Well, welcome, everyone. We are so thrilled you have chosen to spend an hour of your day with us today to learn about how to serve your clients through all different stages of life. And as the landscape of the clients we serve has been changing, this topic is an important one and we're excited to share our insights with you all. Today, so my name is Brandon Marcotte. I am a CFP. I have about 10 plus years working in the financial advice world. And joining me today is my colleague, Chief behavioral Officer Anel Ryan. Doctor Daniel Crosby, welcome Doctor Crosby. Thank you. Daniel is responsible for bringing behavioral tools, training and technology to financial advisors. So again, kind of in summary, what Daniel and I are going to talk about is how each of these life cycle stages. Fits within a client's life and then how clients act in each one of those stages. And then based on that information, how should we as advisors be doing financial planning and how should we be highlighting different areas in each of those stages before we get into each stage individually. We'll just give a kind of a quick summary of what those stages are. And I'll mention too that you know there are definitely sub stages within each of these. It's not as if each client will only fit in each of these four that we're going to talk about today. But we'll get into that a little bit more later as well. So what we see is the four major categories is 1 the getting started stage. So I like to refer to this as as tiptoeing into the real world essentially where you have that client who maybe just got their first job, just graduated college and they're excited, they're anticipating the future and they're, they're just kind of dipping their toes, not really knowing what to expect, but they're, they're excited to be there. Then we have second stage which is the growth stage and this is. This is a huge stage. I mean it grows exponentially where the client has a lot of changes, a lot of transitions that happen in their life and they're going from maybe being single again just graduating to all of a sudden kids, family, pets, house, the whole 9 yards. And there's a lot of lot of decisions and a lot of responsibilities that now require a lot of extra cash flow that maybe they didn't have to worry about before. The third stage is the preparation stage, so this is the the set up stage essentially before. Retirement, where clients are maybe five years or so before retirement and they're really getting the itch to to be done, but they're not quite there yet. And so we want to continue to work with them and overcome the biases that they have at that given time. And then finally, the retirement stage where there's still work to be done, of course, which we'll get into later. But it's really a period of focus and reflection on their life to that point and what they want their legacy both personally as well as financially to be. For the rest of their life. And so with that being said, we will get into the first stage here with getting started and we'll have Daniel kick us off with the behavioral finance aspects of this initial client. All right, Brandon. So when we talk about tiptoeing into the real world, I love that. I love that phraseology. What are the things that we're asking ourselves and what are these major turning points in our life? Well, the, the overarching question at this stage in the clients life is who am I? Which direction do I want to tiptoe in? Who am I? What's the career that's going to fit me? What's the kind of relationship that's going to fit me? How do I want to craft? This one life that I've been given to suit my unique needs. So this is a period of self discovery, trying to determine who am I, who is my authentic self, how can I move forward with competence and what is going to be my unique contribution to society? What is that all going to look like for me? And this may not seem like the job of a financial advisor, but this is one of the ways that we can begin to form bonds. Between the next generation of clients and ourselves, we know the stats. We know the dismal stats about what percentage of children don't work with their parents financial advisor. But oftentimes that's because a bridge has not begun to be built at this this initial tiptoeing into maturity stage of life. So anything that we can do to help that client discover what sorts of careers they might like, who they are. What their aptitudes are, anything we could do to help line up an internship or anything that helps in that maturation and and and growing process I think is a very positive way to build connections and build bridges with that younger generation. Yeah absolutely and I and I think it's important too that you mentioned you know these people might not ever be clients. I mean one thing that is is nice today is that again while these while people in this age group and state of life stage of life may not have been able to be clients in the future based in the past based on how fee structures worked in the past. You know we we they can be now. I mean there there are fee structures that work for for a for somebody in this getting started stage but even if even if. There still doesn't fit for your firm. There's still the ability as Daniel saying for you to be a hub of knowledge for this person. Ultimately this this person in this stage again is just entered into this world that they're really excited about, but they know very little. They have little to no first hand knowledge on what next steps to take. So they're going to look for information somewhere and you have the opportunity even if they're not your client, to be that hub of knowledge for them, you know depending on what your content. Production is at your firm and what your website looks like. Maybe you're doing blogging, maybe you're doing podcasts, I'm not sure. But there's an opportunity for you there to be this hub of knowledge for this person and the getting started stage. You know, you think about where they're at financially, you know, they have never and may never have a greater percentage