The retirement agency gap is a floor-and-reserve sale

Eighty-four percent of pre-retirees want an active role in their retirement planning and decisions, according to the inaugural Financial Confidence Report from Edelman Financial Engines, and sixty percent of those same respondents cannot say how their retirement savings are invested. Put those two figures side by side and you have the client walking into advisory offices this fall: ready to take the wheel, unable to read the dashboard.

The appetite has its roots in the retirement industry's move from defined benefit to defined contribution plans, which forced most participants to learn to save as independent agents rather than rely on a pension to manage their income. Four decades on, the desire for that role is close to universal while the competence has not kept pace.

Edelman's chief planning officer, Michael Liersch, describes what the appetite sounds like in the room: “People want to understand the investments they're in, the risks they're taking and how that can benefit them, financially speaking,” he said. His prescription for plan advisers and sponsors is to move past the default, enabling participants to be “actively focused and engaged on what's in their plan,” to ask the questions they have, and to get the advice they need — a fair description of an opening, and read from the wealth side, a description of a client who is not yet anyone's relationship.

The stress in the same survey is mostly not about security selection: forty-eight percent of respondents said they felt financially stressed, with the economy in general topping their list of stressors at 52%, ahead of personal finances at 41% and the political climate at 26%, while 74% of plan participants said they were concerned their Social Security benefits would be cut.

Schroders' 2026 U.S. Retirement Survey finds the same nerve from another direction: fifty-two percent of surveyed nonretired Americans were concerned or very concerned about outliving their retirement assets, and among pre-retirees, most were uncertain they could replace 75% of their last paycheck with retirement income, with only 16% saying they would “definitely” be able to. “Planning for retirement isn't just about how much you save—it's about knowing how you'll turn that savings into a reliable income stream,” said Deb Boyden, Schroders' head of U.S. defined contribution.

Hold the two datasets together and a client profile emerges worth naming: she wants control, cannot describe her holdings, worries more about the political climate than the market, doubts the Social Security check, and has no confidence in her replacement ratio. Nothing on that list is a fund-selection problem, and no better menu resolves it; what resolves it is a plan that converts a balance into a paycheck, and as this publication noted earlier this month, most workers know they are short without knowing the target, which is precisely the opening these two reports now size.

Two caveats: survey responses measure stated intent, not behavior, and the 84% who want a hand on the wheel will not all book a meeting; the 60% is also a measure of what no one has ever asked them, since participants who have never been walked through their own allocation answer honestly that they do not know it.

The industry reflex is to turn that finding into a literacy campaign, but that is the wrong read, and an expensive one. A pre-retiree who cannot name the funds in her 401(k) is not asking for a glossary; she is telling you she has no way to turn the balance into income, and the way is what she will pay for. Answering that gap with an education module treats a missing plan as a missing vocabulary.

Edelman's stress data supports the ordering this publication has argued for in the final stage of retirement: the decumulation conversation starts with the reserve fund and the income floor, not the rollover. The stressors respondents named are macro and personal, and nothing in a portfolio rebalance reaches them; a floor does something different, converting an unanswerable worry into a number and a date. Three moves do most of that work — sequencing Social Security claiming, sizing the cash reserve that stands between a drawdown and a spending decision, and setting a target replacement ratio — and none of them requires the client to become an investor.

The 84/60 split is also a cheap segmentation tool: the 84% is the population that will take an income meeting, and the 60% marks the ones who arrive without a plan to defend, which makes the first conversation about their goals rather than a comparison of your report to the incumbent's. For the 16% who are sure they can replace 75% of pay, the work is to confirm that confidence; for the 74% worried about Social Security, it is a claiming analysis run with both spouses' earnings records and survivor benefits on the table.

Liersch's opening for plan advisers and sponsors is real, and it sets up a contest that will run for years, because managed accounts and in-plan income products put the plan squarely into the decumulation conversation while a household's rollover, taxable account, and home sit outside it, suggesting the relationship consolidates on the wealth side for any client with meaningful balances. Plan-side defaults can start the spending conversation, but they are unlikely to finish it.

Both reports landed this month, and both describe a client who is ready to be asked; the practices that book the most new income relationships between now and year-end will be the ones that pull the clients matching that profile, put a claiming analysis and a reserve target in front of them, and set the follow-up before the meeting ends. Edelman's report does not say how many of those clients will get that meeting, but that count is the one advisors control.