And Why Total Wealth Planners Must Think Bigger Than Cashflow Models
For decades, the financial planning profession has trained itself to believe one thing above all else:
“Accuracy is everything.”
The closer a spreadsheet can predict a person’s financial future, the more “professional” the plan is assumed to be.
But here is the uncomfortable truth:
That belief collapses in later life.
Not philosophically.
Empirically.
And if Total Wealth Planners don’t understand this shift, they risk becoming technicians of the wrong problem at exactly the wrong moment in a person’s life.
1. The Late-Life Reality: Precision Stops Being the Primary Driver of a “Good Outcome”
There is now a large and consistent body of evidence across palliative care, gerontology, and end-of-life psychology showing that what determines whether someone experiences a good death — and whether their family experiences a healthy bereavement — is not financial optimisation.
It is:
- Relief from distress and suffering
- Dignity and personal agency
- Meaning and life completion
- Relational peace
- Clear communication of values and wishes
- Care that aligns with the person’s priorities
- Avoidance of unwanted medical escalation
- Psychological and spiritual coherence at the end of life
In other words:
The quality of the death is driven by coherence, not capital efficiency.
Money matters, of course.
But it is not the controlling variable in later-life wellbeing.
2. Why the Profession Clings to Precision (Even When It No Longer Serves)
So why does traditional financial planning still behave as if:
- a 0.4% return difference
- a perfectly smoothed cashflow line
- a marginal tax optimisation
- or a hyper-accurate decumulation glidepath
is the highest good?
Because the profession was built inside a structurally untrustworthy system.
In a system where:
- institutions extract value
- advice is conflicted
- incentives are misaligned
- trust has been eroded
- and clients have been repeatedly harmed
the profession learned to protect itself by clinging to technical defensibility.
Precision became a psychological shield.
“If the numbers are right, I must be right.”
But this is conditioned thinking — not human-centred planning.
It mistakes mechanical correctness for existential relevance.
3. What Actually Breaks People in Later Life (It Isn’t Running Out of Money First)
When people approach the final chapters of life, the primary stressors are not:
- “Will my portfolio beat inflation by 1%?”
- “Is my drawdown strategy perfectly optimised?”
They are:
- “Will I lose my dignity?”
- “Will I be a burden?”
- “Will my family fight when I’m gone?”
- “Will I be over-medicalised against my wishes?”
- “Will my life have made sense?”
- “Will I be remembered well?”
- “Will my final years be calm or chaotic?”
The research is unambiguous:
- Families suffer most when wishes were unclear.
- Patients suffer most when agency is taken from them.
- Grief is most complicated when conflict and regret dominate the end-of-life period.
- Late-life anxiety reduces when people feel prepared, not when they feel optimised.
That preparedness is primarily:
- psychological
- relational
- narrative
- existential
- procedural
Only secondarily financial.
4. This Is Why “Total Wealth” Is Not a Slogan — It’s an Evidence-Based Upgrade
The Total Wealth Planner model exists precisely because:
Most of a person’s wealth is not on a balance sheet.
It walks into the room every day as human capital.
In later life, that human capital expresses itself as:
- emotional resilience
- relational stability
- clarity of values
- peace of mind
- dignity-preserving decisions
- spiritual coherence
- narrative closure
- legacy integrity
These are not “soft extras”.
They are the primary determinants of whether the final years of life feel grounded, meaningful, and humane — or anxious, chaotic, and medicalised.
A technically perfect financial plan layered on top of:
- unresolved family conflict
- identity collapse
- unspoken wishes
- fear of death
- institutional dependency
- and moral injury from a lifetime of extraction
is not a good plan.
It is a polite illusion.
5. The Planning Error: Treating Later Life Like an Extension of Accumulation
One of the biggest mistakes the profession makes is this:
It treats later life as merely “the drawdown phase of the same game.”
But later life is not a financial phase.
It is a developmental phase.
The person’s priorities change:
- from growth → coherence
- from accumulation → integration
- from optimisation → meaning
- from risk-taking → dignity
- from future projection → present-moment quality
- from legacy value → legacy impact
When planners fail to recognise this shift, they continue to push:
- ever more complex modelling
- ever more defensive assumptions
- ever more product scaffolding
…onto a human being who is actually asking:
“How do I live well now, and die well later?”
6. What Total Wealth Planners Must Do Differently
This is where AoLP draws a clean line in the sand.
Later-life planning must be re-architected around four primary domains:
1) Life Arc Coherence
Helping clients integrate their life story, values, regrets, achievements, and lessons into a coherent narrative.
2) Agency Preservation
Advance care planning, proxies, dignity boundaries, and values-based decision thresholds.
3) Relational Peace
Family dialogue facilitation, legacy conversations, conflict reduction, and expectation alignment.
4) Financial Sufficiency (Not Financial Perfection)
Ensuring enough money to support dignity, autonomy, care quality, and freedom from fear — without fetishising numerical precision.
This is not anti-financial planning.
It is post-financial planning.
7. The Empirical Bottom Line
Here is the conclusion the evidence forces us to face:
In later life, increasing financial precision delivers diminishing human returns.
Increasing coherence, agency, and meaning delivers exponential wellbeing returns.
Or more bluntly:
You can die with a perfectly optimised portfolio and still have a bad death.
You can die with a “good enough” financial plan and have a deeply good death.
The difference is not the spreadsheet.
It is the planner’s worldview.
8. Why the Academy of Life Planning Exists
AoLP exists to train a new kind of professional:
Not technicians of extraction.
Not spreadsheet priests.
Not product distribution nodes.
But Total Wealth Planners who:
- understand human development
- respect life-stage psychology
- work with dignity, not fear
- centre agency, not control
- design for coherence, not just compliance
- and measure success in human outcomes, not just financial metrics
The GAME Plan is not a forecasting engine.
It is a life-architecture framework.
And in later life, that distinction becomes not just useful — but morally decisive.
In short,
If your planning still treats money as the master variable in the final chapters of life, you are not doing holistic planning.
You are doing delayed-stage accumulation therapy for a system that no longer deserves that loyalty.
Total Wealth Planning is the future of the profession.
And later-life planning is where that truth becomes impossible to ignore.
Become a Total Wealth Planner
Learn how to design life plans that honour dignity, coherence, and human sovereignty — not just financial projections.
The Academy of Life Planning is the home of the GAME Plan and the GAME Plan Practitioner Accreditation.
Further Reading & Evidence
- Steinhauser KE et al., Factors Considered Important at the End of Life…
- Detering KM et al., The Impact of Advance Care Planning…
- Chochinov HM et al., Dignity Therapy Randomised Controlled Trial
- Brinkman-Stoppelenburg T et al., Advance Care Planning Systematic Review
- Barnsdale G., Do Not Ignore Your Mortality
Academy of Life Planning 