increase in income in their entire life. They went from basically maybe next to nothing to all of a sudden having their first career. And so that's, that's a lot of responsibility that's on there. Shoulders now, and they know there's things they're supposed to do. There's not exactly sure how or what to do. They know they're supposed to save, but how much and where do they save it to? They know they're supposed to do something with these benefits and pick insurance, but how did they do that? You know, that's where you come in, whether as as as their advisor if they're a client, or as a content producer. You're helping provide them with the ability to make those decisions without onboarding them as a client. And when you think about financial planning for this age group, I mean there is no, there is no stage of life that financial planning has a greater impact on than these people in the getting started stage which will go into here with with Orion planning. So when you think about someone in this, in this life stage. You'll note here that we don't really have a lot of goals for them yet. And again, as Daniel was talking about, their goals are going to be determined by where they want to go. You know, what do they want their life to look like at that given time. But if we think about traditionally for financial planning, even for someone in this stage of life, we might be looking at retirement saving for an emergency fund, debt management, perhaps saving to buy a house. But the thing to really focus on here is you think about this person who maybe isn't making a lot of money when you think about the demographics. Of your clients, and they're not saving a lot then therefore either. But to be able to tangibly show them what the impact of saving makes is enormous. Again, they know they're supposed to save, and they know what's good, and they know that it has a good outcome at the end. But to visibly show them how low this graph can start, and by the time retirement comes to be able to show them, this is where you could be with actually pretty minimal effort. Again, assuming that you are saving today and that you're going to have some income growth over time. This sort of graphic really helps them understand that, wow, what I've heard and what I've been told really can make an impact in my life. And and that's just retirement. When you think about something like debt management, you know, they might have student loans. And I mean, I know first hand how overwhelming that can be. It feels like you'll never get out of it. It'll never end. And to be able to show somebody, you know, maybe they feel like I have 15 years left of making these payments and to be able to quickly show them. You know what it looks like if they take some of their extra cash flow that they have today because they have less responsibilities, less commitments and put that towards their debt, let's say, wow, that makes a six year impact, 125 bucks a month makes a six year impact on how quickly they can pay off their debts. That's pretty amazing. And again, this is one of those things that people know inherently. If I have money and I pay some of my debts off early, that's going to be good for me. But we can tangibly show them that this, show that to them in the planning. Software. Same thing with something like an emergency fund. That can also sound overwhelming. How in the world, you know, I just graduated. I just got my first job. How am I going to save 15 grand? That's a lot of money. But you do it slowly but surely. You know, you can show them what it takes to to make that happen in a graphical as well as a as a chart basis within the software. And again, it's not as if these, these clients don't know what to do, they know what to do, they just need the guidance on how and where to do it. And that's where the software can really come into play for clients in this life stage. And with that, we will move forward to stage two, which is the growth phase, huge stage lot going on here. So again, we'll start with Doctor Crosby to give us an idea of the behavioral finance side of people within this life stage. Thank you. So the keyword at this second phase of life, the growth phase is relationships and the key question is will I be loved? Will I enjoy sound relationships? This is a time of profound relationship formation. People are dating, getting married, solidifying friend groups that they will keep hopefully for their lifetime. So attendant only. We see most of the concerns around money have to do with. Indeed, these relationships, this is everything from marriage to divorce and everything in between. If we go to the next slide, we'll see just a few of the relationally oriented types of financial considerations there are. We have everything for saving, for college to planning, for a family, to the unique needs that LGBTQ plus individuals are may face from a financial perspective all the way to navigating. Divorce or separation. So this is indeed the biggest of of all of our phases of life, and one that is tied up with lots and lots of relational and emotional considerations. So part of the behavioral finance of managing this base goes to managing emotion. Let's take a minute and revisit our first stage where we tiptoed into into adulthood. We've we're figuring out who we were. And the biggest risk there was the behavioral finance meta bias of ego. Is that in this process of figuring out who I am and what I'm all about that. I'm going to mistakenly think that I'm so different and I'm so special that the rules don't apply to me. You can be as special as you'd like to be. You can be as unique as you'd like to be. But we have to help our clients understand that although they may be special, they may be unique in interpersonal ways. The rules of Good Investment management, the good, the rules of good financial planning apply to everyone. So that's sort of the first behavioral. Bias that we needed to manage here in the growth phase, we're managing emotion because attendant with all this love and all this relationship orientation is of course a