Adam Storbakken Asks: Enough for What, Exactly?

For anyone about five years from retirement who has done the saving part well and is starting to wonder what the number is actually for.

The client came in with a magic number: one million dollars. “In her mind, that figure was the finish line,” her advisor says, “reach it and a fruitful retirement was guaranteed.”

Plenty of people carry a figure like hers. Northwestern Mutual’s 2026 Planning & Progress Study found that Americans believe they will need $1.46 million to retire comfortably.

Her advisor was Adam Storbakken, a financial advisor and the founder of HRZN Wealth Management in Plymouth, Minnesota, and he had the conversation he has with most clients chasing a number: what is retirement actually going to cost you? Once they mapped her real expenses against her balance, he says, the plan changed on both ends. They adjusted her portfolio’s risk tolerance to better match what she’d need it to do. And it became clear she’d want to work part-time for a few years after retiring, “not out of necessity, but because she genuinely loved the work and hadn’t considered that walking away from it entirely wasn’t required just because she’d hit her number.”

That is the work: financial planning that starts from whether a client’s resources match the life they want to live, with the portfolio as one piece of it.

“The number tells you when you can stop. The life tells you what you actually want to do next, and sometimes that includes not stopping at all.”

Adam Storbakken, NSSA®, Financial Advisor / Founder, HRZN Wealth Management

Leader in Spotlight: Read Adam Dowd Feature in Executives Diary

The Question With a Number Attached

“Most people walk in asking ‘do I have enough,’ because that’s the question that’s easy to measure,” Adam says. “It has a number attached, and a number feels like an answer.” The harder question, in his words, is “enough for what exactly,” and it “doesn’t get asked until someone forces it.”

He describes a second client, who came in locked onto age 65. “That was the plan, work until 65, retire, done.” But 65 wasn’t a target the client had arrived at, Adam says. It was “the default everyone reaches for because it’s familiar, not because anyone checked it against his life.”

The default is a common one. In the 2026 Retirement Confidence Survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute and Greenwald Research, workers gave a median expected retirement age of 65, while retirees reported a median retirement age of 62.

When Adam and his client looked at what the client wanted retirement to cost, “what his lifestyle would run him month to month and not just what his balance would say on paper,” the age stopped being fixed. It became a range, with a full stop and a partial-retirement option both on the table, and the client chose the one that fit the life he wanted. “The real question wasn’t ‘can I retire at 65,’” Adam says, “it was ‘what does retirement actually cost me, and does that change what age even makes sense.’”

“That’s usually the moment the planning conversation actually starts,” he says, “not when we’ve hit a number, but when the number gets tied to something real.”

Getting to something real is what his first meeting is for.

The First Meeting Isn’t About Decisions

When someone tells Adam they want to retire in five years, he doesn’t start with strategy. “The first meeting isn’t about making decisions,” he says, “it’s about learning about them before we talk about recommendations.” He wants to know what their week looks like now, what they picture it looking like later, who’s depending on them, and what they’re worried about “that has nothing to do with money.”

“Strategy is easy once I understand what it’s actually in service of. Get that backwards, lead with the plan before you understand the life, and you end up solving for the wrong problem, even if the math is right.”

Adam, Financial Advisor / Founder, HRZN Wealth Management

The meeting runs both ways. On LinkedIn he has written that it’s “an opportunity for both of us to determine whether we’re a good fit to work together.”

What follows that conversation is wider than investments. A well-rounded plan, he has written, can involve “protecting against risk, preparing for future tax considerations, planning for loved ones, supporting charitable goals, and helping align financial decisions with what matters most to you.” The investments may be important, he wrote, “but they’re just one piece of the puzzle.” The tax line in that list comes from where he started.

Spreadsheets First, Then People

“My career started with spreadsheets, my passion started with people, and for a while those felt like two different things,” Adam says. He graduated summa cum laude from Rasmussen University with a Bachelor of Science in Business, and he worked as an accountant before he became a financial advisor.

“As an accountant, I was looking at the aftermath of decisions,” he says, “the return that showed exactly what a choice had cost or saved someone, months after the choice was already made.” What he found himself missing was “the human connection, the chance to be in the room before the decision instead of just reconciling it afterward.”

