Executive Summary
As the research into behavioral finance has shown, the words we use and how concepts are framed can have a powerful impact on how we see the world and consider the opportunities that may lie before us. A strategy can go from being appealing to terrifying (or vice versa!) based solely on how it’s explained. And in the context of retirement, there are a lot of words and phrases that may unintentionally be hampering our efforts to have a productive planning conversation.
For instance, with the rise of Monte Carlo analysis, it’s become increasingly popular to talk about the probability of success, leading retirees to naturally want to minimize the probability of failure as much as possible, given the catastrophe that implies. Yet the reality is that for most retirees, a “failure” doesn’t just mean running off the retirement spending cliff, but instead a gradual spenddown of assets that necessitates adjustments along the way to get back on track. So what happens if “probability of failure” is reimagined as a “probability of adjustment” instead, to reflect what actually happens in the real world? All the sudden it doesn’t seem so bad; it simply raises the question of how much of an adjustment will be necessary, and when or under what conditions.
Similarly, the focus of generating retirement spending from retirement “income” creates other unnatural distortions, as retirees potentially stretch for income (especially in low-yield environments!) and introduce new risks, not to mention possibly confusing-yet-appealing-sounding retirement “income” products that are actually just returning principal and not income at all! If we talk about retirement “cash flows” instead, and move away from an income-centric conversation, it opens the door to looking more holistically at the retirement portfolio and how it can support retirement spending.
But perhaps the most crucial change in our language of retirement planning is simply to rename “retirement” itself. After all, when the concept of “retirement” was originally created, it wasn’t really meant to be an entire multi-decade phase of life without work, and recent research has found that stripping away work can for many retirees leave them devoid of purpose altogether, actually reducing happiness and well-being! Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean “retirees” want to do their current job; it simply means they may want to choose work that is independent of the financial compensation it provides. So maybe it’s time to rename the goal of retirement planning altogether, and to recognize that “financial independence” from the need to work for money is the real goal of saving and investing?
From Monte Carlo Probability Of Failure To Probability Of Adjustment
Over the past 15 years, retirement planning has shifted away from simple projecting returns in a straight line of growth, to using Monte Carlo analyses to evaluate a large number of “random” retirement scenarios and then quantify the frequency that the outcomes are favorable or not. If 10,000 Monte Carlo trials lead to 9,000 outcomes where there is something left at the end, and 1,000 scenarios where the assets come up short, the plan is said to have a 10% “probability of failure”.
Yet the challenge is that “probability of failure” conjures of rather harsh images of retirement outcomes; its implication is that those retirement scenarios were paths to destitution, where people might be unable to provide for their basic retirement needs, be evicted from their retirement homes, or be unable to afford their own basic medical care. Such outcomes are justifiably scary! If you ask someone “what risk of failure are you comfortable accepting” most rational human beings will answer “0%, or as darn close to it as we can get!” In fact, our brains confuse the risk of the event with the intensity of the possible outcome; as a result, the harsher the image of “failure” in their minds, the more likely it is the client will be unwilling to accept any probability of it occurring.
Yet in the real world, most people don’t actually go from enjoying their normal spending to abject retirement plan destitution in a single step, where they continue their full retirement lifestyle right up until the day they wake up and find out all their checks are bouncing because there’s absolutely nothing left. Unless there’s a sudden and extreme financial loss in an investment, in practice most people will deplete their retirement assets more slowly over time, where the portfolio balance gets lower and lower, the ongoing withdrawals become a larger and larger share of the total account balance, and it becomes clear that eventually this is going to be a problem and that something must be done.
The implicit “advance warning” that comes with even the most basic monitoring, though, means that retirement plans don’t have to result in total (and sudden) failure. Instead, they force a change. If the change comes early enough, it may not even take much to necessarily to get back on track. If the change comes later, and the situation has become more severe along the way, the requisite adjustment is larger. But nonetheless, the reality is that what a probability of “failure” really describes, for most people, the probability that they will need to make an adjustment to get back on track again to avoid failure.