lot of emotion. So let's talk about emotion and financial decision making. The first thing we have to realize is that emotion is not going anywhere. We know from research that's been done on people whose emotional processing centers have been damaged in traumatic brain injuries. That without emotion, people can't even make simple decisions. Decisions like which kind of ice cream they like to have or which color jacket they'd like to wear are all made difficult by the emotional substrate of their brain being damaged. That is twice as true when it comes to money. Money is one of the most emotional concepts around, in fact, studies of how much energy is created in the brain. When people think about different emotional concepts like religion or death or politics, show that money is #1. So we just have to accept from the outset that all of our conversations are going to be emotional. So what do we do with that information? Well, the first thing that we do is we try and use it to our advantage. One study that is probably my favorite of all time found that. People who looked at a picture of their children for five seconds before making a financial decision saved twice as much money for retirement as a control group. OK, So what does that all mean for us? It means that through planning, we can tie back the people, people's relationships and their love. We can tie these things back. A spouse, a partner. Family. We can tie it back to the planning process. We can name those dollars. And in the process of tying the financial planning process to real life and real love, we can actually use emotion to help our clients make better decisions. But there's also destructive emotions. Emotions like fear and greed. What do we do with these destructive emotions? Because it's not all looking at at cute pictures of children and having that work for our advantage. Well, this is where planning becomes so important. We know that people who have pre committed to a plan and who have created a plan are about 50% less likely than there are no plan counterparts to do the wrong thing at the wrong time. And then finally we can become a voice for good and the lives of those. Clients to help them take care of themselves. In my writing for the behavioral investor. I was shocked to learn how much things like proper sleep, nutrition, relationship management, going to therapy, meditating, how much these seemingly simple things can impact the way people think about and act with money. And that can be part of our role as an advisor and as a friend to help advocate for the things in that person's life that are going to lead them to make great decisions. We here at Orion think that financial advisors are actually very uniquely positioned when it comes to relationships and money because inasmuch as this is a source of great tension and many relationships, it's a source of great value add if we can figure out where those sore sore spots are and add some value. So I want to give a little teaser for an assessment that we will be rolling out in the coming months that we're referring to internally as as the money. 20 because it's based on a 20 Question Questionnaire that looks at the most common pain points of with money in relationships. We know that fighting about money is the number one cause of divorce in America, and so we set out to talk to everyday couples like the people you serve, right, about the things that they fought about when they fought about money. So where did they disagree when they disagreed? About money. And we found five things very consistently. One was around communication. Some folks are direct and some are indirect in the way that they like to communicate about money. Some people understand that money should be talked about freely and openly, whereas others feel that it's it's impolite and that it's imprudent to speak openly about money. Next is apprehension. Some people that we surveyed were quite concerned about money, others scarcely gave it a thought. The third was function. Some people felt that money should be used to live it up in the day, to seize the day, to make the most of a moment. While that moment is with us, because nothing in life is promised, other people took more of a future orientation, a future function, and said that the best purpose of money was to secure tomorrow. That was the number one thing that the couples in our survey thought about. Is money best used to enjoy the day or to secure tomorrow? I want you to think about which one you think is correct. 4th we have orientation. Is this, is this my money? Is this our money? Or is this community really to bless the lives of of our broader family and the community and even the government? People in our survey had very different attitudes with respect to whether they had a more individualistic or collectivistic take on how money should be spent. And then finally, importance is money central to who you are as a person? Is it important for you to have? Uh, sort of conspicuous shows of wealth, like a large house, or a second home or a fancy car or. Or is this not central to your sort of sense of self? Those are the five things we found couples fight about when they fight about money. So the thing that I'll say we'll use function as as an example, because it is indeed the most contentious of the lot when we think about whether money should be used to enjoy the day or secure tomorrow. The answer is, of course, yes, right? Both. Both things are important, and across all five of these contexts, moderation is important. But we will be equipping you in the near future with this practical assessment, which will help you have conversations with your clients about where they sit across each of these, across each of these five value areas, and help facilitate a conversation between you and your clients. About where they're similar, where they're different, and what that means for their planning needs. So this is just one example of how we as financial professionals can solve a real world problem with practical applied behavioral tools that tie into our planning