Integrate Life Coaching Into Retirement Planning

While financial planning and life coaching have traditionally been independent of each other, integrating the two can be extremely beneficial. It is time to integrate life coaching into your financial planning. By working through your plan more comprehensively, you will feel more comfortable and confident in making the transition. A life coach can often tap into concerns you don’t even realize exist, and will provide valuable tools, perspectives, and support systems to prepare you for the next phase.

While it’s critical to have your financial affairs in order, it’s equally as important to plan for the mental, social, and spiritual aspects of retirement. Ask yourself questions such as, “How will I fill up my days and keep myself busy?” or “What will my new routine look like?” and “My career has given me a sense of purpose for decades, what comes next?” To help answer these questions, I recommend bringing a life coach into the retirement planning conversation.

Financial life planning seeks to help clients strike a balance between the two sides and hence enable them to live life to their full potential. Traditional financial planning focuses solely on the quantitative side-that is budgeting, estate planning, insurance coverage, retirement savings, taxes, and so on. Financial life planning is a holistic process that applies traditional financial analysis within a framework of the individual’s life and total resources. At the core of financial life planning is an emphasis on asking meaningful questions.

Financial life planning is the process of helping you understand what’s truly important to you in your life and how you can effectively make changes to achieve your goals. It complements traditional financial planning by placing a greater focus on defining your values and what actions you can take to better align with those values.

Many people are realizing that financial planning has helped them continue to build greater wealth, but they aren’t necessarily using their wealth “intentionally” — on things that matter most to them.

This is where financial life planning comes in. Our process helps you identify and focus on what’s truly most important to you in your life, and it seamlessly incorporates these values into your financial plan and advisor discussions. Through the process of financial life planning, we ask you questions designed to provoke deep and thoughtful responses, to truly understand what’s at your heart’s core. It’s only then your financial plan truly comes to life.

The support, encouragement, and direction delivered through life coaching is an area where CPA financial planners can add tremendous value for clients by integrating it with the financial planning process.