Enter Retirement With a Purpose
Dallas-area retirement adviser Andy Raub has made a living helping people plan, so it makes sense that he wouldn’t like surprises. Not even at Walt Disney World.
He remembers one day, he got on a rollercoaster ride with a young grandson, and it “scared us both to death.”
That’s not how retirement should feel, Raub said.
“When you retire, you think it’s going to be like Disney World,” he said. “Things happen that scare us to death. Nobody prepares you for that.”
Raub is the founder and president of Raub Capital Management, part of Ameriprise Financial Services in Dallas.
Now he’s an author, whose book The Encore Curve: Retire with a Life Plan That Excites You offers a mix of financial coaching and life coaching to help readers avoid retirement surprises.
“When people leave their careers behind, they almost always leave a feeling of identity and purpose behind,” he said. “I have a lot of clients and friends who’ve retired but have no purpose but playing golf. A lot will go back to work or look for something else to do.” There’s a real crisis among retirees right now; it’s much more than a money crisis, he said. “Very few people are prepared for the jarring life changes that happen when they retire.”
To combat that feeling, Raub advises clients to find their “why” in life.
“We call it building your GPS,” he said. “A GPS provides guidance; [it] tells you how to get from where you are to where you want to be.”
For Raub and his clients, GPS stands for giftedness, passion, and standards. “Giftedness is, ‘What am I best at?’ Passion is, ‘What do I love doing?’ Standards are, ‘What’s most important to me?’ ”
Raub says there are three states of retirement: Go, go; slow go; and no go. “You don’t want to spend all your money and energy trying to figure things out in go, go.”
“You’ve got to have an intentional plan to fill that ‘habit hole’ with things that are productive,” Raub said. “As we get older, our regrets get bigger and bigger. I’m 71 and I’m probably going to live another 30 years. I don’t want to live it doing nothing. I want it to have purpose and meaning.”
Prospective retirees are the target audience for Raub, but as millennials become a larger part of the U.S. population, he encourages planning for them, too. “I’ve coached a lot of younger people on just finding their purpose,” he said. “The sooner you can start … the better off you’ll be in that process.”
Planned well, retirement can become an encore to your life, Raub said. “Around retirement age, we go into a decline. We’re sick, tired, bored. And things begin to slow down. Our curve declines. I believe we can create an upward sloping curve. Encore means saving your best for last. That’s what I’m trying to teach.”
Andy Raub’s top three retirement tips:
1. Have a plan. That sounds really silly, but most people don’t. Have a money plan and have a life plan so that when you hit the ground running, you know where you’re going.
2. Secure reliable income. Make sure that you have a guaranteed or stable source of money. If you are going to spend $5,000 a month, then make sure that you have some kind of guaranteed source for that.
3. Know where you’re going. Retirement is all about money and time. People fear running out of time, and they fear being insignificant. Know what you’re good at, know what you’re passionate about, and know what your standards are.