process. Yeah. And and this stage more than any of them, I mean if I talked about the beginning, the melding of behavioral learning as well as financial planning mean this, this one has so much. There's so much going on at this stage. So much behavioral intelligence that's required both of your clients as well as of yourself as you're sitting down with them to understand these things that we were just talking about to help guide them because you know you go from again the stage of. Just getting your toes in the water a little bit to all of a sudden having so many commitments, so many responsibilities and each of these things. Most of them require money and then we learn about how money can again pull us apart, but it can also bring us together. So melding that together is huge. And and this stage from a financial planning perspective, because of all of this, because of all the commitments and responsibilities, the cash flow side of financial planning here in the growth stage is of utmost importance because this is what's going to determine what and where funds can be allocated towards. I mean, it's one thing to say, OK. Right. I have these goals. I see this picture of my of my kids. I want to save more. I want to save for them. But the but the fact of the matter is we have to figure out what is there. You know there's there's as we go into the software here in a little bit we're going to see again boy our list of goals went from a pretty small condensed list to a quite large one very quickly and so there's trade-offs and there's conversations that need to happen around. Doctor Crosby was just saying you know what is the function of this money and what isn't it. Because that's a conversation that you need to help lead them as they're as they're going through this stage and helping, helping them to discover what is the outcome for that money and what's the best planning decisions they can make based on their situation and based on what their goals are. So as we can see here when we look at Orion planning, again we went from that small list of four goals to we doubled it very quickly. And again this could happen over the over the course of just a few years in a client's life. And again the things don't slow down in this stage. It grows exponentially in terms of the commitments and responsibilities that our clients have. And so you'll see here and we'll look at the cash flow report here in a little bit as well that you know in this particular example. There's decisions that this client would have to make in regards to where do I allocate these funds. Yes, I should still save for retirement and we have our emergency fund from before, which is good. But what about the education for our two kids? And what about our insurance coverage? And what about that new business that I wanted to start in a few years, I'm not going to be able to fund all these things. And the answer may be. No, it may not be. It may mean we need to have moderation across the board in order to do some in each of these or maybe we focus it in one of them or two of them. But again this is a conversation that you're going to lead with them to help discover for them what's what's really most important to them at that given time. You know, again I mentioned the cash flow is really important and and I'll mention here too because this comes up often with our tool. You know Orion planning is a cash flow. Base tool as much as you know, we show goals because we again, we know that goals help drive behavior better than just looking at a table of numbers. You know you can show a client a table of numbers and that means something but it doesn't mean as much as saying, you know, Billy's education or Jenny's education. The goals are going to are going to help drive the behavior much better than than the table of numbers. But the table of numbers helps us to know can you actually fund these things or can you not. And so this is a really important report. As we come to a client in the growth stage, because there's going to be periods of time where based on how old their kids are and when they're going to school or when that new business that you want to start comes up, there's going to be periods of time where there might be some negative cash flow situations and there might be significant. And so therefore you as the planner have to start preparing with them today to say, OK and 10 years from now there's this is what we're looking at today and so therefore what? Does that mean today where, where do we need to allocate those monies today so that in 2030 you're where you want to be because maybe we can't do it all? What's most important? Maybe the new business is the most important, maybe the kids, college is most important for them. And so therefore maybe that'll take a back seat unless something changes down the road. You know, again, this is a conversation, an ongoing conversation that you're having with them because of course planning is not a static one and done sort of, sort of. Thing it's it's an ongoing process that requires ongoing communication and conversation because as we all know, and as this last year and a half of COVID has taught us, things change and things change very quickly and families have to be nimble whether they plan to or not. You just have to be one other thing I'll mention here and we'll go to it a little bit later as well that comes up at this point is, is a state planning, you know, maybe as a getting started stage person, you haven't really thought about a state planning, which is. Understandable. But now again, you have these people in your life that you're potentially responsible for and that you care about and are relying on you. And so therefore this also comes up now as well. And again, our state planning module, which we'll look at again is a great way to build that checklist and review to make sure that we are taking care of the the estate if something were to happen. So as we move from getting started to the growth stage, we're now inching closer to retirement. Again, all of our clients are excited for this moment. They're