Goal Oriented
I only discussed retirement investments with my dad once, and the conversation didn’t take place until he had already decided to retire. He had a pretty good idea about what he wanted to do – he just couldn’t figure out how to accomplish that via the all-too-typically complicated distribution request form. Consequently, at my mother’s instigation, he called in an “interpreter” – in this case, the son with the law degree. It was a complicated discussion. Since hundreds of miles separated us, he had to read the form to me (I suggested faxing, but that was “more trouble than it was worth”; I chose to assume that was a reference to his difficulty with operating the fax machine on his end, and not the quality of advice he was hoping to get from mine). Fortunately, there is something of a boilerplate design to most of these forms and, in reasonably short order, I was able to wrest an English version of his options from the document. Having outlined the options for him, I asked him if he ...