Eddie and Betty meet their new look
October 11, 2026
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Show Notes
Eddie and Betty's Conversation
Welcome to The American Retirement Advisor. I'm Betty, and Eddie is here with me in the studio today, which, as usual, means I have someone to tease for the next little while.
I walked right into that. Again.
You did. So, today's episode is a little different. We're not talking about Medicare or income plans or tax strategy. We're talking about us. Or rather, a version of us that now lives on brochures, a website, and apparently a library in the Scottsdale office.
Which is a sentence I never expected to say out loud.
Ian Schaeffer, the company's COO, wrote a piece this week explaining what happened, and I think it's worth talking through, because it's not just a rebrand story. There's a real idea underneath it.
There is. And I'll admit, when I first read it, I was a little surprised by the scale of it. About two hundred pages of the website got the new look.
That's a lot.
Homepage, advisor pages, the podcast page, the guides library. All of it. Ivory paper, navy ink, gold frames, classic serif headlines. Matches the brochures their advisors have been handing out in person.
And the thing Ian Schaeffer is careful to point out is that not a single word changed. The content is identical. It's purely the look.
Just dressed for the occasion, is how he puts it. Which I thought was a nice way to say it.
Okay, so here's the part I want to dig into, because there's a design decision in this article that stopped me cold. Real people, meaning the actual advisors and actual clients, they're still photographs. But things, objects, got the pen-and-ink illustration treatment.
Right, so there's a pocket watch. Apparently there's a real photo of a pocket watch sitting on a desk in the Scottsdale office. That became a pen-and-ink drawing. It's now at the top of the homepage.
But if you're an advisor, your face is still your actual face.
Shown like a snapshot tucked into an album, with little gold corners, is how Ian describes it. Real people stay real. That was apparently a deliberate call.
I love that distinction. There's something grounding about it. You're not meeting a cartoon advisor. You're meeting a real person, but the whole world around them has this warm, classic, approachable feel.
Which brings us to the two characters at the center of all of this.
Us. Kind of.
Kind of us. Pen-and-ink us. Ian Schaeffer describes them as looking like they stepped out of a 1950s magazine ad.
Ben Douglas, who creates content for the team, gave them a look. And the details are very specific. Do you want to tell them, or should I?
You go. You clearly want to.
Illustrated Eddie wears a navy suit and a red tie, and, this is my favorite part, one stubborn curl on top of his head.
Extremely accurate, for the record.
And illustrated Betty wears a striped top, a denim jacket, and a bow in her ponytail. She looks adorable, honestly.
She does. Very put-together. More put-together than I am, apparently.
That tracks. So the article describes them as voices who finally got a face. On the podcast, just voices. Now they exist visually.
And I think the reason that matters, the reason Ian Schaeffer spends time on it, is this line he uses: retirement planning is serious. It does not have to feel stiff.
Which is basically the whole philosophy behind the visual approach. A 1950s illustration style feels warm and familiar without feeling childish. It's not a cartoon. It's a considered aesthetic choice.
And if you've ever sat across from a stack of financial paperwork and felt your brain just shut down, that's kind of the problem they're trying to solve before you even open the folder.
Right, first impressions matter. If the first thing you see feels approachable, you might actually keep reading.
Which leads to the guides, which I think are the most interesting part of the whole article.
Tell me about them, because I found the concept almost radical in its simplicity.
So there's a physical library in the Scottsdale office now. And it has these single-page guides. One page each. Topics like long-term care planning, generational wealth strategies, retirement income planning, and something called the BeneficiaryBox program.
One page.
One sheet of paper. And each one is built around an image you'll remember.
The long-term care one is the example Ian walks through in the article, and it's worth slowing down on, because the structure is so clean.
It opens with illustrated Eddie and Betty on a porch swing. The tagline is: a plan for care, before you need it. And then it answers exactly three questions. What does care cost? How do you pay for it? When do benefits begin?
That's it.
That's it. Long-term care is one of the most complicated, emotionally loaded topics in all of retirement planning, and they put it on one page.
And the image carries meaning too. A porch swing. Two people. That's not accidental. That's a picture of what you're trying to protect.
The generational wealth one does the same thing differently. It shows them watering a young tree. And its three ideas, again just three, are: protect it first, pass it on, give with purpose.
A young tree. That's going to stick with people in a way that a bullet-pointed PDF never would.