feeling good. They're, they're close, but there's still work to be done. This is the stage before retirement. This is the preparation stage. And so when we get into this stage, there's again a whole myriad of new behavioral changes and behavioral biases that come into play for these clients as well. Absolutely. So you remember in our first stage the concern behaviorally was ego. That was very much an inward focused time. As you begin to go out into the world, you start to ask who am I? Well now as you're have a little better sense of self, you're a little more financially secure and you're preparing for retirement, you begin to ask how can I turn outward? How can I become a little bit more of a global citizen and how can I? Have my personal life and my career contribute to the world. This is a time where we start to think about meaning, you know? Gandhi famously said to A to a poor man bred his God. In those early stages of our career, we're not worried about the meaning of life. We're not worried about giving back. We just want to scrape by. We want to figure out who we are. We want to get started in our career here. In the preparation phase, though, we're beginning to have. A little more financial security and we begin to turn outward. How can we help the next generation? How can we invest in a way that's consistent with our values? How can we get more involved in the community in ways that are personally fulfilling? So if we go on to the next slide, though, we begin to ask ourselves questions about generative wealth. It's not enough just to make a bunch of money. We want to ask questions like this. How can I spend my money or invest? My money in a way that's consistent with my values. Every single year we hear more and more about impact ESG, Sri and values based investing. And that's because it's increasingly important to people as they age and it's dramatically important to the rising generation of young people, even from a much earlier age. These are considerations we may not have at a young age but but begin to think about at an older age. We're beginning now to think about. Charity, we're beginning now to think about mentoring that next generation and we as advisers can be guides to spending investing both time and capital in ways that are personally fulfilling. Now if we go to this next slide, what is the behavioral bias that attends this age? You go back to that first phase, it was ego, right? We were self-centered, we were self focused and the worry there from a behavioral. Highest standpoint was that we were going to be so self focused and so sort of focused on our own uniqueness and specialness that we were going to erroneously assume that that specialness applied to our ability to manage our money on our own. Here though we're getting more involved and more cognizant of what's going out in the world. And as part of that, we're more tuned into the news, we're more tuned into current events, we have more of this outward. Focus. And that can be very, very problematic. As people become more politically active and politically focused, they can confuse their political activism with how they ought to be investing. When people become more focused on what's going on in the world and the news, that's all a good thing. But they can confuse what they begin to see on the nightly news with how they should invest. So what can we do? Well, the first thing that we can do is. We can encourage our clients to turn off the news and share with them some of the research that shows that the more people watch financial news, the worse they tend to do. You heard that right. There's an inverse correlation between how involved people are in monitoring and digesting financial news and how their portfolios tend to do. We can also help them consider what's called base rates, or just probabilities. We as a human, as a human race, tend to confuse what is loud with what is likely. So we see this niche case, this fringe case, on the news and we assume that this niche case is everywhere. We read the paper and read about the next scary headline and assume that need means we need to act in our own personal portfolios. So becoming other focused, becoming locked into what's going on in the world. Has the potential to do a lot of good and be a very positive force in our clients lives, but we have to help them direct that in a way that's focused on impacting the next generation, mentoring the next generation, investing in a socially responsible or values based way and not about trying to time the market or to anticipate every political turn or or social turn by what's going on out in the world. Yeah, boy that's that's so spot on. I mean I think about you know, in my what's interesting is I think about my own financial advisor experience and it's interesting, you know you hearing you talk about those that are paying you know, paying more attention to the financial news and they're the one, there's the inverse relationship there. I mean I, I I saw that first hand constantly, constantly. It was often those clients that they had, they had a particular type of attention to their financial life. They were, they were attentive to it, but not in such a way that they were obsessive. It was, it was an attention of I know I'm supposed to be doing something and I need some help, you know, that was really it. Those those clients that had that mindset, more often than not, it turned out that they were totally fine. They honestly didn't even need me. It was more so those clients that were really hyper obsessed as well as those clients that I'll talk about in a little bit here that really we're in that kind of phase coasting stage. They just thought, you know what, I've worked really hard and it's been emotionally and. Physically exhausting. And I'm I'm ready to be done. You know, the kids are out. Our commitments are less. We should be able to just kind of coast our way through this. And the fact is that you can't always do that. There are there's a time for for that and it's not necessarily yet. You know, you think about the setup, man. In