Episode 130:

How to Manage the Financial and Emotional Reality of Aging Parents

Keith: Welcome to the Empowered Investor Podcast, brought to you by the advisory team at Tulett, Matthews and Associates. Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the number of voices telling you how to plan or invest for your future? We’re here to help you cut through the noise, bringing clarity to your investment decisions and helping you build lasting financial peace of mind. Learn more and subscribe today at tma-invest.com. Welcome to the Empowered Investor. My name is Keith Matthews, and today I’m joined by my co host, Marcelo Taboada. Marcelo, how are you today?

Marcelo: Keith? I’m doing good. I am very excited about today’s episode. As I was telling you off Mike, I’ve done a lot of interviews for the Empowered Investor Podcast, but this is a subject that I’m becoming very passionate about because I see the real impact we can have on clients if we address it early. Wow.

Keith: Great intro. So what’s the topic and who’s the guest?

Marcelo: Okay, so we have Beth Pinsker. She’s a CFP professional and a journalist in the United States. She writes for MarketWatch, and she wrote a book about financial caregiving for elderly parents. So the book is called My Mother’s A Guide to Financial Caregiving. Wow.

Keith: Okay, so first of all, MarketWatch, that’s a great website. That’s a very reputable website. I know after you had the conversation with Beth, you were super excited. You said, wow, Keith, there’s so much great information here for our clients and listeners. What are the kinds of things that Beth talks about in today’s show?

Marcelo: So don’t be mistaken by the title a lot because it’s, yes, it’s about financial caregiving, but it also, like, Beth also does a great job talking about the emotional cost, the time cost of taking care of an elder parent, how to talk to your family about it, how to deal with family dynamics, like, you know, your brother, your sister, how to deal with all that, how to start the conversations with your parents.

Keith: Yeah, I agree with you 100%. So what we have in our world is we have clients that are currently, you know, 50, 55, 60, 65. They’re having to manage and work with and take care of aging parents. And that could be somebody in their early 80s. It could be somebody in their early 90s. Nonetheless, there’s issues that need to be worked through. And I think that what you’re talking about is Beth has created content that can help anybody who’s dealing with aging parents.

Marcelo: Anybody.

Keith: And now I’m assuming you cover conversations around bank accounts, investment accounts, how do you sell a house? How do you deal with financial affairs for anybody who’s aging? Is that a fair assessment?

Marcelo: Goes as far as she even gives you how to deal with somebody’s phone when they die. So, for example, you can set yourself as a backup in your dad’s phone, for example, so when he passes, you’re able to access that phone. So it gives you so many useful tips that you don’t think about. You know, it’s easy to think about the big picture stuff like the house, the big accounts. It’s hard to think about the passwords, how am I going to access the computer and what gets paid through online banking and paper. Like, it’s good.

Keith: Yeah. And I know you were so enthusiastic when you finished the discussion with Beth. I’m excited to hear today’s episode. Marcelo. For our listeners, we have five complimentary copies of My Mother’s Money by Beth Pinsker. Please just email me at keith@tma-invest.com and we will be really happy to send you a complimentary copy.

Marcelo: Enjoy the episode.

Keith: So thank you very much for tuning in. Thank you, Beth. Thank you, Marcelo. Have a great episode.

Marcelo: Beth, thank you so much for joining me today.

Beth: Thank you for having me.

Marcelo: So, look, I’m gonna give you some praise. I read the book. I adore this type of book, by the way. Like, they are so interesting to me. It is my job also to read about this because we take care of people’s money. It’s a huge privilege but what I really loved about the book is it is very personal, it is very, very articulate. I love the fact that you consulted different professionals in the different chapters and the different issues you were discussing in the book. And I think what I love the most, and I will use this with a lot of my clients, is all the checklists and conversations you have at the end of the book. I found that’s genius anyways, so let me just start there. Why did you write the book and why did you feel like this was something that needed to be shared?

Beth: Well, I wrote the book because that list at the back of the book, the resources and all the things you need for family members so often sits unfilled on the desks of people. People, financial planners, estate planners, they hand you this binder. People sell them at the bookshop. You can buy a next of kin box, you can buy a folder system, you can buy all these systems to organize yourself. And what happens is nobody ever fills out the information.

