Design Your Make-Work-Optional Retirement: Where Financial Planning Meets Life Coaching

Design Your Make-Work-Optional Retirement: Where Financial Planning Meets Life Coaching

Most financial firms will help you figure out if you have enough money to retire, but few will help you figure out what to do once you get there.

At OnePoint BFG, our job is to help clients answer questions around building their financial plan, funding the best accounts, and setting an income strategy. However, for many investors, once the actual retirement date gets circled on a calendar, a different kind of question starts to surface.

What is my day actually going to look like?

Not the spreadsheet version of retirement. The real version. Monday morning. No meetings. No inbox. Nowhere to be.

Most firms stop the conversation right there. We don’t — because we have Marlene.

Meet Marlene: She Helps Us Do Things a Little Differently

Marlene is our in-house, certified life coach. She’s been part of OnePoint BFG for nearly nine years, and her background has nothing to do with finance. She spent decades in the medical field before earning her certification, a path that gave her something a finance background never could: real-life experience navigating different careers, raising kids, and managing change. It’s all given her a perspective that matters when someone is sitting across from you, trying to figure out who they are outside of their job.

As a life coach, Marlene works with everyone inside OnePoint BFG: advisors, staff, and leadership. She believes (and we agree) that our internal team deserves the resources and support they need to feel their best. When our team shows up grounded and present, everyone wins. 

Marlene also works directly with our clients in a confidential capacity at no additional cost. Her role with our clients isn’t simply a perk — it’s a core part of how we think about this work. Our clients are more than just accounts to us. They are whole people,  and whole people need more than a financial plan to navigate life’s different chapters. 

Why Money Alone Doesn’t Create a Great Retirement

The financial plan is the foundation. It’s what supports a make-work-optional retirement in the first place — the point where you’re no longer working because you have to, but because you want to.

Here’s what we’ve seen happen again and again: people can arrive at retirement fully prepared financially but unprepared for everything else.

Why? Because retirement isn’t just a financial transition — it’s a life transition.

When a career ends, what goes with it isn’t just the paycheck. It’s the routine. The sense of purpose. The identity attached to a role for thirty or forty years. The structure that shaped every week without you even realizing it.

Marlene describes it simply: When your routine is off, you feel it immediately. 

Now imagine stepping away from a career you’ve had your entire adult life. The financial plan doesn’t help you rebuild that routine. That’s where retirement lifestyle planning begins.

​​Life Coaching in Retirement Transitions

Marlene works with OnePoint BFG clients at every stage of their financial planning journey. Beyond clients approaching retirement, she also connects with people still in the middle of their careers, trying to sort through the questions that come with major life transitions.

What she sees across those conversations is remarkably consistent. The details vary, but the themes tend to repeat themselves. 

Uncertainty about what’s next. Beliefs about money and success that were shaped years earlier by family, career experiences, and expectations people absorbed along the way. A sense of identity so tied to what they do that it’s hard to separate from who they are.

She sees it play out between couples as well. One spouse may be counting down the days to retirement, while the other quietly wonders what the change will mean for the rhythm of daily life. Those conversations are normal. They just rarely happen with someone who knows how to guide them without taking sides.

Marlene makes it clear that her role is never to tell people what to do. Instead, she asks thoughtful questions, listens carefully, and helps clients clarify what they already know but may not have fully articulated yet.

“Sometimes people just need space to think through their own ideas,” she says. “They may already have a plan. They just need support shaping it.”

Sometimes that conversation happens once. Sometimes it becomes an occasional check-in. There’s no set structure and absolutely no pressure.

“It might just be a few questions,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be complicated.”

At its core, that’s what the conversation is about: helping people reconnect with what matters to them outside of work. She firmly believes that, “Once you understand what you’re passionate about, your purpose will find you.”

The Importance of Intentionality in Retirement

The clients who seem most prepared for retirement aren’t always the ones who sail through it.

We’ve worked with people who had detailed plans, strong portfolios, and a clear retirement date — and still found the first few months disorienting. The structure they’d counted on was gone, and nothing had replaced it yet. We’ve also worked with the opposite: clients who transitioned smoothly because they had already been thinking about it, not just financially, but in terms of how they actually wanted to spend their time.

What separates those two experiences isn’t money. It’s intentionality.

The clients who transition well have usually already thought through what their weeks look like. They’ve had the conversation about what work was actually giving them beyond income — and what they need to replace it with. Purpose. Connection. Rhythm. Something to look forward to.

That’s the conversation Marlene opens up. For many clients, it’s one they haven’t had anywhere else.

Designing Your Ideal Week in Retirement

When Marlene works with clients on retirement lifestyle planning on Long Island, she doesn’t start with a five-year vision. She starts with something much simpler: the next month. She’ll sit with clients asking questions like:

What do you want to do? Do you want to travel? Spend more time with family? Get back into a routine at the gym?

From there, she works backward with clients from the month to the week, and eventually to the day. Sometimes the conversation moves into details people haven’t thought about before. The goal isn’t to schedule every hour. It’s to build a rhythm that actually feels like yours — something you chose, not something dictated by a career.

Some people discover they want more structure than they expected. Others realize they’ve been craving spontaneity for years and never gave themselves permission to have it. Couples sometimes discover they’ve been picturing two very different retirements.

No matter where the conversation leads, it’s always far easier to have it before the transition than after it.