The retirement runway: spotting the client who needs advice now

Retirement is not a single date so much as a runway, a stretch of years in the run-up during which the choices a person makes have an outsized effect on how the rest of their life is funded. The frustrating thing about that runway is that it feels comfortably distant right up until it is short. Clients tell themselves there is plenty of time, and then one day there is not.

As a professional close to your client's affairs, you are unusually well placed to notice when someone has entered that window. You are not being asked to plan their retirement; that is the work of a regulated adviser. You are being asked to recognise the client for whom the runway has become real, and to see that this is the moment to introduce a vetted, regulated advice firm while there is still room to act.

The signs that a client has entered the pre-retirement years are usually plain once you know to look. They surface in conversation, in paperwork, and in the shape of a client's plans.

• A client openly talking about winding down, cutting back their hours, or stepping away from a business
• Someone within striking distance of the age they have always pictured stopping
• A business owner with no succession plan and no clear sense of what retirement will actually pay for
• A client whose children have left home and whose outgoings and priorities are visibly shifting
• Someone asking, half-seriously, whether they can afford to stop, without any real basis for the answer

Any of these tells you the runway is no longer theoretical. The client has entered the window in which proper guidance matters most.

Clients approaching retirement often circle the subject long before they confront it. The way they talk gives them away.

• "I'd love to slow down, but I don't know if the numbers work."
• "I keep wondering when I can actually stop."
• "I'll figure out the money side when I get closer."
• "I've no real idea what I'll live on."
• "The plan is to sell up eventually and see where that leaves us."

These are not invitations for you to run the numbers, and you should not try. Working out whether someone can afford to retire, and how their income should be arranged, is regulated advice. What each remark tells you is that a live decision is forming and the client has no one guiding it. That is your cue to refer.

What makes the retirement runway different from many referral moments is that the value of acting early is enormous. Decisions taken with several years of runway left open far more options than the same decisions taken in the final months. A client who is referred in good time can be helped to shape their position; one referred too late is often simply managing what remains. Your ability to spot the window early is therefore not a minor convenience. It is the difference between a client with room to plan and one who has run out of it.

That is why you should never sit on the observation. The temptation to wait for a tidier moment, or to offer a few reassuring words yourself, both cost the client time they cannot get back. Recognise the runway, resist the urge to advise, and make the introduction while the window is still wide.

The strongest introductions happen when the subject is already alive, when a client has just voiced a doubt about whether they can afford to stop, or mentioned a plan to wind down. Naming it there, and suggesting they have someone look at it properly, lands naturally. Left for a future review, the same moment loses its urgency and some of its value.

Through a referral network the mechanics are simple. You introduce the client to a vetted, regulated advice firm, the specialist does the regulated planning, and where that leads to advice the client takes forward, you receive a share of the fee, typically a 60-70% member share. You will not have advised on their retirement at all. You will have done the one thing you were uniquely placed to do, which is to notice that the runway had opened and to hand the client over while it still had room. The professionals who serve their clients best here are the ones who treat the approach of retirement as a trigger to act, not a subject to defer.