We talked with Susan Latremoille about:
- The importance of integrating non-financial aspects into retirement planning to help advisors better serve pre-retirees and prepare them for their next chapter
- The various non-financial challenges retirees face in retirement
- Why advisors should consider appealing to the “non-financial” spouse in client couples
About Susan Latremoille:
Among her extensive credentials and achievements, Susan Latremoille is a Certified Professional Retirement Coach and the partner and co-founder of Next Chapter Lifestyle Advisors. Observing a growing need to redefine retirement and embrace a broader vision for the life stage, Susan shares how the non-financial side — not just having enough savings — is a significant predictor of success in one's next chapter. A published author and sought-after keynote speaker with over 35 years of experience as a wealth advisor and firm owner, Susan shares her insights through coaching, webinars, and content designed to help advisors effectively reach and serve this dynamic demographic.
Featured Resources
- Susan on LinkedIn
- Marianne on LinkedIn
- Next Chapter Lifestyle Advisors
- 9 Steps to a RichLife Retirement by Susan Latremoille
- Your Happiness Portfolio for Retirement: It's Not About the Money! By Marianne Oehser
Enjoyed This? You’ll Also Love:
- Supporting Financial Professionals and Their Aging Clients
- Enhancing Advisor Success: How to Add Value Beyond the Numbers Through Human Connection
- Providing a Human-First Value Add for Clients and Advisors
Full Audio Transcript:
00:00:00 - 00:07:13
Lauren Hong
Right. Well, Susan, thank you for joining us today.
00:07:15 - 00:11:25
Susan Latremoille
It's a pleasure to be with you, Lauren. And I can't wait to have this chat with you.
00:11:25 - 00:24:18
Lauren Hong
So, Susan, for those of you who don't know, it's Susan Latremoille. I think I got that right. She is the co-founder and president of Next Chapter Lifestyle Advisors, if I got that right as well.
00:24:20 - 00:26:10
Susan Latremoille
Partner. Yes.
00:26:13 - 00:56:00
Lauren Hong
Perfect. So we were just chatting about all things in this industry, a little bit of NAPFA and kids and conversations that are happening. And you have this unique bend around lifestyle retirement planning, which we're going to talk more about today. And I'm really excited to sort of dive in and hear a little bit more about what you're seeing from a more practical level of how to really reach a retiree or pre-retiree audience.
00:56:12 - 01:13:19
Lauren Hong
And also just how to make your operations procedures and communications really fit this demographic. But before we get into all of that, I want to hand it over to you. And if you could just share a little bit more about your background. How did you get into this space? Why this demographic? Tell us a little bit more, please.
01:13:21 - 01:35:16
Susan Latremoille
Sure. Happy to do that, Lauren. Well, actually, I was a financial advisor for 38 years, so I worked at three different firms over my 38 years and built a successful practice, primarily working with high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients. And I thought my job was done as a financial advisor when my clients had enough money to retire.
01:35:29 - 01:59:08
Susan Latremoille
And then I started to notice as they sold their businesses or stepped away from their careers or professions, many of them were not as happy as they thought they would be. And here I was, I prided myself on being that holistic financial advisor, and yet I'd completely ignored that. There was a whole other side to a retirement planning than just having enough money to retire.
01:59:11 - 02:26:11
Susan Latremoille
And what really brought it home to me was a particular client. His name was Alan, a very successful business owner. It was a family furniture business, and he would always talk about how he couldn't wait to retire. He had a beautiful home in a gated community in Florida. He was an avid golfer. And so his dream, his retirement dream when he sold out of the company, was to go to Florida for the winter and play golf.
02:26:13 - 02:45:23
Susan Latremoille
So I wished them well in November, so idyllic, and he left and I saw him when he came back. We had our usual check-up meeting when he came back from Florida. And honestly, I was expecting to see this tanned, happy, and really bright guy.
02:45:26 - 03:07:13
Susan Latremoille
And I couldn't believe it. He was so down. He said to me, I'm so bored with the same guys I play golf with every day. I'm so frustrated with my golf game. I thought I'd be a crackerjack by now. And it actually has not improved and I've injured my shoulder. I've played every day and it was too much for my body.
03:07:13 - 03:33:27
Susan Latremoille
So instead of being this happy and excited and really positive man, he was actually pretty depressed and down and disillusioned. And I started to see this pattern play out over and over again, especially with people who were really high achievers, business owners, and professionals who had reached the pinnacle and so on. And I thought, there's something wrong here.
03:33:27 - 03:57:06
Susan Latremoille
Why doesn't the financial services industry know anything about this phenomena or do anything? That's what really prompted me to sell my practice, which I did. I didn't want to stay in competition with other advisors, so I sold the practice entirely to focus this next stage of my career on the non-financial side of retirement planning. And so that's my story.