Before starting HRZN he worked in banking, as a Relationship Manager at Bank of America. His father, he says, “worked a long tenure on the railroad and always told me to work with my brain and not my back.”

The accounting still shapes how he works. “Someone who came up through the books notices things in a client’s situation that someone who started straight into advice can miss,” he says, “the tax consequence sitting quietly inside a decision that looks unrelated to taxes, the way a plan that looks clean on paper creates a mess two years later at filing time. I’d rather catch that before it happens than explain it after.” He calls himself the “check, check and recheck guy.”

He tells one story about a plan that was tested.

When a Client Wanted to Sell Everything

“When a client wanted to sell everything during a sharp downturn,” Adam says, “I walked her back through why the plan was built the way it was instead of reacting to the market with her, and she stayed the course.”

“Numbers matter. Trust matters more.”

Adam, Financial Advisor / Founder, HRZN Wealth Management

That line opens one of his LinkedIn posts. “Financial planning is personal,” he wrote in it. “It involves goals, concerns, family, and some of life’s biggest decisions.” He wants clients to know they can reach out with questions, share what’s on their mind, “and feel confident that I’ll listen.” The strongest client relationships, he wrote, “aren’t built in a single meeting. They’re built over time through trust, communication, and reliability.”

He has also written about when that time is best spent.

Five Years Out

“Retirement looks a lot different when it’s five years away instead of twenty-five,” Adam has written. As retirement gets closer, the questions start to change, and he lists three: “How will my income be structured? When should I start Social Security? What should I know about Medicare?” He holds the National Social Security Advisor designation, the NSSA® after his name.

“Five years may sound like a long time,” he wrote, “but it’s often the perfect window to start preparing for the transition.” It’s also the reader he had in mind for this piece: “someone about five years out from retirement who has done the saving part well and is starting to realize that ‘how much’ isn’t the same question as ‘what now.’”

Where Adam Is Now

Adam started HRZN Wealth Management in July 2026 and works from Plymouth, Minnesota. Asked what comes next, he says: “Building HRZN into a firm that keeps growing while staying focused on the same thing that got me here: helping people get to what they’re actually working toward.”

He’d like to hear from two kinds of people. The first is “the kind of client who wants full planning, not just portfolio management.” The second is the professionals he relies on for referrals, “CPAs and estate attorneys who need to trust that I’ll do right by a client before they’ll send one my way.”

“Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with my family, attending sporting events, volunteering in my community and lawncare,” he says. As he puts it on his profile, free time goes to his wife, two kids and dog. The lawn care has had a LinkedIn post of its own, where he describes himself as “the kind of person who takes soil samples, studies grass health, and built a lawn striping kit to get those perfect lines in the yard.” What he enjoys, he wrote, is that the results come from paying attention to the details: “Small adjustments made consistently over time can create something you’re proud of. Come to think of it, that’s not all that different from financial planning.”

He ended a recent post about retirement age with a question for his readers, and it’s a fair place to leave this piece: “If you could retire tomorrow, how would you spend your time?”

Five Reflections from Adam

Enough for what, exactly? A number feels like an answer, and the harder question is what the number is for.

What will retirement actually cost you? Look at what your lifestyle runs month to month, not only at what the balance says on paper.

Is your retirement age a target or a default? Once expenses sit beside the balance, a fixed age can become a range.

Does stopping have to mean stopping entirely? Working part-time after retiring can be a choice rather than a shortfall.

What is sitting quietly inside the decision? A tax consequence can hide in a choice that looks unrelated to taxes, and it’s better caught before it happens than explained after.

From the Diary of Adam Storbakken, NSSA®

Adam Storbakken, NSSA®, is a Plymouth, Minnesota-based financial advisor and the founder of HRZN Wealth Management.

“The number tells you when you can stop. The life tells you what you actually want to do next.”

Editor’s Note

Executives Diary chose Adam Storbakken because he makes one case and shows it with clients: a retirement number means something once it is tied to what a life costs. Two clients in his answers, one fixed on a million dollars and one on age 65, each left with more options than they arrived with. He reads a plan with an accountant’s eye for the tax consequence inside a decision. The piece is for readers about five years from retirement, and for the CPAs and estate attorneys who advise them.

Executives Diary, Editorial