Wealth Regeneration at Retirement: Planning for a Lifetime of Leadership

By Kaycee Krysty, Robert Moser and Jay Hughes

Tailoring retirement for successful business leaders 

Traditional retirement planning fails to meet the needs of wealthy baby boomers, particularly those who are business leaders. There is no “one size fits all” answer. 

Wealth Regeneration at Retirement: Planning for a Lifetime of Leadership presents an alternative – one that acts more like a GPS.   The authors, Kaycee Krysty and Bob Moser, leaders of the highly regarded Seattle-based wealth management firm, Laird Norton Tyee, use a proprietary discipline, Wealth Regeneration®, to calculate the route to retirement and beyond for those at the top.

The authors challenge successful boomers to redefine retirement on their own terms. They outline a process to create a sustainable plan to achieve retirement objectives. Their years of experience in counseling CEO’s and business founders through transitions is reflected throughout.  For many successful boomers, the answer to the prospect of retirement has been, “I’d rather not.” Yet change is inevitable. Wealth Regeneration at Retirement provides a thoughtful and thorough way for leaders to move onward. 

Describing Wealth Regeneration in a digestible, actionable format, the book provides the framework, tools, and techniques that successful baby boomers and their advisors need to incorporate this innovative approach for a lifetime of leadership and legacy. Packed with learning aids, including graphics, diagrams, worksheets and exercises, the book helps readers build a unique life plan that is about more than simply retirement.

The book includes:

• A proprietary approach to retirement planning that changes seamlessly when times and circumstances change
• A four component  methodology  - Where You Are; What You Want; What to Do; and Make it Happen – to ensure continuous feedback, accountability, and measurement of lifetime goals
• Retirement planning expertise from wealth management firm Laird Norton Tyee   

Wealth Regeneration at Retirement: Planning for a Lifetime of Leadership is artfully illustrated and filled with practical advice for wealthy baby boomers and the financial advisors they rely on.    It explains exactly how to build a personalized and sustainable plan for retirement no matter where life may lead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Sep 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118330579

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction: Where to Begin?

Part I: Redefining Retirement

Chapter 1: It’s All about You (Really It Is)

We versus Me

It’s Time for It to Be All about You

Real Life, Real Money

Wealth Regeneration, What’s That?

Old Money

New Wealth

The Principles

What’s Next?

You Have to Sleep at Night

Chapter 2: The R Word

There Are Lots of Us

Now What?

The Hero’s Farewell

What about Me?

What We’ve Learned

Where Do You Fit?

Chapter 3: The Grab Bag of Life

Change Has Impact

Managing Change

The New Rules

Chapter 4: It’s Not Rocket Science

Strategic Planning

Change Management

Financial Forecasting

Risk Assessment

Building Teams

Holding People Accountable

Meaningful Work

You’ve Got This Wired

Chapter 5: Leading in a New Way

What Is Generativity?

Generativity Is Leadership

Have It Your Way

It’s About Regeneration

Part II: The Wealth Regeneration Discipline

Chapter 6: The Concept of the Wheel

Circle to Wheel

Dealing with Change

What’s Next?

You Know How to Do This

Get It Rolling

A Kick in the . . .

Looking at What Happens

Chapter 7: Know Where You Are

Defining Your Wealth

Lifestyle Analysis—How Much Is Enough?

How Sustainable Is Your Wealth?

Toolkit

Chapter 8: Know Who You Are

Recognizing the Crucible

Facing the Questions

Back to the Future

Seriously, Try This Now

And When You Have a Partner

Flow

So Enough Touchy-Feely Already?

Toolkit

Chapter 9: Know Where You Want to Go

Embracing the Endgame

Getting Strategic

Your Purpose

Now for That Vision Thing

How Does It Look from the Top of the Mountain?

Tookit

Chapter 10: What to Do to Get There from Here

Keeping It Real

Begin at the Beginning

Purpose Is the Destination

What’s Nonnegotiable?

What’s Just Ahead?

Then, Get Going

What to Do If You Still Don’t Know What to Do

Finally, Let’s Talk about Money

What If the Scenarios Suggest I’m Spending Too Much Money?