Yet if that’s the reality, then consider what happens if we actually call it a probability of adjustment, instead of a probability of failure. When we frame the outcomes as failures, the nature response from clients is to think up terrible images of what failure might look like, and then seek to avoid it at all costs. But when we frame the outcomes as “adjustments” it leads to very different – and much more productive – conversations instead, such as “How big would the adjustment be? When would I have to make the adjustment? How will I know when it’s time to adjust?”
In other words, framing “probability of failure” rates as “likelihood of [needing] adjustment” instead changes the context of the conversation. When we say “you have a 10% probability of failure” it conjures up a 1-in-10 chance of catastrophe. When we have a 10% “probability of adjustment” and then explain the adjustment might simply be “you’ll need to sell your vacation home” or “you’ll need to tap your home equity with a reverse mortgage” or “you’ll need to cut your spending by 15% to get back on track” it’s far less scary. It goes from a chance of catastrophe to a chance of simply executing a plan for adjusting to get back on track.
And notably, it’s not just the probability of failure that’s misnamed. It’s also the probability of success, which is more like a probability of EXCESS. It’s the likelihood of having excess money left over, and sadly makes no distinction about how much will be left over! A Monte Carlo analysis in traditional retirement planning software treats having $1 left over the same as $1M and the same as $10M – they’re all “successes” – yet clients would react to this very differently. When you call it a probability of “excess” it again raises the question “how much of an excess are we talking about?” and a more productive conversation.
From Retirement Income To Retirement Cash Flows
When a prospective retiree decides it’s time to stop generating income from employment, the natural alternative is to replace it with “income” from retirement assets instead. In fact, that’s arguably the whole point of saving for retirement in the first place – to accumulate enough assets that you can support your ongoing expenses from the income generated by those assets, rather than the income generated by your labor.
Yet the caveat is that ultimately, the goal for most retirees is not merely to spend income from their assets for the rest of retirement, for the simple reason that doing so actually leaves a huge amount of retirement spending on the table – the assets themselves, or underlying principal, that will get passed on to the heirs when it could have been spent by the retiree.
In other words, for those who don’t specifically have a goal to leave a large inheritance to their children, a charity, or some other beneficiary, the real goal in retirement is not merely to generate “income” but to create a series of retirement “cash flows” that will allow them to spend down throughout retirement the wealth that was accumulated in the years leading up to it - in other words, the income and ultimately the principal, too. Obviously, the retiree will want to be cautious not to deplete that principal too soon, for fear of running out and failing the retirement goal; yet never touching principal at all, and leaving a huge inheritance on the table, may be "failing" the retirement goal, too - or at least, significantly underutilizing the available retirement assets.
Another problem with tying a retiree’s spending goals directly to portfolio “income” is that the income itself can be highly volatile. For a retiree that spends only the actual “income” in the form of interest and dividends, the past decade has resulted in a brutal spending cut, as the decline in interest and dividend rates has drastically curtailed available income, leaving retirees between a rock (spending far less than desired or anticipated) and a hard place (taking more risk in search of yield and the danger that things will get even worse). And of course, focusing solely on traditional “income” payments like interest and dividends ignores the rather material role that capital gains can play as well, given the non-trivial amount of equities that are often held in retirement portfolios.
The challenge of focusing only on “income” has been even further exacerbated in recent years, as many products, from Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs) to various forms of annuities, which have dubbed their payments/distributions as “income” when they are actually a combination of income/growth and a return of principal; the comparison of traditional income payments to these kinds of “income” vehicles is apples to oranges. In some cases – such as the guarantees on many variable (and now increasingly, equity-indexed) annuities that state they provide 5% “income” or “growth” when in reality most of the time they are doing nothing more than paying back an individual their own principal in 1/20th increments for the rest of their lives!
