When the Plan Outlives the Person It Was Built For
Most families with serious assets in motion assume their planning is comprehensive. Trusts in place. Succession documented. Tax exposure addressed. Advisors aligned.
A new study from the MIT AgeLab and Manulife John Hancock measured how prepared Americans are for the longer lives most of us will now live. The country scored 60 out of 100. A barely passing grade.
The plan still works on paper, but the question is whether the person it was written for is harder to predict than the plan assumed.
A succession plan built when the founder was 60 may need a different shape if that founder remains active at 85. A trust designed to support a surviving spouse for ten years may need different funding if the support window is closer to twenty. A wealth transfer designed to reach the next generation may arrive when that generation is already in their own retirement, with planning needs of their own.
In this month’s blog, we explore where the gaps between the life and the plan tend to open, the diagnostic questions a good plan should now be able to answer, and what the data on cognitive trajectory says about the decision-maker the plan quietly assumes will hold.
At C3 Financial Partners, we help families and their advisors bring clarity to what the plan will actually deliver across a longer horizon, confidence that the structure absorbs the changes it cannot predict, and coordination across every professional responsible for making the plan execute as designed.
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From the Founder: Insights That Matter
Welcome back to From the Founder.
Todd Healy, Founder of C3 Financial Partners, brings over four decades of experience in guiding families and business owners through the complexities of wealth preservation and legacy planning. His reflections offer clarity, confidence, and coordination—the core principles that define our approach. Here’s what Todd has been thinking about lately:
A few years ago, we published a piece at C3 on sleep through the stages of life. I opened it with a quote about how time speeds up as we age. At the time, I treated it as a piece of content. I’m reading it differently now.
A few weeks ago, I sat in on a session at a John Hancock event. The speaker was running through eight characteristics of healthy living. Most of it I had heard before. Then a stat landed that I had not.
At age 85, roughly one in three people will have Alzheimer’s. Nearly half of those cases are potentially preventable. Sleep is one of the biggest levers we have. I wrote it down. Read it twice.
Decades into this work, I have sat across from a lot of clients in their early 60s. Sharp. In control. Married. Looking out twenty years at a horizon that felt comfortably long. The plan reflected the person sitting across the desk that day.
What I have not done often enough is ask whether the person at 62 will be the same person at 82. The structures hold. The trusts function. The succession on paper still maps. But the assumption that the principal will be present, sharp, and decisive at 85, when the named successor turns 60, is doing a lot of quiet work in the plan.
That is the assumption the sleep piece is really about. I just did not know it when we wrote it.
The 2024 Lancet Commission on dementia identified fourteen modifiable risk factors that account for nearly half of all dementia cases. Sleep does not appear by name on the list, but it is woven through several of the factors that do.
A piece I once thought of as a quality-of-life column reads now like a piece about whether the financial plan retains the decision-maker it was built around.
You can read the original piece here.
— Todd Healy
Founder, C3 Financial Partners
You can follow Todd’s ongoing reflections and planning insights on LinkedIn here.
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