Why This Advisor Tells His Clients 'Retirement Is Obsolete'

“It’s better to live rich than to die rich,” Samuel Johnson, sage 18th century writer and scholar, inferred.

But you can do both, insists Jake Northrup, financial planner and founder of Experience Your Wealth, in an interview with ThinkAdvisor.

He calls the concept of retirement obsolete.

“Retirement is a villain,” the certified financial planner argues.

His strategy is to not wait until retirement to do the things you’ve dreamed of but instead, use some of your income or savings to experience that good stuff while you’re still young.

Saving along the way and not using your long-term investments for as long as you keep working are key, he stresses.

Northrup recommends that his young clients with families — the bulk of his practice — “phase into retirement as opposed to jumping right in the water.

“Our plan is to earn more longer in a way that allows you to work when you want, wherever you want, how you want, doing something you love,” he adds.

The advisor, 30, was named one of InvestmentNews’ 40 under 40 in 2020 and a Young Advisor to Watch by Financial Advisor Magazine in 2021.

He founded Experience Your Wealth in 2019 after five-plus years at Ballentine Partners in Waltham, Massachusetts, where, as a senior wealth advisor, he worked with ultra-high net worth clients.

In the interview, he discusses his current strategies, which include job-income reduction — what he calls “semi-retirement;” taking a pause in saving for retirement and using that money to fund a longed-for passion.

In addition, in this market downturn, he recommends saving for a big trip, say, in a high yield savings account not exposed to the market, while keeping long-term investments in place.

Akin to the FIRE movement but with the emphasis more on “Financial Independence” than “Retire Early,” Northrup’s tack is for younger people to “save for flexibility and optionality in the future so they can make decisions that are aligned with their values.”

His clients are “travel-loving young families who don’t buy into the work-nine-to-five-until- you’re-65 concept” and then abruptly retire, he says.

His firm has 55 clients and ongoing revenues of $350,000.

The peripatetic Northrup has designed his practice so that he himself is able to work from anywhere in the world — and has: Antarctica, Argentina, Greece, Italy, Portugal and most of the United States.

The chartered financial analyst, who graduated with a Bachelor’s of Business Administration in Finance from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has been an adjunct professor at Boston University, where he taught retirement planning and employee benefits for BU’s Financial Planning Certificate Program.

ThinkAdvisor recently interviewed Northrup, who was speaking from his home base in Bristol, Rhode Island. Here are highlights of our conversation:

THINKADVISOR: What’s your message to prospective clients?

JAKE NORTHRUP: In our marketing, we say, “Retirement is a villain.”

Really. In what way?

You don’t want to just save for retirement. You want to experience your life.

We want to help you align your money with your life as soon as possible.

Our plan is to earn income longer — doing it in a way that allows you to work when you want, wherever you want, how you want, doing something you love.

It’s experiencing the life [you wish for] throughout [the years] as opposed to waiting until retirement.

How and why did you come up with this idea?

I realized that I can have much greater impact on someone’s life when they’re making their money as opposed to when they’ve already been paid their money [in retirement].