Talking about “income” also creates confusion with the Internal Revenue Code, which has its own views about what constitutes “income” or not. Growth in the form of interest and dividends is taxed as “income”, but the tax code also taxes capital gains as “income”, and even taxes the principal of an IRA as income. Even though the reality is that the principal in an IRA is only “income” because it is actually deferred income from wages earned in earlier years that were never taxed (thanks to the preferential treatment for IRA contributions themselves). In essence, a contribution to an IRA belongs partially to an IRA owner, and partially to Uncle Sam, with the benefit that the IRA owner can “borrow” and use Uncle Sam’s share to grow themselves before eventually paying it back later. But in the context of spending from retirement assets, an IRA withdrawal – or in the later years, a Required Minimum Distribution that forces it – is really not income at all. An RMD is nothing more than a requirement to switch an asset from one account (the IRA) to another account (a brokerage account), and give Uncle Sam’s share back in the process (which was eventually going to happen no matter what). Thus, while IRA withdrawals (and RMDs) are “income” for income tax purposes, they are not income in the context of retirement planning!
So what’s the alternative? To clarify the situation, and slow down the confusion, perhaps it’s time to stop calling it retirement “income” altogether, and to call the payments what they really are: retirement cash flows that will fund retirement spending. The distinction of focusing on what are truly retirement cash flows to be spent is that it avoids all the confusion around what is retirement income, what is “income” that is actually a blend of income and principal, what is “income” that is really nothing more than spending principal, and what is “income” only for tax purposes but for retirement is really nothing more than moving assets intact from one account to another.
When focusing on generating retirement cash flows, it becomes clearer that the cash flows don’t have to be traditional “income” payments at all. It could be from interest and dividends, but it could also be from capital gains, or a liquidation of principal (at least as years advance and retirement assets can be safely spent down). Notably, payments from pensions and Social Security are themselves also self-liquidating assets that combine principal and income, and would be better dubbed as “cash flows” than “income”.
The bottom line: when we talk about retirement “income”, we focus retirees on the often-flawed assumptions about what constitutes “income”, and the danger than the “income” term will be misused, misconstrued, or misapplied. With a focus on retirement cash flows, it’s easier to talk about all the different ways those cash flows can be generated (which might include income payments as one methodology!), and retirees can more effectively evaluate what is a sustainable cash flow to withdraw on an ongoing basis!
From “Retirement” To Financial Independence
Perhaps the greatest challenge in the words we use in retirement planning, though, is the label of “retirement” itself. For virtually all of its history, “retirement” has been synonymous with “not working”. Whether it’s the traditional view of retirement - a life of leisure, with lots of golf and vacation and walks on the beach near lighthouses - or the actual historical context where it was a mechanism to “force” people out of job they were no longer competent at and capable of doing (typically manual labor), retirement has always been about the end of work. Arguably, one of the primary purposes of Social Security and related programs in the early years was essentially just to soften the blow of forced retirement for those who were too old to work in traditional jobs… at a point where they weren’t actually expected to live very long in retirement, either.
Except the caveat, as a growing base of research is finding, is that a total cessation of work and trying to live of life of leisure does not actually create the happiness that we might have expected. To some extent, this appears to be one of the downsides of our adaptability as human beings; leisure as an occasional break from work is appealing, but a full time life of leisure can become boring once the novelty wears off. For others, the problem is not simply that the leisure life feels less rewarding over time, but because being productively engaged in work actually brings about the meaning and purpose in life that fuels out positive well-being (not to mention that for many, our work environment is also a source of interaction with others that fuels our social well-being, too).
For many retirees, this phenomenon is leading to the rise of part-time work in retirement – a confusing and implicitly self-contradictory concept for many! – and for others it’s driving them to adopt an entirely new “encore career”. The primary distinction for most of these “post-retirement jobs”, though, is that the purpose of the “work” is not for money and income; the purpose of the work is for purpose in life, whether that’s about engaging in meaningful work, leaving a legacy, impacting the world, or simply maintaining social ties.
Yet the challenge is that for so many retirees, what started out as a phenomenon to get older workers out of the way and into what would be a relative short “retirement” transition has now become an entire phase of life unto itself! And because “retirement” (and its non-work connotations) has been put forth as the ultimately goal at the end of a working career, retirees often transition into a full non-working retirement and then find themselves unhappy and unfilled after a few months or years. Which means that perhaps it’s time to rename retirement.