Marcelo: First of all, I think it’s very brave what you did because you had to share a lot of personal things in the book. To me, it was beautiful. Like the relationship you had with your mom, it came from a place of love, right? And even if it’s very like, hard. And the other thing that was striking to me, I’m sitting there reading the book and saying, man, like, she’s a CFP. She works in the field. Like, if this is hard for her. Like, imagine for, like, the average person who doesn’t have a financial background. Like, it is incredibly hard.

Beth: All this paperwork stuff. It’s really tedious. But the work you do on the front end is so much easier than the work you have to do on the back end. If somebody just takes care of this for you, it’s just so much easier.

Marcelo: I cannot tell you how many people we see through the door here. And they don’t have a will, they don’t have an estate plan, and a lot of them have assets. Yes, but even, like, even if you don’t have a lot of assets, some of them have, like, three, four kids. And it’s just like a disaster waiting, right?

Beth: Yeah, it totally is. And I’ve talked to people who have negative bank balances. I talk about cleaning up your mess. Like, when you die, no matter what you have, somebody has to, you know, close the door and turn out the lights, you know, as you leave. Right. You can’t do these things for yourself because you’re not dead yet. You cannot file your last tax return for yourself. You cannot close down your electric bill, you know, before you die. Like, there are some things you can’t do for yourself, and somebody has to pick up the ball and finish the job. And so who’s that person going to be and how hard are you going to make it for them?

Marcelo: Yeah. And then the problem is in Canada, here, I don’t know if you can relate to this, but. Because I do follow the news in the US But I guess it’s not as accentuated as it is in Canada. But right now, in Canada, the two biggest financial planning worries. And, you know, people can debate me on this. I’m happy to take the debate, but how can I help my kids with real estate and who’s going to take care of me when I’m older and how will I pay for all this stuff? Right.

Beth: I guess, yeah. So it starts with making sure that somebody has access to your financial life and knows enough about it that they could follow your roadmap to it. So that in the US I don’t know if this is the same in Canada, that starts at the age of 18 and it starts just with a general realization that we are all single legal entities as adults. And, and you know, I tried to make a doctor’s appointment for my 19 year old while he was away at school. I’m like, oh, I better call the doctor and schedule something for when he comes home on spring break. And they said, oh, how old is your child? I said 19. They’re like, oh no, you know, you need a healthcare proxy or he calls himself. I’m like, this is the child I’ve made plans for his entire life. He, you know, I don’t even know if he knows how to call a doctor. He would probably argue with me right now if he were home.

Marcelo: Yeah. Because then they can flag the account and freeze it.

Beth: Right, exactly. You know, there are people, banks and brokerage houses are very concerned about fraud, and elders are very susceptible to fraud and manipulation.

Marcelo: Yeah.

Beth: And they can even. They have sophisticated technology now to even assess the phone call. If there’s somebody whispering in the background, you can get your mom on the phone and tell her what to say. Right. But if they hear you whispering in the background, like asking for the beneficiary form, they’re going to flag it. Right. And so you can’t pretend anymore. You need these legal permissions.

Marcelo: Yeah.

Beth: You have all the time in the world.

Marcelo: Right?

Beth: Right. So if you go to probate and money’s not an object, you know, it’s just time. You know, the person’s gone, and you’ll just. It’ll sort itself out eventually. But if somebody’s sick and you can’t pay their mortgage, their house is going to go into foreclosure. You know, their bills aren’t going to get paid, they’re going to lose their insurance accounts. You know, the rest of the family’s not going to be able to eat. Bad things are going to happen if you can’t access that information.

Marcelo: I love that. By the way, like in the book, do you have the steps of how to do it on the iPhone and the Android, how to set up a legacy person?

Beth: Yeah, legacy. They call it a legacy. It is basically a beneficiary for the phone. Because I have heard from so many people who have been locked out of their loved ones phones, and you’re basically locked out of their life. It’s not just a nostalgia item. It’s not just like the photos that are in there. You need to phone. Everything’s in there.

Marcelo: Well, you probably need your phone. You need access to all their passwords, their computer. Computer. Like on top of all the bank accounts and the legal stuff. Right.