A Word about Investment Policy

You Can Do This

Toolkit

Chapter 11: Rolling It Forward

Have a System

The Quick Look Check-In

The Sit-Down

Now for the Deep Dive

Keeping the Plan

Where the Rubber Most Likely Meets the Road

The Big Picture

When Stuff Happens

What to Share with Your Advisor

The Time Is Now

Chapter 12: Legacy

There Are Challenges

What a Letter of Intent Looks Like

Seriously, This Isn’t That Hard

Legacy Is Generativity in Action

Toolkit

And in Conclusion

Appendix 1: How to Choose a Wealth Advisor

Appendix 2: How to Vet a Personal Financial Forecast

Appendix 3: Cash Flow Management

Appendix 4: Wealth Regeneration Interview Format

Recommended Reading

About the Authors

Index

Since 1996, Bloomberg Press has published books for financial professionals on investing, economics, and policy affecting investors. Titles are written by leading practitioners and authorities, and have been translated into more than 20 languages.

The Bloomberg Financial Series provides both core reference knowledge and actionable information for financial professionals. The books are written by experts familiar with the work flows, challenges, and demands of investment professionals who trade the markets, manage money, and analyze investments in their capacity of growing and protecting wealth, hedging risk, and generating revenue.

For a list of available titles, please visit our website at www.wiley.com/go/bloombergpress.

Copyright © 2012 by Laird Norton Tyee. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

Wealth Regeneration® is a registered trademark of Laird Norton Tyee Trust Company.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at [phone], outside the United States at [phone] or fax [phone].

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our website at www.wiley.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Krysty, Kaycee W. author.

Wealth regeneration at retirement : planning for a lifetime of leadership/Kaycee Krysty with Robert Moser.

pages cm. — (Bloomberg financial series)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-27656-3 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-33340-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-33129-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-33057-9 (ebk)

1. Retirement—United States—Planning. 2. Retirement income—United States. 3. Executives—United States. 4. Baby boom generation—United States. I. Moser, Robert, author. II. Title.

HQ1063.2.U6K79 2013

306.3’80973—dc23

2012020165

For our spouses, Michael and Candy, the people in our lives who hold us accountable and keep us turning the wheel forward. Thanks for all the nudging!

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the help, support, and wisdom of many people.

First we would like to acknowledge the Laird Norton family. Their openness and rigor in stewarding both their human and financial capital are an inspiration every day. They set the standard for Wealth Regeneration®.

We would also like to acknowledge our many clients over the years who have taught us so much about what it means to lead a generative life and leave a positive legacy. They allowed us to push them and prod them, asking all the difficult questions that went into formulating the ideas presented in this book. We have been honored to be their partner as they plan for Wealth Regeneration. A particular thanks goes to those clients of long standing (and you know who you are) who were willing co-experimenters when we were just taking baby steps.

So many professional colleagues have helped along the way that it is impossible to mention them all. Our desire is to reciprocate, so that more and more individuals and families have good counsel on the road ahead. We would like to particularly acknowledge Jay Hughes, whose many years of mentorship and substantive writings have so clearly informed our work; Bill George, whose work on authenticity has inspired a generation of business leaders; and Pamela MacLean and Frederick Hudson, whose clear-eyed view of change sets the stage for facing the future with intention.

And finally our sincere appreciation to our colleagues at Laird Norton Tyee. Wealth Regeneration is a team sport, and we are privileged to play on the same team as some of the best in the business. To quote Theodore Roosevelt: Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. At Laird Norton Tyee we get to do that every day.

Kaycee and Bob

June 2012

Foreword

Generativity or Stagnation? These are the two states of being, the great psychologist Erik H. Erikson, in his book Childhood and Society, offers to those of us either entering or living in the third stage of life. How stark and yet how accurate these two terms are for defining our lives from about 60 to 80. Don’t worry that I am cutting your life short; there is another stage for 80–100, where the two options are Ego Integrity and Despair. Getting the Generative self right creates a high probability that you will have one more stage, the stage of Ego Integrity, toward leaving this life fulfilled and flourishing right to the final second. Despair as the state of one’s being at the end of life? Unthinkable!!!

The book you are about to read offers a path to Generativity that is bold. Equally, it requires all of the dedication, passion, and creativity you brought to the first two stages of your life; the stage of youth and adolescence, the stage of learning; and the second stage of vocation and relationship, the stage of doing. It is a journey of transition that will ask you once again to shed your shell (in this case of your second stage) as you once shed the shell of your first-stage self, so you can create a new larger shell to accommodate your larger more deeply aware third-stage self.