baseball, you know you don't you need that strong strategy and plan in the 7th and 8th innings of a close game. You can't just assume everything is going to be fine when you get to the 9th inning in the closer you need. That set up time as well and the same thing goes for your financial plan. Yes, you've set this all up and again you've made this these good decisions and you can start thinking about your, your, your legacy a little bit. But at the same time you can't lose sight of what is also going to still come yet. We talked about healthcare expenses on a on a previous slide as well and as we get into the software we'll take a look at that. But I mean that's something where you're living expenses in your healthcare expenses. You know, it's easy for clients to underestimate what those will look like in retirement. It's easy to look at those and say, you know what? Again, kids are out of the house, our mortgage is paid off. I'm, I'm not really worried about expenses. But the fact is that's often not the way that it works in real life. The expenses often will go up much more quickly than they would go down. So as we see here again we see the, the goals have condensed again a little bit for our client in this stage. Again it's not always the case but in this example that's what we went with. But what I want to really spotlight here again is the living expenses and the healthcare expenses from a financial planning standpoint, you know our our software as well as as most you know usually give a default of 80% of living expenses. That's how much you'll spend in retirement and it's easy to override that. Of course to change it, but I think this is one of the first conversation pieces that's really important to have with the clients. You know a lot of them come into this assuming you know what, I'm almost at retirement again, the commitments have have been reduced. We're not going to spend that much money. And I think it's important to use your past history with other clients just to let them know. I know you think that and it's very logical to think that, but that's honestly not the way that it works. You know, when you're retired, you have a lot more time to spend and there's a lot of things that you want to do. And so to think that I'm going to spend less money now because I have less commitments, it's just it's not not very common that that happens. And so, you know, it's really easy to show clients, you know, a rosy picture if you want to show them. What that might look like if they spend a lot less, but in reality it's not that. And so it's helpful to plan for them for again, what's realistic, what are the base rates for this is Daniel was talking about. And you know, we don't want to show them something just because they said they're only going to spend this. We want to have a realistic conversation with them in regards to what that is likely to look like for them during those years. And again, Healthcare is the exact same thing. Again, inherently clients know, OK, I know I'm going to have greater health care expenses as I get older. Their retirement. But we can easily show that for them and give them a really tangible understanding of what that may look like for them and not not to scare them or to to drive them away from thinking about how they can give money in their community. But just to give them a a base understanding of this is this is what this is going to look like for you. You know in 2040 it's going to be about 55 grand that you're going to spend on healthcare. And again this is this is an average and these are real numbers based on a real out of pocket. Costs and real Medicare costs. And so this is an important conversation to have with them at this time that, yes, you have worked really hard and we're going to continue to work hard because the job's not quite done yet. We're going to keep working together with you to make sure you understand the overall impact of all of these things that are still yet to come up. Even though it feels like you're really close and you can taste it, there's still some other things that we need to still plan for. And Healthcare is a big one in this life stage. Of preparation. So as we leave the preparation stage, we now hit our, our final stage for today, which is stage four retirement. And again, I'll mention here that there are absolutely substages at each of these categories. Retirement, you know, being one of the main ones you think about active retirement versus passes, passive retirement. Retirement is not a single thing that looks exactly the same from let's say age 65 to 95, absolutely not. And so there are different moments in time that the planning will happen a little bit differently. For you and for the clients, but you know for the sake of time and for the sake of summarizing this and what we feel is a really good and tangible way, this is going to be our last stage. But this one again as well as the growth stage we talked about how expansive that is, how many changes are happening. There are absolutely substages within within that for our clients. But again those as you as you gain these behavioral tools from Doctor Crosby, this is going to help you discover what those stages are, those sub stages in your clients life because. Yeah. Not every client's going to be identical either. They're going to be a little bit different. And so you're going to have to really know them and and tweak the way that you're doing this planning for them based on your understanding of who they are and what's what's driving their decision making. But as we go into our last state share of retirement, Daniel, why don't you again go through the behavioral finance aspects of this group of people. Yeah, thank you. Great setup. So let's talk about where our clients heads are at as they enter and indeed live live through retirement. This is a time of reflection and of conceptualization of the years that came before and asking the question, did I live a life that mattered now? There there's really 2 selves when it comes to experience. There's the experiencing self and there's the