Beth: So a lot of people will tell me, oh, it’s okay. I have my mom’s password. That is not good enough. My mom didn’t even know she had a password, you know, to her phone. Like, my kids change their passwords all the time on purpose, but my mom would change stuff without even knowing. And my mom was great. She thought she was so on top of things. And she was a really good, super competent human being. And so when I would ask her, like, okay, I need to pay your electric bill and I need to get into the account, where’s the password? And she’s like, oh, I keep a book with all of my passwords. Well, I get to the book and open, you know, it’s like an old check register, you know, with all like AT&T, and there’s scribbles. I don’t know if it made sense to her or not or if she was just a little bit further gone than we thought she was. But it literally was undecipherable. And so it was unhelpful to me. She thought she was writing everything down and she clearly wasn’t. Yeah, these practicalities get people tripped up.

Marcelo: I love the fact that you. What you just said, not about the estate planning and how you frame it. Right. Because when somebody dies, you’re absolutely right. You can pay somebody for that problem to go away. You can hire an estate company to settle the estate and fix all this stuff.

Beth: Yeah. In the US there was just a big data from the estate planning industry survey from Trust and Will, which I think also operates in Canada. And 26% of people had a will, only 11% had the power of attorney documents.

Marcelo: Yeah, well, you see people all the time that walk with a will and they don’t have a power of attorney and a mandate. We suggest that people get all three done at the same time. Because if this is a matter of saving $500, like, come on, like, that’s not an excuse, right?

Beth: It’s not. Because going to court in the US costs $20,000 and a year of your life. We look at celebrity cases. You know, if you follow the case of Jay Leno, this is in practical terms what happens. Jay Leno is 74, his wife is 72, she has dementia. They never got a power of attorney done. He wanted to create a trust structure to take care of her in case he would predecease her. Right. He’s a 74 year old, overweight, you know, man. Right. Like there’s a chance that he could go before her.

Marcelo: Yeah.

Beth: So he wanted to set up these things, but he didn’t have the power of attorney. She was too far gone in dementia to sign the papers. So he had to go to court to get guardianship over her, to set up a trust to protect her. And it’s all public because that’s how the guardianship process works. But this is a very common scenario that happens in families. You know, you get to it too late. And I’m saying that the age to get to it is 18.

Marcelo: Correct.

Beth: Not to go down to the bank. All the financial institutions these days want you to show up in person with the person, you know, with the two people. Like, I need to show up with my mom. We never did that. So by the time I went to take the papers in, my mom was in the hospital completely incapacitated. She couldn’t walk after her surgery. And I go to the bank and I say, I want to be. Here’s my power of attorney documents. And they said, no, you need a court order. And I said, no, I don’t need a court order. These are properly executed by a lawyer and notarized. This is all I need.

Marcelo: You know your stuff, right?

Beth: I know my stuff. And they said no. And they said, she has to come down here herself. And I said, well, obviously she can’t do that. Can I show you a picture of her in the hospital? And they knew her. It was her local branch. Like she had been there a thousand times. Still, the answer was no. And so I said, can I get her on the phone? Can we send a notary to the bedside? You know, what are the solutions here? There was no other solution. So I stood my ground and I said, you’re going to have to find a way to accept these documents. And in my book, I interviewed a lawyer who actually had to sue a bank.

Marcelo: Yeah.

Beth: To get the documents enforced because they said no to her. And she said, you can’t say no to me. You know, you have to. It’s. It’s a state law.

Marcelo: Right.

Beth: And they said no. She said, well, I’m going to sue you. They said, good luck with that. And she did. And she won.

Marcelo: Yeah.

Beth: Families have. You have to get through the red tape like you have no other choice as a customer, as a human being who needs this stuff done. But the caveat to this is, you have to be right. You have to have the documents.

Marcelo: Yes.

Beth: And they have to be correct documents. Now, my parents have moved a whole bunch of times. They’re very specific to your location. Like, you in your province need two documents. In another province, if you have moved from another province, your documents might be old, you might not have the right ones any longer than five years. And these things go stale because laws change.

Marcelo: Yeah, we advocate here, and you’re exactly right. Those documents have to be tight. They have to be reviewed every year. Every two years, you know, fair. Because what happens is one person dies and the other one, you know, stays, goes on. And they were each other’s beneficiaries and executors. And then maybe the backups are not even relevant anymore. Or a kid.