What’s the alternative in this case? Consider recharacterizing “retirement” as “financial independence” instead. The point of financial independence is simply to recognize that, once sufficient assets are accumulated, the decision about whether, where, and how much to work, can be made independent of the financial ramifications of the work itself. In other words, being financially independent is about being independent from the need to work, which then opens the door to more productive conversations about whether we want to work, and what meaningful work might be. For many prospective retirees, the whole conversation of “what would you do, work or otherwise, if money was no object” can be a remarkably freeing conversation, and lead to entirely new and productive avenues to explore!
Yet reframing retirement as financial independence goes beyond just what one will do in that “retirement” phase; it also changes the context of the retirement goal, where the target instead is simply to reach that point of financial independence, and to recognize that the accumulation of assets is just part of the transition of replacing income-from-work with cash-flows-from-assets instead. The approach allows for a much more productive transition into “partial retirement” as well; after all, for many people, their “financial independence” job might actually still be a job that does generate some income, which means the transition point to “financial independence” may be far closer than what it takes to “fully retire” instead.
Or viewed another way – for many, their “Findependence Day” may be much more achievable than a full-on retirement, in addition to being more personally satisfying and conducive to well-being! But it’s not possible to plan for financial independence until it’s identified as an option in the first place! So the next time you’re talking about “retirement”, think about “financial independence” instead and see where the conversation goes!
So what do you think? Would your conversations with prospective and currently retired clients be different if you used words like “retirement cash flows” or “probability of adjustment” or “financial independence” instead of the more traditional (and potentially problematic!) terms? Do you think the labels we use influence how we think about retirement? Have you tried changing the language of how you talk about retirement with your clients? Are there other words that you prefer to use to help clients think differently about the opportunities?
Excellent post, Michael! You are truly a thought leader here.
Thanks Elaine! 🙂
– Michael
Great post, Michael. I love the idea of “financial independence” because almost none of my clients look forward to “retiring” in the traditional sense (nor do I). I’m going to grab that right away! I’ve been using Cash Flow for quite a few years now. I often describe Financial Independence (nee Retirement) as a Cash Flow exercise. So I create cash flow spreadsheets with my clients and explain how the cash flow will be generated and how they might have to adjust. I’m using a blend of some of your work and Jon Guyton’s “handrails” to explain that adjustment. So far so good.
I think you nailed the idea of mental set being established by the terms we use. I’m going to change how I frame the discussion!
Michael, I think this is one of your best posts (and I’ve read a lot of them). I already tell prospects and clients that I don’t like the term “probability of failure” and prefer “the chance you’ll have to make some changes in order to lessen the risk of depleting your assets.” But your “probability of adjustment” is much more succinct! And I love the idea of replacing “income” with “cash flow” (especially since I espouse a total-return approach) and “retirement” with “financial independence.” Thanks for these suggestions!
Thanks Neal, I hope it’s helpful!
I think your avoidance of probability of failure for what it really means – the chance you’ll have to make changes – was dead-on appropriate already.
Hopefully I just gave you a slightly more succinct way to say it. 🙂
– Michael
There has been a lot of push on the 4% rule. I don’t see anything wrong with it per se. What is missing though is the “Safety Plan” for the rule which is to know when to regroup and cut the spending level to more appropriate levels. The second thing is to know when to up the spending when the market has well outperformed any reasonable expectations so you won’t die a multiple billionaire and living like a pauper.
Thanks, Michael for connecting the dots. My book and client conversations frequently refer to “financial independence assets,” but now I realize that I have overused the word “retirement.”
Michael: Spot on commentary!
This really addresses they key point that I’ve been grappling with for
the last few years. Much of the
available “wisdom”, and a lot of the literature, is based upon the concept that
at some point a retirement “switch” is
thrown and suddenly one draws social
security and “income” at some predetermined rate that constantly increases
until “failure”.
There’s very little out there that addresses the – how
do I know if I have enough socked away to do something else, maybe part time,
maybe focus a little less on maximizing the paycheck , maybe fish a little
more, or travel somewhere NOT on business ?
And what is “failure”, having to cut back on expenditures somewhere down
the road?