remembering self. And as the father of young children, the easiest way I can put this is like a trip to Disney, right? A trip to Disney, as you are experiencing it, is a little bit miserable, right? There's long lines, there's heat, there's exhaustion. There's, you know, kids throwing a fit. But then when you get back and you remember that time, you remember the sweetness, you remember the togetherness, you remember the the time you spent in the last you. Add in the joy you felt right because you've consolidated and you've remembered those things in an impactful way. So retirement is a time of remembering and of consolidating all that came before. We reflect on those times and we say, did I live a life that mattered? Was I able to be productive? I was. I accepted in my whole right. We can help our clients begin to. Pass on their wisdom. We can help them conceptualize and frame that time to help think about and conceptualize that time as a time that mattered. We can help them articulate the good they did in their own live life as well as the lives that they came in contact with. This is every bit as important as what actually happened is packaging it and thinking about it in a way that's personally meaningful to your client. So how can we do this from a financial perspective? Well, a big quests are often the way that this gets manifest from a financial perspective. We can help talk to our clients about their philanthropic goals and their charitable legacy, both within and outside of their family. We can help them decide how they want to give gifts to their family. Indeed, if they're a person of great wealth, we can help them conceptualize the very thorny. And complicated way of leaving a big, a big number, a great amount of wealth to people for whom that can be complicated. There are profound psychological implications. And as Warren Buffett has said, we want to leave our families enough that they can do anything, but not so much that they can do nothing. So that's a simple and Apithy phrase that has a great deal of psychological complexity to it that you are well equipped to handle. And then finally we can sit with them. In the conversation, we can help them talk about their life and frame it in a way that matter. So what is the behavioral bias that begin to enter in, in this phase of retirement? Well, it is of course becoming excessively conservative. You know, I just mentioned that I have young children and I'll never forget that when my youngest child was born, she just turned 5, the nurse came in and and handed her to us, right. And said did you know that children of this age, you know children that were born when you're when your daughter was born, they'll live to be 105 on average. And I'm embarrassed to admit that the first thing that came to my mind is how can you, how can you prepare for 40 years of retirement. You know how can you prepare for a life that lasts that long so increasingly as long longevity risk becomes? More and more of a concern, people really can't become conservative in retirement for most folks. They need to remain with some sort of exposure to risk assets even well into to their retirement years. Even though they might want to make a binary switch, right? Like when when my work stops, my risk taking stops. And for most people, that's simply not a reality. So what can we do for people who are? Prone to this sort of conservatism? Well, there's a few things we can do. One of the most powerful is actually quite simple, and it's actually just getting people to sleep on it. We know that when people are in a rush, when people feel stressed or panicked about a decision, they tend to default to the safe option. They tend to do what they have always done. So be sure to have conversations with your clients in ways that don't impinge on their personal freedom, that don't make them feel rushed, because if you make them feel rushed or stressed, you're likely to get a pushback and you're likely to get that excessively conservative behavior. The other thing we can do is. What's called remove the fear of loss. So if you think back to the great financial crisis, there was a great example given in in the form of of Hyundai. So Hyundai, the automaker did something really incredible. They they said if you lose your job, you can return your car. During the great financial crisis, understandably, there's a ton of concern about people losing their job, even though for most people that didn't happen. But even if you were in the, you know, 8085% of people who were employed, you were probably still a little worried about your job. And So what Hyundai did was they took the worst case off the table. They said if you lose your job, we'll take the car back and they outperform the other major automakers exponentially by taking the worst case off the table. We can do that with our clients as well using a bucketed approach, right? Having a bucket for safety assets protection against that worst possible scenario and we find that when people are able to mentally bucket and mentally say. You know, eating cat food is off the table. The worst case is off the table. They're able to take some risk with the remainder of their assets. So just a few tips for helping to conquer that conservatism that can creep in in the retirement years. Yeah, that's great. We, we love that bucketing approach with Orion planning as well. It's something that we're thinking about often when it comes to again how to, how to help drive that behavior because ultimately that's, that's that's the point of planning software, right, is how to help your clients get where they need to go. And so we're always thinking about ways and partnering with Doctor Crosby on some of these some of these item which is which is really wonderful. So one thing that I find really interesting about about this retirement stage is there's actually quite a few parallels with even that. That getting started stage, but you have the ego from the getting started and you have the conservatism here. But ultimately you have two groups of people that have now moved into