Beth: Yeah. I don’t understand people who fight over who gets to be the executor. It’s not who gets them exactly. It’s like who gets the headaches and the work and everybody nitpicking them and. Yeah, no, it is not at all fun to do any of that stuff.

Marcelo: No, no. But let me ask you something here. The family dynamics are real, but I mean, you live through this. You have a brother. How can families deal with this? Because here’s what tends to happen, right. And please correct me if I’m wrong. First of all, it tends to be disproportionate to women.

Beth: Right.

Marcelo: Like women end up taking most of the burden. It has an emotional cost, it has a financial cost that you don’t describe in the book. I mean, some of the statistics that you listed in the book were so scary on page 31. I’m not going to go through them. I’ll encourage people to buy the book. But how can people deal with the inequalities that happen from caregiving? How can families deal with this?

Beth: I’m doing a follow up story because so many people asked me this question. It seems like the most common family dynamic is there’s one kid who does everything and the other one swoops in at some point to tell them they’re doing everything wrong. That seems to be the most common dynamic. And all anybody wants to know from me is like, this is great. I need to know all this information. I need to do all this stuff. What do I do about my sibling who’s a jerk? And I use the term jerk because it could mean anything. They could be a narcissist, they could be a drug addict. Whatever it is, somebody is causing trouble. And the more siblings you have, the more chance there is for trouble or just the more disparity there is between incomes and situation in life. And whatever it is.

Marcelo: I want to do 100%. I feel like all the family issues and traumas tend to come out in this situation, which is very sad.

Beth: So the solution is you have to cut that person in. Like, you have to reach them, including them. Like, don’t have family texts without that person included. Like, don’t make decisions without consulting them. Don’t do things behind their back. Be upfront about everything. If you are an executor or power of attorney, these are fiduciary roles, correct?

Marcelo: Correct.

Beth: You have to work in the best interest of the person you’re representing. And you have to understand, like, you know, when I equate it because I’m divorced. When you are divorcing and you have children, you may hate your toxic ex with the fire of a thousand suns, but you’re still the parent of your child and you oftentimes cannot. You just have to learn some way to deal with it. When you are dealing with a toxic or troublesome sibling, they are still the child of the parent that you’re taking care of. Yes. There is no way to just completely cut them out of that relationship because your parents, you know, for good or bad or whatever, they still love both their children or all of their children. And so you’re kind of stuck with your siblings.

Marcelo: Nice.

Beth: It’s a great task. I’m in charge of settling the entire estate. He is in charge of the family photos. It’s been three years. And anytime he asks me about how am I doing on this, that or the other task, I say, great, how are you doing on the photos? And the conversation ends because he doesn’t want to admit that he hasn’t digitized

Marcelo: any of the photos. Right, right, right, right. Well, you know what? Some of the best cases, to give you some background, we have a lot of clients here who have very successful careers, retired, and now they’re in that age that they have to start thinking about legacy planning and estate planning, obviously. But the situations I’ve seen that work the best from my experience is where, because, you know, life happens, Right. You’re going to have inequality. Some kids did better in life, some kids did worse, but not at the same level as the other ones economically.

Beth: Yeah. And you know, the only solution to a sibling conflict is court, which you don’t want the parent. There’s no other entity that can override, you know, a sibling fight. Mom and dad can. But if mom and dad are incapacitated or have died, then nobody can settle the dispute between siblings except a judge or, you know, if they’re sent to the media. But, like, that’s the only route you have to go. So short of that, you guys got to work it out.

Marcelo: Yeah.

Beth: You know, it’s like mom and dad would say, go over there and talk it out. You know, hug it out, dance it out, whatever you got to do. Because there’s no other way but court. And the court is terrible.

Marcelo: Oh, yeah. Like you can say goodbye to the family legacy from that point.

Beth: Right, Exactly. And I would say that money is the easiest money can be. Parse down to the last penny and split. What’s hard are things that are unique, that there’s only one of. This is where houses become problems because that’s the biggest, you know, asset that you have to split. But it’s hard to split a house.

Marcelo: Right.

Beth: And then you get down to, you know, people fight over spoons, people fight over couches. You know, like, people fight over things that there’s only one of, and they’re just not rational or mature about it.

Marcelo: Yeah.

