The retirement runway conversation accountants should start

There is a stretch of roughly ten to fifteen years before someone stops working when the decisions they make have the greatest effect on the rest of their life. This is the retirement runway. It is when contribution levels, tax planning, and the shape of future income can still be meaningfully influenced. It is also, unfortunately, when most people do nothing, because retirement still feels far enough away to postpone and close enough to feel daunting.

As an accountant, you can often see a client entering this runway before they have registered it themselves. Their earnings, their age, their business plans and their pension contributions are all in front of you. You are frequently the only professional in a position to say: this is the time to start thinking properly about how you will retire. That single prompt can change the trajectory of a client's later years.

Watch for the combinations that mark this stage:

• A client in their early-to-mid fifties who has never had a formal retirement plan.
• A business owner starting to talk about slowing down or eventually selling.
• Rising profits that could support greater pension funding but are not being used that way.
• Clients unsure how much they will need or where their retirement income will come from.
• Someone with several disconnected pots and no sense of how they add up.

These are not problems for you to solve. They are indicators that a client is at the point where regulated retirement advice would be genuinely valuable, and where starting late costs opportunities that cannot be recovered.

The reason the runway conversation matters is that many of the most useful options narrow as retirement approaches. Contribution capacity, phasing of income, and the flexibility to adjust plans all depend on having time. A client who engages at fifty-two has choices that a client engaging at sixty-four does not. By waiting, people quietly forfeit those choices without ever deciding to.

You cannot advise on any of this, and you should not try. What you can do is recognise the calendar. When you see a client with earning years still ahead but no plan for how they end, the responsible act is to say so and to point them towards proper help while there is still runway to use.

The opening is gentle and entirely within your role. During a year-end review you might say: you are at the stage where how you wind down really starts to matter, and getting a plan in place now gives you far more room than leaving it. This is not something I advise on, but I work with a firm that does exactly this kind of planning.

That framing does three things. It flags the timing, which is your legitimate observation. It stays clear of any regulated advice. And it offers a route to a vetted, regulated advice firm rather than leaving the client to search alone. You remain the trusted introducer who noticed at the right moment.

For owner-managers, the runway conversation is entangled with the future of the business itself. Whether they intend to sell, pass the company on, or gradually extract value, the retirement question and the exit question are the same question viewed from two angles. You are already advising on the business side; the personal retirement side needs a regulated firm.

This makes the introduction especially natural. You can help the owner see that decisions about the business have direct consequences for their retirement, and that both deserve coordinated, professional attention. You handle the accountancy; the regulated retirement planning goes through the referral.

Through SmartPeer, starting the runway conversation and introducing the client is a straightforward commission-only arrangement. You make the introduction; the regulated firm carries out the planning and advice; you receive a share of the fee, typically a 60-70% member share, without advising yourself.

The discipline to build is simple: treat a client's age and earning stage as a prompt. When someone with real earning years left has no retirement plan, that is the moment to speak. Most clients never open this conversation on their own. By opening it for them and directing it to the right firm, you serve them well and are rewarded for the introduction.