Being successful in business involves multiple different factors that you control and a dose of luck.
Some of the attributes of running a business, such as building a senior leadership team and constantly reviewing the company’s performance are crucial to success. However they don’t necessarily translate into how to run a successful retirement.
When you have been used to a certain way of working, often for decades, you can fall into the trap of continuing to work this way once you have left work behind. Good habits built up over the years, can soon become a drag on your retirement finances and particularly your happiness.
In all the stories we tell ourselves, retirement is supposed to be one long period of sitting on a beach and not worrying about work anymore. Long gone are the stresses about employees and whether you can make payroll.
Whilst this might be a bit if a myth, the biggest hindrance to enjoying retirement is to continue looking at your P&L on a weekly or even daily basis. We see clients time and time again, apply the same routine and discipline of the workplace to their retirement finances.
It is a hard mindset to get out of. A business requires constant checking and tweaking. Retirement is the opposite. Wealth has a wonderful effect of just sitting there and growing. In reality it is made up of thousands of small investments in the greatest companies in the world and so in effect you have thousands of the world’s top CEOs working to make you richer in retirement.
Close monitoring and especially fiddling with a portfolio is the worst thing you can do. Provided your portfolio is invested in global markets at a low cost, let it to its thing. Interference is proven to reduce your returns, as you will respond to the latest news item or movement in asset price.
There are things that will make your retirement finances work more smoothly, optimising for tax and cashflow planning to take the right amount of withdrawal from the right pot of money, at the right time. This is not the business that most people are in though, pre-retirement and so it is hard to do it yourself, without retraining and essentially going back to full time work, when you could be relaxing.
There are some things that need to be done with your finances in retirement. A financial adviser can help with the two tasks above, an accountant can help with tax returns and a lawyer can help with drafting wills and trusts.
This is not a team of professionals, however, that need regular catch-ups and strategy away days like your old board or senior management team needed. They are best left to work to the natural cadence of tax year end and do the work in the background.
This news is sometimes hard for clients to accept, as it means breaking a habit of a lifetime but it is good news.
It is the one time in life that you can relax and let others do the work for you. Making you wealthier, whilst you focus on the things that matter with the time you have left. Each retirement week is precious and should be treated as such, not filled with worry and meetings.
The Altor team is busy managing our clients’ retirements for them so that they can relax. We do this in conjunction with their other professional advisers. We run these relationships from our Head Office in Hook, Hampshire and throughout the UK, using the latest technology.