Beth: Well, I think that you have to be more realistic about time frames because, you know, most financial planning calculators and most financial planners are taught to use those calculators in the sense of a long time horizon, an unknown long time horizon. Like we, you know, so you start planning for retirement and it’s 30, 40 years. We are not very good at, at like, a short, acute time period. When my mom got sick, we didn’t know what the outcome was going to be, and we had to figure out, she’s got, you know, X amount of dollars we’re spending, you know, X amount now it was about $15,000 a month.

Marcelo: That’s crazy.

Beth: You know, it’s only going to go up from there. You know, what are our choices and how long is what she is going to last? And what are our choices when that money runs out and how do we access it and in what order do we access it? You know, these are all questions that I found financial professionals very untrained to answer because we are better at optimizing situations rather than unoptimizing them. For instance, you know, my mom was dealing with, you know, a representative at an annuity company.

Marcelo: Right. You talk about that in the book. Yeah.

Beth: And I needed money in August, and she wasn’t to get money in December and there were contract restrictions for a five year surrender period that would have made her money worth less if we accessed it before October.

Marcelo: Right.

Beth: But I needed the money in August and I knew I, you know, like this is my job. I know I need the money in August and if I don’t get it from my mom’s new annuity, I have to pay it out of my pocket. It was a large sum of money. We were probably going to be spending $20,000 a month by then. So I was going to need 60, 70, $80,000.

Marcelo: And mind you, this 15, $20,000 is after tax dollars that you need.

Beth: Yeah.

Marcelo: So you need to be mindful about that. Right?

Beth: Yeah, exactly. So I needed to break into this money and the advisor was telling me, you know, it’s not a good idea. I’m like, well duh, I know it’s

Beth: not a good idea, but I need the money today.

Beth: But as her representative, as power of attorney, he was, you know, not sure what the best interest of the client was. Right. In theory, it’s not in her best interest to break into money and use it and pay a fee to use it the same way, you know, you wouldn’t want to pay extra taxes on something, you know, you want to do things smartly. And I said, she’s got a very short amount of time to live. We need her money now. And then what happened is, you know, I was planning for August in June and she died in July. Life has its way of doing whatever life does and changes your plans. But if she had lived longer, you know, I would have been like, no, we need this money now.

Marcelo: Right.

Beth: I was supposed to take 90,000 for her RMD in December and I need it in August instead. And I need double the amount that she usually takes.

Marcelo: I think people underestimate the cost of health care. In Canada. We have, I mean in the US I learned a lot in your book by the way, from how this, it is so complicated. It is insane how complicated it is in the US to navigate Medicaid, Medicare, and long term insurances. So in Canada we have, as you know, we have single payer health care.

Beth: It is. It’s a weird feeling. Self dealing is strange. Right. Like third parties probably should be making all these decisions and helping, you know, it would be helpful in that sense. But I think what it comes down to is, you know, if you are the person who ends up making the decisions about how the money is spent, really take that fiduciary responsibility seriously. And this is where a lot of sibling relationships go south.

Marcelo: Yeah.

Beth: Because if you are the one making that decision and you have a sibling who is worried about that money dwindling, sometimes it’s because they are worried about what their inheritance is going to be. A lot of times it’s because, you know, like my mom’s situation with her parents, the money dwindled and then she and her brother had to kick in.

Marcelo: Yeah.

Beth: You know, so like, you know, you’re like, okay, if I spend all this money on my parents and it goes to zero, then I am on the hook for paying for it. In the US you’re not on the hook, legally speaking. But you guys have the same issue that we have. Is that a system that caps your payment or whatever, the government payment is a third of what private pay is and you get a third of the value. Yeah.

Marcelo: I mean, to me, like my wife’s grandmother ended up in a public institution and it was such a wake up call and a painful thing to go through because the, the, for me, I can have the stark comparison because I had that experience and I go visit clients in residences. Right. And I see the level of care you get when you have private care. Now the public system, three times more.

Beth: But it’s three times better.

Marcelo: Correct, Correct. So it’s just a tough one. I think what worries me the most is how I need to be very careful here. But I think people have a lack of understanding of how complicated it gets once you get to that stage. So I think it’s good that people have this view that, you know, you have to have a positive view of life. But it’s also like it’s almost negligent not to think about what all the implications are. I think in Canada we’re going to have a bigger problem. Like I’m seeing it more and more with clients now and it’s going to get worse.

