Arena is well aware that baby boomers are juggling their own retirement needs against school expenses of children and living costs of parents. He talked to writer Judith Schoolman about how advisors can help their clients handle all these responsibilities and why cash isn't the best choice.

1. How does an EVP in the retirement division of a financial services company spend his day?
Education is my main job. As a division partner with the financial advisors, we help them think through challenges. We remind the financial planners that "doing nothing" isn't a solution, even if the economic landscape is unpredictable. In fact, it can lead to a most dangerous outcome. We talk about retirement income, not as a number, but as a whole. We segment income needs into two buckets-basic needs, such as mortgage, food and health care; and lifestyle needs, such as vacations. This makes planning easier to grasp.

2. Tell me more about these buckets.
As part the Personal Retirement Manager plan that we've established, we've deconstructed the notion of retirement income. The first bucket is a personal pension account, which offers the certainty of lifetime income. An investor can start at any age, and it pays out monthly. The second bucket is an accumulation, or growth, account that caters to lifestyle needs. Although there's no minimum amount to set up this plan, the average is around $100,000, and a lot of that money comes from IRA rollovers.

3. What are the new retirement challenges for boomers?
We're seeing the impact of uncertainty. In the past, people approaching retirement could calculate income from defined-benefit plans-pensions-or Social Security. And, in fact, most boomers grew up in a time when those two sources of income were enough for retirees to live on. But now, these plans aren't providing the same level of income. The challenge is to make sure you don't outlive your assets. In addition, many boomer investors still have children and even parents to take care of. So, with the demise of most defined-contribution plans, it's harder to juggle all those responsibilities. So the role of the financial advisor has become even more important and expansive. He or she is both a money person and an educator.

4. For clients who want to fund their children's college education, what's your best advice?
A terrific way to save for educational costs is to invest in 529 plans, which offer tax benefits and are advantageous in other ways. Because the 529 plans are singularly focused on socking away funds for education, money from retirement plans, for instance, doesn't get taken from it and used for another purpose, and vice versa.

5. Given all that's happening now, how do you convince boomers to invest?
Seven out of 10 people in a recent survey we did believe it is very important to have a stable, guaranteed income during retirement. Of course, many people sank their retirement income into stocks, and look what happened to their portfolios. We can't afford to be wrong again. With that in mind, we have to focus on covering basic income needs. People shouldn't take a lot of risk to meet their retirement goals, so setting up such a fund that is placed in the general account of an insurance company is a fine idea. If the client is putting money aside for other stuff, there can be some risk, as much or as little as a client can stand. By not investing money, by keeping it in a cash account, for example, it's a risk, because interest rates are practically zero, and that doesn't keep up with inflation and rising healthcare costs.