03:57:06 - 04:06:21
Susan Latremoille
That's how I got here. And it was really all prompted with what I saw with clients when I started to look beyond do they have enough money to retire comfortably?
04:06:23 - 04:16:27
Lauren Hong
So tell me a little bit more about what you are doing to support advisors or specific advisors you're working with, or are you working with their clients? I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.
04:16:29 - 04:42:22
Susan Latremoille
We actually work with both advisors and their clients, so I'll outline more specifically what we do with advisors. We created an advisor program, a Next Chapter advisor program. And we call our advisors in the program First Movers because they really are these thought leaders, these advisors who want to expand beyond just talking to their clients about money and doing financial planning, investments, insurance.
04:42:24 - 05:03:05
Susan Latremoille
They are people who say, I want to look after my clients from a broader perspective. I care about their lives. I care about how well they fare throughout their retirement journey. So those are the types of advisors who resonate with the work we do. So specifically for advisors, we have a number of things.
05:03:05 - 05:27:13
Susan Latremoille
First of all, within our advisor program, we teach them how to have a different conversation with their clients because quite often advisors are all trained to talk about markets and the economy and interest rates and portfolios. But to me, that's not what the clients want to talk about. They want to talk about what's going on in their lives, what what wakes them up at two in the morning, what they're excited about, and so on.
05:27:15 - 06:03
Susan Latremoille
So we have a training program for financial advisors to change that conversation. And we use a template for that guided conversation called your Next Chapter Scorecard. So that's one of the things. We also provide content for financial advisors that they can put in their newsletters or blogs or simply articles to send out to their clients. Instead of putting recipes in their newsletter, they put on a thought leadership piece about some aspect of retirement from a non-financial perspective.
06:17 - 06:27:07
Susan Latremoille
In addition to that, we do webinars for financial advisors’ clients. It started in COVID when it was very popular to have virtual webinars. And we've continued to this day to do both virtual and in-person webinars and workshops for advisors’ clients. We have six topics we speak on, and I can outline those if you want to go into more detail.
06:27:14 - 07:09
Susan Latremoille
But the webinars are a great way for advisors to engage their clients in a conversation that isn't just about money and markets. So those are some of the key highlights. We also have a bit of a community of advisors in that we meet about eight times a year. And the advisor roundtable, we usually have a guest speaker and then the advisors have a chance to interact with each other because they all are like minded in that they are not just thinking about product and process.
07:12 - 07:03:04
Lauren Hong
And are these roundtables virtual?
07:03:04 - 07:25:16
Susan Latremoille
Yes. They take place on a Monday afternoon at 4:30 Eastern time. They're 45 minutes. They start on time and we record them. All of them are recorded and they're on the member section of our website. So when an advisor signs up for the program, they get access to all the prerecorded roundtables we've done over the past few years.
07:25:23 - 07:45:00
Lauren Hong
That's wonderful. So I just want to go back to what you said a little bit earlier about the webinars. We've seen webinars be a really fantastic tool, especially for this retiree, pre-retiree group, especially topics like thinking about being a consultant after I retire or what that next phase of life looks like.
07:45:02 - 08:03:10
Lauren Hong
And I'd be really curious to hear from you. And we'll have to link — I'm assuming you've got maybe the topics on your website or what have you linked to that as well. How do advisors’ clients respond to those webinars and is advisor on the webinar as well?
08:03:10 - 08:07:00
Lauren Hong
I'd love to hear a little bit more about that component of your business.
08:07:02 - 08:31:16
Susan Latremoille
Sure. So our webinars are usually under an hour in length and depending on compliance departments, they can be interactive. But many compliance departments don't allow audience participation. And they come in two formats. One is the advisors can purchase a prerecorded webinar that they can link to their site. They can send it out, they can put on a live event using a recorded webinar.
08:31:23 - 09:02:09
Susan Latremoille
And the other is a live, virtual webinar where there can be interaction. And we want to make it really easy for the advisors to put these on for their clients. So we provide them with the webinar solution guide. And it has everything in it that they need to put on the webinar. We give them the social media assets, the save the date, the template for the invitation, hosting instructions, scripts, and everything.
09:02:09 - 09:36:27
Susan Latremoille
So the idea is that it doesn't take a lot of the advisor’s time. They can hand it off to a marketing person on their team or an admin person on their team, or outsource it to do all the logistics. And then the advisor just shows up to host the webinar and then follows up and some advisors have had tremendous success with that in both reaching the non-financial spouse in their client couples as well as using social media and other means of spreading the word to attract new people to their practice.
09:37:08 - 09:40:26
Susan Latremoille
I can talk about the topics if you want.
09:40:26 - 09:46:05
Lauren Hong
Maybe hit on a few you think would be interesting to hear a little bit more about here.