In my opinion very little useful information has been offered so far to the 70 million of you, known as Baby Boomers (those born between 1/1/1946–12/31/1962), to help you understand the path to Generativity; the way of being that the third stage of life is all about. Equally, the fear of stagnation that the R (Retirement) word defines has gotten lots of worried press. Appreciating this reality, Kaycee Krysty and Bob Moser have offered a set of diagnostics and a path to apply them that, if followed with dedication and discernment, will lead you to be the Generative person this stage of life calls you to be.

I can well imagine that many of you have the same fear of loss of your dynamism that I felt when I reached 60, for me exactly 10 years ago. Perhaps unlike you, I was so worried about it that I decided to read all I could on the third stage of life. I can also tell you that I knew, as you do, that this stage of life was often defined as the Senior stage of life, or Codger stage, and this really frightened me. However, in watching my parents live through this stage, I saw them become true Elders and never Seniors. So in my reading I sought to discover what the third stage of being and giving back was about. I sought to determine why and how I could make conscious choices, using a seriously meaningful set of actions that would lead to my becoming a true Elder and never a Codger.

Where did the journey lead me? To Aristotle, in the Nichomachean Ethics and its journey to happiness; to many of the wisdom teachers in the various spiritual systems on our planet who I discovered were our Elders, our true wisdom keepers; to Dante and his Divine Comedy and within it Dante’s gift that reminds us that there are times when we find ourselves in a dark wood with no way out, a dark wood from which we can only extract ourselves by our willingness to call our metaphorical Virgils to life to lead us to Generativity; to Sigmund Freud; to Carl Jung; to James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code; to James Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life and The Middle Passage; to Jane R. Pretat’s Coming of Age; to John R. O’Neil’s and Allan Jones’s Seasons of Grace; to Daniel Levinson’s The Seasons of a Man’s Life and The Seasons of a Woman’s Life; to Michael Meade’s Men and the Water of Life; to Barbara G. Walker’s Crone; to Gail Sheehey’s New Passages; to Angeles Arrien; to Rabbi Shalomi-Schachter’s Ageing to Sageing; and finally to those who spoke to me most profoundly—Erik H. Erickson and above all Abraham Maslow and his Towards a Psychology of Being.

Why was and is Maslow my greatest teacher? Because he defines the hierarchy of one’s life’s development and its highest achievement, its apogee, its fully grown third stage, as that of practicing altruism in all that one does. Essentially, it is: the stage of giving back to those we love and to our society—to become Good Samaritans; to be more productive than we have ever been before. I believe he is right about ultimate success in how to live one’s life and the happiness that will be afforded to us it if we should succeed.

I decided, after I read Maslow, that his was the path of development I would adopt for this new stage of MY life—a path of development that I believed might, if I was diligent and discerning, lead me successfully to the being stage of life, to becoming a true Elder. I wanted to learn to grow myself toward his idea of being. Above all I wanted to ensure I was not falling into Stagnation and Despair; that I was becoming Generative.

I hasten to say that I tell my story only in the hope that it may encourage you to find your own way of understanding and expressing this stage of life and the lineage that underlies it. The important thing is to get going in finding YOUR way by learning from the wisdom keepers whose voices you discover you can hear best.

These last ten years I have been working on being Generative, seeking to understand and live the role of an Elder while doing all I can not to be a Codger. Toward this end and toward exploring the issues of this stage of life I have written extensively on wealth, family, and the role of Elders in family and in society, including the roles in family of active grandparents.¹

In these works, I challenge you to consider your role in your own family at this stage of your life. As an Elder your actions can help deepen your family’s sense of its own uniqueness. You can tell the family stories and remind the family of shared core values. As an Elder you’re in a unique position to bring to your family the seventh-generation wisdom of the Iroquois that said it should be our hope that the care and thoughtfulness we bring to our decision-making today will be remembered and honored by our descendents seven generations from today.

Further, I suggest that senior generations should ask, What role can I have in the family that keeps me active and participating in a way that is appropriate to my seniority but does not cripple the growth and leadership of my children?

I have outlined my journey for you as I hope it might offer you confidence