For decades, your financial life had a clear objective: earn, save, invest, and grow your wealth. If you've reached retirement with substantial savings, chances are you’ve made thoughtful decisions and worked with people who helped you get there.
But the closer you get to relying on your savings instead of your paycheck, the less your success depends on investment performance alone. Decisions about taxes, income, Social Security, Medicare, healthcare, estate planning, and legacy all begin interacting with one another.
And this changes what many people should expect from their advisor. The question is no longer simply whether your investments are performing well. It’s whether your financial strategy reflects the realities of retirement.
Retirement Changes the Planning Equation
For most of your working life, you’ve been in the wealth accumulation phase. You earned, saved, invested for long-term growth, and built a financial cushion. The goal was relatively straightforward: keep growing your assets over time. That’s been the assignment for the past 20, 30, maybe 40 years.
Retirement changes the assignment entirely.
Instead of accumulating assets, you need to turn what you’ve built into reliable income that can support your life for decades. That requires coordinating investments with income, taxes, Social Security, healthcare, insurance, and estate planning. The accumulation phase didn’t require the same kind of coordination.
Consider Susan. By the time she came to Falbo Wealth Management, she had accumulated substantial savings and had worked with a financial advisor for years. On paper, she looked prepared for retirement. But she couldn’t answer some basic questions about what happened next. Which accounts would fund her first years of retirement? When should she claim Social Security? How would withdrawals affect her taxes? What would she do for income during a market downturn?
Susan had spent years building her portfolio. What she didn’t have was a strategy for turning those assets into income and coordinating the decisions that came with retirement.
That’s the fundamental change that happens as you approach retirement. A well-managed portfolio is still important, but now it has a different job to do.
This is a hypothetical situation based on real life examples. Names and circumstances have been changed. The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. To determine which investments or strategies may be appropriate for you, consult your advisor prior to investing.
Where the Difference Shows Up Day to Day
Here’s what that distinction looks like in practice.
Your account balances, investment returns, and tax bracket are quantitative data, but they only tell part of your story. The other part is qualitative: the “why” behind your money.
What do you want retirement to actually look like? Who depends on you? What kinds of things worry you? What do you want to leave behind?
Your answers should be driving the plan, not sitting in the background.
Say you want to retire at 62, but you’re planning to delay Social Security. Your advisor should be thinking through where those first few years of income will come from, which accounts make sense to tap first, and how those withdrawals affect your taxes. If you’re considering a large purchase, such as a second home or helping an adult child with a down payment, that decision should be evaluated in the context of your retirement income rather than treated as a separate transaction.
The same applies when markets fall. Instead of deciding which investments to sell after the decline has already happened, your plan should establish where near-term income will come from and how much flexibility you have to avoid selling certain investments at an unfavorable time.
Tax planning creates another layer. A lower-income period after you retire but before required minimum distributions begin may create opportunities to evaluate Roth conversions or other tax strategies. Those decisions need to account for the rest of your financial picture, including how additional taxable income may affect other parts of your retirement plan.
Planning also extends beyond your portfolio. If you update your estate plan after a remarriage, for example, your
advisor can coordinate with your attorney and tax professional and review beneficiary designations so your accounts reflect your current wishes.
These aren’t separate planning exercises. A decision about retirement income may affect your taxes, which may influence another decision later. Good retirement planning anticipates those connections before you’re forced to address them one at a time.
If you’re the one identifying every issue and prompting your advisor to react, that’s a signal worth taking seriously and a reasonable place to start thinking about when to change financial advisors.
What a Functional Retirement Advisor Does Differently
If retirement requires a more coordinated approach, what should you look for in an advisor?
In my book, Retirement Success: Hiring Your Functional Retirement Advisor, I describe the model I believe fits this stage of life: the Functional Retirement Advisor, or FRA. Much like a functional doctor looks at the whole person rather than treating one condition in isolation, an FRA looks at your entire financial life rather than managing your investments as a separate piece.
That starts with understanding what your money needs to do for you. If you want to retire at 62, help your children financially, travel regularly, or leave a particular legacy, those priorities affect the decisions your advisor helps you make. Your income strategy, investments, taxes, Social Security, and estate plan should reflect those goals and work together.
I describe this relationship through three pillars: Clarity, Insight, and Partnership. You should understand your plan and the reasoning behind it. Your advisor should bring the experience to identify issues and opportunities you may not see on your own, while working alongside you as your life and financial needs change.
That’s what I mean by person-first and plan-first. Your investments remain an important part of the work, but they’re tools within your retirement plan, not the plan itself.
Is Your Advisor Still the Right Fit?
The question isn’t whether your financial advisor is good at what they do. It’s whether their approach still fits this stage of your life. Retirement changes the questions you need answered, the decisions you need to make, and the role you need your advisor to play. A relationship that served you well while you were building wealth may not be the one that’s best equipped to help you turn that wealth into lasting retirement security.
Outgrowing an advisor doesn’t mean the relationship failed. Your needs have simply changed. If you’re approaching retirement and wondering whether your current plan is prepared for what comes next, let’s talk about where you are today and what you need from your advisor in retirement.
You can also explore the Falbo Wealth Management approach in the free book Retirement Success: Hiring Your Functional Retirement Advisor.
This material has been prepared in collaboration with Crystal Marketing Solutions, LLC, and has been edited with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools. The information presented is based on sources believed to be reliable and accurate at the time of publication. This material is for educational purposes only and does not necessarily reflect the views of the author, presenter, or affiliated organizations. It should not be construed as investment, tax, legal, or other professional advice. Always consult a qualified professional regarding your specific situation before making any decisions.
This material is for general information and educational purposes only and is not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
Investing involves risk including the loss of principal. There is no assurance that the views or strategies discussed are suitable for all investors or will yield positive outcomes.
Traditional IRA account owners have considerations to make before performing a Roth IRA conversion. These primarily include income tax consequences on the converted amount in the year of conversion, withdrawal limitations from a Roth IRA, and income limitations for future contributions to a Roth IRA. In addition, if you are required to take a required minimum distribution (RMD) in the year you convert, you must do so before converting to a Roth IRA.