When it comes to retirement, clients don’t always think about the future in one continuous phase.
They often experience it in two very different chapters and that difference has a material impact on advice outcomes.
The Two‑Chapter Retirement is a new adviser insights paper designed to help you understand why even financially well‑resourced clients:
- hesitate to spend
- delay key decisions
- avoid committing capital even when it could improve their lives.
The issue is often not affordability, but how clients perceive the future and their fear of making decisions they believe are difficult to unwind.
Based on behavioural research, retirement studies and adviser insights, the paper introduces a practical two‑chapter framework, showing how retirement typically unfolds across:
- an active, optimistic early chapter clients can clearly imagine
- a later chapter shaped by uncertainty, health concerns and complexity.
What you’ll gain from this paper:
- Insight into why traditional retirement thinking is creating emerging risks to client outcomes
- Why clients can clearly picture early retirement but not later life
- An understanding of how behavioural biases influence spending, confidence and decision‑making
- Practical implications for structuring conversations, sequencing decisions and prioritising advice.
This paper equips advisers with a framework to support more confident retirement conversations and support better long‑term outcomes across both chapters of retirement.