I’d venture to say, not many people start their working
career with a plan to work x years at Y dollars, escalated annually at an
inflation index of z, while spending M dollars per year investing Q into a
pre-programmed asset allocation, and spending
Y1 dollars on living expenses.
Most people just try to get by on what they have. Good to have a plan, but plans always need
adjusting, nothing is constant but change.
Excellent post Michael. The words we choose and how we frame them shape client perception in ways that many advisors don’t even think about. For example, I recently wrote a post about why using the word “fee” to describe how you get paid as an advisor is a bad choice of words. Why, because nobody likes to pay fees! We’ll pay what something “costs” but fees, forget it. Nobody likes to pay baggage fees, handling fees, service fees, late fees, Ticketmaster fees, etc. I’m not suggesting we use words to manipulate, rather, we need to consciously think about our choice of words and phrases so we communicate clearly and in ways that clients understand. Always enjoy your work.
Steve,
Thanks for sharing. And indeed, I’ve written on this theme of words like “fees” as well. The term “fees” inside our industry is very different than how consumers interpret it; in most other contexts, “fees” are actually bad marketing! See http://www.kitces.com/blog/fees-and-fiduciary-good-business-bad-marketing/
With warm regards,
– Michael
Steve, How do you frame the conversation on fees? You allude to using “cost” instead of “fees”. Or do you frame it as “you pay us for this or that” instead of “our fee for this service is…”? How does your typical conversation flow?
Thanks for clarifying!
Jim
Jim, you can also use the word “price.” Example, “The price of the financial plan is…” Or, “The financial plan costs…” Or, “Our investment management service costs…” or “…is priced at…” Practice these words with your staff or family and friends, get their reaction, and whatever you use, make sure you are very comfortable with your language. Prospects will pickup on how comfortable you are in the words you are using.
I like the reference to Findependence Day at the end. But then I would! (see http://www.findependenceday.com)
Completely agree. I have been educating clients about dropping the “r” word and replacing it with life design in 10 year bands, still looking out further on the horizon. It’s slow going because the notion of traditional retirement is deep seated and in business with mandatory retirement.
hi Michael, I agree with you that language determines a lot of our responses and that we need new frameworks for retirement . I see that lots of young bloggers are also into the financial independence movement but some still call it retirement as in “retire by 40″…I like the change of terms as in “adjustment” instead of “failure”….will create less fear and more flexibility..thanks for a good post.
I have been using the term “financial independence” for years. Thanks for the thoughts on additional positive terminology!!
Hi Micheal, even for an experience wealth builder, it never occur to me to frame the failure in withdrawal rate that way. thanks for helping with that.
I tend to think we should frame retirement savings as a Wealth Fund as people think retirement is too far away why save for it. but if you tell people to put into their Wealth it is more appealing since everyone wants Wealth isn’t it?
I don’t really get the difference between cash flow and income really. they do feel the same to me
Dropped the word “retirement” from my Fortune 100 401(k) plan when updating marketing/communication materials effective July 1, 1996 – almost 20 years ago. The materials incorporated the theme “drive to your dreams” – and participation leaped to over 95% (without automatic enrollment). Similarly, we changed the focus from an employer-sponsored retirement savings plan to a “lifetime financial instrument” – today, nearly 40% of plan assets, almost $1.5B belongs to people like me – term vested and retired individuals who no longer work there.
Another awesome post Michael! You always get me thinkin! I recently finished a book called ‘The Annuity Stanifesto’ by Stan Haithcock and it has me really excited about the possibilities. I’d love to see a post from you on the topic. Check out his website (www.stantheannuityman.com). He is refreshingly blunt and definitely cuts through the vague promises of annuities. When I finished this read, I immediately reached out to him and hope to enlist his help in the near future.
Very long and insightful post! There are so many things about retirement and financial independence that we ought to learn and master.
I want to thank you for this post. it is insightful, helpful, refreshing and provides a clear path forward that anyone can use to their advantage. thank you for your work in this field. i continue to learn and implement and it has helped me significantly with anxiety around planning for the future. Im 40 for reference.