Beth: Yeah. The more common dynamic I hear about and the more common mental dynamic that I hear about psychology is people don’t want to go in either the private or the public.

Marcelo: They want to age at home. Right.

Beth: They want to age at home or they want to, you know, move in with their children and age in their homes. And it’s just not feasible sometimes. And if you have had a parent who says I don’t ever want to be in one of those places and you get, you know, 10 years into a dementia diagnosis and you have to consider memory care because of work, because being at home is just not feasible. It is really, really just crushing psychologically to go against your parents wishes in that sense. But it is entirely the appropriate thing to do medically and for their safety. And so it’s this push pull constantly of what’s the right thing to do, what’s the responsible thing to do with the money. You know, like you really have to balance a lot of things and it’s just really hard.

Marcelo: Right, that’s such a great point. But you had that open line of communication which is what often is lacking. So the other thing that I’m seeing is, you know, I tend to do this with, we’re onboarding people here with discovery meetings. I always ask people like, who are 35, 40, 45. You know, tell me about your parents. Like, are we in a situation where you’re going to have to help them? Because that’s a very different financial plan, as if you’re going to get an inheritance down the line. So I think that conversation, the sooner it starts, the better it is.

Beth: Absolutely, yes. And my daughter has now promised me that if I need help in my later years, she’ll be there for me.

Marcelo: So you must have a very solid estate plan or caregiving plan. Right. Because you’ve, you’ve gone through all this.

Beth: Well, it just, it came along with her realizing how expensive college was going to be and she’s like, okay, I see the trade off now. You’re going to help me with all of this and I’m going to help you down the line. Yeah, that’s how it works in families.

Marcelo: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard now, right, because you start seeing, you know, we’re living longer. Right. It’s a great thing. A lot of times people have talked about this, right, A health span. It doesn’t mean, like, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be good. No, I think I’m mixing this up. I think lifespan doesn’t mean health span. So like, you can live a long time, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to be healthy. And that has massive financial implications. But just another question, on the financial planning side, if you were like in your 40s, 45s, and you have parents that are going down that path, what’s the one thing that you would recommend to them to do on the financial planning side?

Beth: I would recommend that they look at their big expenses first, their housing, and maybe they need to downsize earlier than they thought they were going to. And maybe look at one of, you know, the kind of care communities that progress with you as you age. Maybe a shift to one of those. If you sell the house you’re in and move into one of those communities, you know, it’s a big buy-in usually, but then you don’t have to worry about those housing decisions and what you’re going to do down the line. And when care needs come around, you already have a slot and it’s already kind of taken care of in the payment.

Marcelo: The housing decision is such a tough one, I find in my experience, I’m sure, I don’t know for you it’s the same experience, but people have a very hard time, you know, downsizing or just selling their primary residence, not only because it’s I think it’s the emotional side. Right. Like all the memories are there. It’s a place of gathering for the family. But yeah, change is just hard the older you get.

Beth: Yeah. I wrote a piece the other day about my own retirement plans.

Marcelo: Right. Congratulations, by the way. I know you announced your retirement five years from now.

Beth: Five years from now. Little item in there about needing to assess my living situation because my dog is aging and can’t go down the back stairs hard anymore. And somebody wrote in the comments that that is absolutely crazy and I shouldn’t consider my dog’s health needs. And I’m like, it was a metaphor for me not being able to do the stairs. But also this is what we need to consider. Like part of my retirement plan is where are we going to live? That the next place we go is going to be suitable for, you know, the whole family, which includes the dog, for us to age in place, you know, down the road. That’s a consideration I’m making now at 54 and a half.

Marcelo: Yeah. I mean, if you look at, and I’m speaking from like what I see here in Canada, you have a lot of people who have been fortunate enough to accumulate a portfolio and have those assets to get them through life in the later stages in life. But you do have a lot of people who are sitting on 1, 2 million dollar homes. We have a term called house rich, cash poor. And you need that liquidity event. So it’s either going to be, you would really have to think about unlocking that liquidity. Whether it is selling or doing a reverse mortgage. Those are options.

Beth: Yeah, yeah. So it’s easier to think about the dog, the dog’s needs, and the dog not being able to go down the stairs. It is for me to think about myself not being able to go up and down the stairs.

Marcelo: Yeah.

