Post-work plans are changing
As lifespans get longer, ‘financial gerontologists’ address stages of old age
When Cynthia Hutchins started her career as a financial planner in the 1980s, the concept of “retirement” was simple and straightforward.
Most of her clients envisioned a few years of leisure after their full-time careers ended, with a pension, Social Security and perhaps a bit of savings providing steady support.
“When my grandmother retired, as an example, if you lived into your 70s that was considered to be a really good, long life,” Hutchins said recently over video chat from her home office outside Baltimore.
As the years went on, she noticed a shift in her conversations with clients at Merrill Lynch, where she worked as a retirement specialist.
The defined-benefit plans their parents had relied on were fading away, replaced by self-funded schemes that demanded a great deal more planning on the employee’s part.
What’s more, people no longer imagined their so-called retirements as a few golden years of golf and grandchildren. The 20th century added more years to life expectancy than any era of human history before it. As the new century loomed, Hutchins’ clients were grappling with decisions that previous generations simply hadn’t lived long enough to face. They were trying to plan for decadeslong stretches that included multiple phases: leaving work to care for an aging parent, a second career, the possibility of needing full-time care themselves.
Even in her own family, Hutchins saw how gains in life expectancy were outpacing the plans people made for themselves. Her grandmother died at 96, four decades after retiring from the Social Security Administration at age 55.
“She lived 41 years in retirement, and it hit me that had she known she had 41 years, she would have planned totally differently,” she said.
That realization prompted a career shift. Hutchins, 61, is now the director of financial gerontology at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, a role in which she educates the firm’s nearly 19,000 financial advisers on working with clients across all stages of life.
The training she has developed helps advisers understand the complexities that can accumulate as the years pile up: how to simultaneously finance children’s college education and parents’ in-home care; when to bring in adult children or other family members to collaborate on financial decisions;
how to recognize if a long-term client is being financially exploited or experiencing cognitive changes that are influencing their decision-making.
Hutchins was named to the newly created role in 2014, shortly after obtaining her master’s degree from the University of Southern California’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. At the time, Merrill Lynch (which had not yet merged with Bank of America) was the first major bank to employ a financial gerontologist, and is still the only major one to use that title.
Being the first to hold this role gave Hutchins freedom to shape a subspecialty that is small but growing in significance.
In contrast to the medical specialty of geriatrics, which focuses on the physical
concerns of the later stages of life, gerontology is a multidisciplinary field that includes the social and psychological implications of aging and longevity.
Doctors concerned with a patient’s longevity don’t just look at vital signs, but also ask about the social factors affecting their patient’s health, like access to social support, adequate food and transportation to appointments.
Similarly, financial planners who have completed training in longevity know the questions to ask to make sure that their clients are on track for successful financial outcomes in older age, and that they will be comfortable starting necessary but potentially difficult conversations about longterm care, health and end-of-life plans.