09:46:08 - 10:17:11
Susan Latremoille
So there are a series of six and there are two general ones. Three Secrets to a Happy Retirement is one general one and Your Happiness Portfolio for Retirement. So I can elaborate on that — our whole happiness portfolio concept. But then the other four are for specific audiences. So we have one for couples because we know the divorce rate — and we call it gray divorce — is very high when people retire and some go their separate ways.
10:17:11 - 10:42:25
Susan Latremoille
So how to prevent retirement from ruining your relationship? We have one for women because women face some different issues in retirement than men. And one of the other webinar topics is called Flying Solo. And this is for people who are divorced, widowed, never married, not partnered with anyone. So what's it like to retire and fly solo at this stage of life?
10:42:27 - 11:06:04
Susan Latremoille
And then one that's really popular with business owners and it's called The Retirement Challenges of High Achievers, Business Owners, and Workaholics. A lot of business owners really relate to that one because for many of them, work is all they know. And so they often have a much more difficult time with this transition.
11:06:04 - 11:09:26
Susan Latremoille
Like my client, Alan, who I talked about a few minutes ago.
11:10:03 - 11:31:18
Lauren Hong
So just for folks who are listening who may not be as familiar, I know you shared a little bit earlier about your background personally and how you got into this space. How are these webinars coming together? Is it paired with your background, or are there others on the team that are putting together this content? Where is that coming from to really make it as robust as possible?
11:31:20 - 12:02:07
Susan Latremoille
So that's a good question. So my business partner is Marianne Oehser, and she has been a retirement coach for more than a decade. She has done a lot of the research and investigation into this whole phenomena. She started her career as a relationship coach, and that's what led her to really delve into that issue of gray divorce with couples, because she she was living in Naples, Florida, at the time, which is a mecca for retirees and older people.
12:02:07 - 12:37:22
Susan Latremoille
The couples that were coming to her were often having some challenges in their relationship. So that's where she started with relationship and then got into retirement coaching. So she's the expert on content and does a lot of our writing and research and delivery of the client-facing webinars. My work because of my own background as a financial advisor is more working with financial advisors and their firms, although at times we do overlap with each other and I can present the webinars too but she's really the person doing that.
12:38:00 - 13:10
Lauren Hong
That's great to have a little bit of that context too. And you're so familiar too, with the space having been in that seat as you lived it. So I want to shift topics a little bit. You have talked a lot about the sort of services you offer, some of these virtual options for advisors and their clients, webinars and such.
13:13 - 13:22:06
Lauren Hong
Let’s hear a little bit more from your perspective if there is a firm that's really thinking about and perhaps targets this demographic of retirees and retirees, how old are they? Are there any kind of best practices to make that onboarding experience seamless? Once they've been onboarded? Regular drips. I'd love to hear a little bit more about things that sort of work.
13:22:06 - 13:30:11
Lauren Hong
Or things advisors should be thinking about that makes sense to kind of bake into their day-to-day checkpoints for this demographic.
13:30:14 - 13:53:11
Susan Latremoille
So I think in terms of onboarding, it all starts with the discovery meeting. And coming back to the my mention of the scorecard, so many advisors in their discovery meetings will talk about themselves, their credentials, their team, their approach to money management, etc. And they don't spend enough time with the client speaking.
13:53:13 - 14:12:22
Susan Latremoille
So what I discovered, actually about 20 years ago, was if I did a discovery meeting and didn't talk very much but got the clients and in that case a prospect talking, at the end of the meeting, typically they'd say, I think I can trust you. And boy, this was only an hour we were together and you know so much about me.
14:12:22 - 14:34:17
Susan Latremoille
Well, guess what? You did the talking, not me. But to get them to open up and talk, especially if you've never met them before, is a special skill. And that's what we teach advisors — how to have that kind of conversation that really gets at what's in their hearts, what keeps them awake at night, as I mentioned, and yet doesn't sound invasive or digging.
14:34:17 - 14:58:12
Susan Latremoille
So I used to never actually talk about money in those meetings, in those first meetings. And I had a good success rate of converting those prospects to being a client because I was different than the conversations other advisors were having, which was, look at me, look at me, and how great I am and where the market is, where the S&P 500 is going, or the latest fund or whatever.
14:58:14 - 15:18:26
Susan Latremoille
And so taking the focus away from product and process and the whole thing and focusing on the individual was really the key to engaging those people. So I think it's also a great way — it's often the non-financial spouse who really is in the background making the decision about who they work with as an advisor.
15:18:29 - 15:35:12
Susan Latremoille
And this stuff really appeals to that person who just doesn't understand financial and never really wants to dig into it. They light up and it really becomes a much more balanced conversation than just one-sided.
15:35:14 - 16:01:00
Lauren Hong
That's great; it's such good insight. When someone becomes a client, are there any recommendations you have as far as touchpoints? Do you see what the demographic responds better to? I know you talk about webinars. I've often seen in-person events like seminars or luncheons work really well just because there is that flexibility of schedule typically.