something that they really have no first-hand knowledge of what it's going to be like. They're excited. They've anticipated this for a long time and now it's here, but now there's things that they've never actually done before. You know, for the retiree it might be, you know, what do I do with Social Security and Medicare and all these healthcare decisions? Versus the getting started person who's just trying to figure out where to save to begin with. Same thing goes for saving. You know, for a retiree they might think, OK, well I'm still making money here, whether it's from required minimum distributions or Social Security, maybe they don't need at all. And they're wondering what, what should I do with this? So there's still lots of questions to be answered. But again, the retirees this often thinking about it from the conservative mindset and again as doctor. As he was mentioning, that's one battle we need to help them fight to not be too conservative because again that's that's that can be a recipe for disaster based on longevity. But ultimately this is all leading to ultimate, ultimately what what is the legacy that they're going to leave. And again we'll go into the software here to take a look at how to manage this last stage with these retired clients. So in in the last stage, in stage four in retirement. Again, there, there's still, there's always work to be done. There's never a moment of of total coasting. But again, that's where you come in as the advisor to really kind of step step through this with them, walk them through these situations to ensure that they're not being overcome by their conservatism when they can't afford to be. And so, you know, when it comes to retirement planning as an example, you know, ensuring that. Umm. You know, year over year that they're able to continue to fund whatever it is their expenses are. There's going to be external factors that happen that they can't control, but how are they controlling their internal ones to ensure that they're going to have success based on what their longevity looks like? And there's a number of other things as Doctor Crosby was mentioning as well when it comes to. Where, where do they want to move some of these funds? Perhaps it's college for grandkids, or perhaps it's a scholarship fund at an alma mater. But these are easy, easy things that we can show in planning software to help guide our clients to understand. You know what? You can make a difference in this way. You have this desire and this yearning for doing this thing for your community, for your school, for your family. And it's really easy for us to to to put those goals in place here for them. To ensure that they're able to reach them. And the other great thing is as well as you know as, as clients have worked on their financial life over all these years and we talked about estate planning earlier, you know that's an important aspect. Of course as we get to this closer to end of life stage. One thing that's great in Orion planning as well is just with our document vault here you're able to house all this information that's going to be crucial to your family when the time comes. It's one thing to have taken care of your finances. You know while you're alive, but to have your financial house in order for your family, for your estate when the time comes, is a huge benefit to them. It's one thing to say you're going to leave money to somebody, but if you leave it in a messy way, that's a headache for a lot of people. And so our document vault allows you to store an unlimited amount of documents, whether it's a state documents to help help those who are going to be handling those. Maybe it's insurance documents like life insurance policies or long term care policies we can house. All of that information here for you so that when the time comes, it's all in one central location able to be accessed for those that need it and again be remiss to not go over the state planning module again. This is just one area that we see time and time again that there are certain areas of a state planning that people just tend to not always update. You know, maybe you have your primary beneficiaries listed, but you don't have contingent beneficiaries. Well, if your primary is your is your partner and you don't have the contingent. Yep. We all know that's that's not great. And so this is a great checklist, great way to show, OK, yes, you have all of these set or you don't or maybe you have them set, but they were set 15 years ago. It's really important to ensure that this has all been taken care of. And again, it's a crucial part of the annual review or however often you do reviews with your planning clients to ensure. That the estate planning side of things has been taken care of. So as as we mentioned at the top, our, our main objective is was to take behavioral knowledge and financial planning knowledge and meld them together. When you do that, when you meld those two things together, we feel that you can make the greatest impact on your clients. Financial planning on its own is a great tool. Behavioral finance on its own is a great tool. But when you put them together, it can really make a huge difference for your clients and and for the world to be honest and it allows you when you think about these different life. Pages, if you pair those two things together, you're really able to holistically serve clients not just at again at the financial level, but holistically at every stage of life. And we hope that we were able to provide you some insight to be able to do that today. If you have any questions about Orion planning or Orion at large, please reach out to us. If you want to hear more from from Doctor Crosby, pick up any one of his great books. He mentioned behavioral investor number of times, it's very good. You can also listen to his podcast. Standard deviations, which is a great podcast name wherever you listen to your podcasts. But with that, we just want to thank you again for being here today. Thank you for your time, and we hope we'll see you again real soon. Bye now. _1732325238812