The point is, it works.
And you can get these if you can't get to the Scottsdale office, right? It's not just a physical thing.
The online version lives on the Guides page of americanretirementadvisors.com. You can download them and keep them.
At no cost to you.
Right, just go find them. The guides page.
Okay, I want to go back to something Ian Schaeffer writes near the end of the article, because it hit me differently than I expected from what started as basically a design announcement.
The part about his father.
Yes. He writes that he grew up watching him sit with families and turn a scary pile of paper into a plan they understood.
And that the best advisors he knows do that every day.
And then he says this, and I want to get it right: a drawing of a man in a suit holding an umbrella over a jar of savings will never replace that conversation. But it might be the thing that gets someone to start it.
That's the whole argument for every illustration, every guide, every brochure, in one sentence.
It's a means to an end. The picture lowers the barrier just enough that someone picks up the phone.
And that's not a small thing. There are people who have been meaning to think about their retirement plan for five years and just haven't started because it feels overwhelming before you even open the door.
If the door looks friendlier, maybe you open it.
That's the bet they're making.
And then there's the line printed in gold italic at the bottom of every brochure. It all starts with a conversation.
Which is both a tagline and also just true.
It is just true. You can read every guide in the library and still need someone to sit with you and look at your specific numbers, your specific situation.
The guide gives you the vocabulary. The advisor gives you the plan.
How are our characters showing up in these articles going forward? Because Ian talks about that too.
So starting this week, illustrated Eddie and Betty show up in them on the site. And the examples he gives are great. If the piece is about income, you might find Eddie napping in a hammock, described as untroubled about where next month's paycheck is coming from.
Ha. Very relatable character for Eddie.
I'm choosing not to respond to that.
And if it's about savings, Betty is filling a jar marked BANK.
And if it's a Medicare choice, Eddie is at a crossroads squinting at signposts.
That image is genuinely one of the most accurate for how that decision feels.
Too many signs. All of them important. All of them slightly confusing.
And that's what I find clever about this whole approach. The illustrations aren't decorative. They're diagnostic. They tell you what the article is about before you read a word.
Ian calls it the same plain-English writing you're used to, now with two friends in the margins who make the hard parts easier to picture.
That's a good way to put it.
It's also where Eddie and Betty are on the podcast page and on the YouTube page, where all of the channels are collected in one place.
So if you've been listening to us for a while and you're curious what these illustrated versions of us look like, go to americanretirementadvisors.com. They're not hard to find.
And if your next meeting is at the Scottsdale office, glance at the library on your way in. That's where we live now.
Physical Eddie and Betty, holding single-page guides.
I mean, not literally. Illustrated on the front of them. But close enough.
Can I just say, the pocket watch detail is what got me. The fact that there's a real pocket watch on a desk in Scottsdale, and someone photographed it, and then someone turned that photo into a pen-and-ink drawing for the top of the homepage. That's a lot of intention for one object.
It's the kind of detail that tells you the whole thing was thought through, not just slapped together.
A pocket watch is also a pretty perfect symbol for a retirement planning firm. Time, right? That's the whole game.
How much of it you have, how you use what's left of it, what you leave behind. Yeah. They picked well.
Okay, so to pull this together: americanretirementadvisors.com has a completely new look that matches the brochures. About two hundred pages. Real people are still photos, objects and characters got illustrated. Eddie and Betty now have faces. The office has a physical library with single-page guides on long-term care, generational wealth, income planning, and more. And those same guides are downloadable on the Guides page.
And if any of those topics open up questions for you, long-term care costs, how benefits work, how to think about passing things on to the next generation, that's a good moment to sit down with one of the advisors. The guides are the beginning of the conversation, not the whole thing.
And the specific questions, like how does the BeneficiaryBox program actually work, or what are the exact mechanics of a particular planning strategy, those are questions for the team. That's what they're there for.
They know the specifics. The guides point you toward the right things to ask. The advisors answer them.
That brochure line really does capture something true, though, doesn't it? I can see why they put it there.
In gold italic, no less.
As it should be. Thanks for listening, everyone. If you want to see what we look like in a 1950s pen-and-ink style, with our stubborn curl and our denim jacket, go take a look at americanretirementadvisors.com. And if something on those pages sparks a question about your own retirement picture, that's what the advisors are there for. Set up a time to talk. That's where the real work happens.