16:01:21 - 16:19:26
Lauren Hong
I'd love to hear a little bit more about even the questions of paper. Do I print leave behinds and give that to folks? How is that received? A lot of the time, especially for a younger demographic, we're often saying, you don't even need the paper, just have digital versions and have a few printed copies as a backup.
16:19:26 - 16:25:22
Lauren Hong
I’d love to hear your thoughts on that as you carry forward that relationship with clients.
16:25:24 - 16:55:06
Susan Latremoille
Well, I think there's nothing that replaces people getting together. And what I used to do in my own practice was have lunch and learn meetings where we'd have a speaker but it wouldn't be so monopolized by the speaker that people at the table couldn't just have a conversation with each other. So I love a roundtable format with around four couples or eight people at the table strategically placed, and sometimes prospects mixed in with the existing clients.
16:55:06 - 17:14:06
Susan Latremoille
Because if a prospect is kind of sitting on the fence, they're not sure where they're going, who they're going to land up with as an advisor — by putting them in with your best clients, your raving fan clients, often at the end of the event, they'll say, oh, they deal with so-and-so. You know, I'd like to be part of that group.
17:14:06 - 17:38:03
Susan Latremoille
And then they get closed very seamlessly that way. Also, people like to be in community. And during COVID, this was one of the hardest parts for so many people, the isolation. And often when people have retired, they are cut off from their colleagues, the people they used to work with. And many are really struggling and trying to build these new social connections.
17:38:06 - 18:02:19
Susan Latremoille
By bringing like-minded people together or like-stage people together, they often find new friends or people who are going through some of the same aspects of their life journey, whether it be comparing notes on grandchildren or how to rewire themselves, or what kind of consulting they're doing, or even travel or finding meaning at this stage of life.
18:02:19 - 18:06:02
Susan Latremoille
It can lead to some really worthwhile conversations.
18:06:11 - 18:24:15
Lauren Hong
Such good insights. I think we could be here for a while. So, I do want to ask if you have any other final thoughts for folks who are listening or places you think it would be good to go to learn a little bit more. I’d love to hear if I haven't touched on anything you want to make sure you cover.
18:24:24 - 18:46:04
Susan Latremoille
Sure. Well, both my partner and I have written books and published books. My partner Marianne Oehser's book is “Your Happiness Portfolio® for Retirement — It's Not About the Money.” Not that the money isn't critically important but the book is not about the money. And she lays out in the book the essence of building a happiness portfolio for retirement.
18:46:07 - 19:11:28
Susan Latremoille
So we use a portfolio analogy because it's like a portfolio that has different asset classes. So your life portfolio should also have different asset classes. So we break it down into eight areas of life, all non-financial, that are really important for people to plan for their next chapter. And we don't really love the word retirement but there isn't a better word in the English language for it, other than next chapter.
19:12:07 - 19:33:00
Susan Latremoille
And that leads to my book, which is the latest book I've written, which is “9 Steps to a RichLife Retirement — Live Well, Give Back, Leave a Legacy.” And that all came from my richlife philosophy, which actually started many, many years ago when my clients would be so eager to earn that extra half percent on their portfolio.
19:33:00 - 20:01:01
Susan Latremoille
And then I'd ask them the question, well, what's all this money for? There was this disconnect between the money and the purpose of the money. So to me, this whole richlife thinking is that combination, that integration of the wealth to do what you want but also having a purpose for the wealth. So, our books are on Amazon and they are in a sense guides for people and they make great giveaways for advisors.
20:01:01 - 20:23:25
Susan Latremoille
A number of our advisors buy the books and then hand them out to clients. It's a small investment and it resonates well with that demographic. So of course we're on LinkedIn. It's a great way to connect. But also our website is nextchapterlifestyleadvisors.com. And you can always reach me by email, susan@nextchapterlifestyleadvisors.com.
20:24:03 - 20:56:07
Susan Latremoille
So there are a number of ways to interact with us. But we love hearing from financial advisors. And we love hearing from financial advisors who say, I have a client who needs your help because there's nothing better for a client than to help them guide them in the right direction of building that happiness portfolio, which then the meat of that can go back to the financial advisor so they can do a better job doing the financial plan once they know what the life plan of that client entails.
20:56:23 - 21:18:21
Lauren Hong
Yeah, it's a full circle win. Well, Susan, thank you so much for your time and also for the work you do. I love that you've literally walked in the shoes, right? You've been an advisor. And you're also taking that work and then helping to support the advisor community but also other clients of that community as well.
21:18:21 - 21:29:06
Lauren Hong
So thank you for the good work you do. And I'm excited. We'll make sure to link to your book, and website as well. Books, I should say, and website as well. So thank you again for your time today.
21:29:08 - 21:34:24
Susan Latremoille
My pleasure, Lauren.