Beth: Yeah.

Marcelo: So this is more of a question for you. You had an idea of what this process was going to be, but what’s the one thing that surprised you the most? And what’s the one thing that you weren’t expecting at all?

Beth: Oh, gosh, there was so much. I was not expecting it to go so fast.

Marcelo: Okay.

Beth: Life is its own thing, and you cannot control it. I didn’t foresee my mom’s health crisis becoming a terminal kind of thing. And I was planning for a much longer time period than life allowed her, so that took me by surprise. And the things that we didn’t plan for, you know, because we thought we had time because, you know, we thought that things would be smoother than they were. We didn’t do certain things. One thing that still. That still gets me is I had planned to, you know, go through all the knickknacks in the cabinets with my mom and say, you know, videotape her telling me the story behind each one. Right. And we just never got to it.

Marcelo: Right.

Beth: Just never got to that. And so when my brother and I went to clean out the apartment, we didn’t know what was important all the time. And what was it? Little memento on the thing. And I’m like, this is from our trip to Israel. And then I turned it over and added stickers from, like, Home Goods on it. This is something she got for $6 from HomeGoods that she thought looked nice, and she put it on the shelf. But how did I know? Like, I might have taken that and cherished it as if it were some biblical icon. You know, it’s a $6 thing from home Goods, so, you know, like, that’s the sort of thing I missed out on.

Marcelo: Yeah. Well, look, would you say it’s changed your view of life and your relationship with your kids? Yeah. You must say.

Beth: Right, Absolutely. I mean, part of my decision to retire at 59 and a half.

Marcelo: Oh, interesting.

Beth: Which is, you know, generally early, and I love what I do. And all of that is because my parents died when they were both 76.

Marcelo: Right. And that’s young.

Beth: Yeah. The thought of working until I’m 70 and I have a day job, you know, I’m not just a writer who sits at home all day, and, you know, I have meetings and deadlines and performance reviews and all of the things that come with the job. And I don’t want to, you know, necessarily spend my good years doing all of those things. And so it has definitely made me see that, like, there is life to be lived and cherished and that’s the importance of us all being here. And the stuff that I was uptight about and, you know, on a hamster wheel for is not the important, important

Marcelo: stuff that’s so interesting. You know, like, I did get that sense from the book and it’s made me think and reflect a lot about my personal relationships, family relationships. So I’m guessing that’s a nice collateral effect of the book, besides having the practical aspect. And I think your book is fantastic and it’s going to help a lot of people. And you know, I almost wish that somebody wrote a similar book in Canada with all the practical implications in Canada with the legal system and the medical system. So if you ever want to move to Canada and live here for a few years and write the book, I would encourage you to do so.

Beth: There is talk of a Canadian edition where there would be an addendum to each chapter that would say this is where it translates to Canada. But it’s hard because it’s so US specific.

Marcelo: Yeah. The conversation starters are genius, by the way, because I find that you can get lists, you know, we have a family organizer where you put all the names and the addresses, but the conversation starters, like you’re just giving them to people. You just go and repeat those things to your parents and like it’ll get the conversation going. And at least in your. Even if it doesn’t go anywhere, at least you tried.

Beth: By the way, if I give out the back part of the book, I give that out for free if anybody wants it.

Marcelo: Oh, Nice.

Beth: If you subscribe to my newsletter or you have a verified purchase of the book, you can just email me on my website. And I have a PDF version of just the back end of the book. That’s the resource guide. Because a lot of people have asked me, even they bought the book and they say, okay, but I need, you know, I bought the book, I read the book, but I need one for my mother in law and I need one for, you know, my mother and I need one for me and I need it on multiple versions. I’m like, okay, here you go.

Marcelo: What we’ll do is we’ll ask you for all the links and we’ll put them in the episode notes.

Beth: Perfect, my website is bethpinsker.com.

Marcelo: Thank you so much for your time. Look, I’m going to wrap up here. I think this has been a fascinating conversation. I can go for another three hours. But I know I’m going to get flak for this because I tend to talk a lot. But that’s okay. One last question. If looking at our futures, like I put myself in this situation now, what’s the single most practical gift I can give to my future caregivers to make their job easier in the future? What is that one thing that I can give them today?

Beth: Simplify your life. Don’t have accounts all over the place. Like, I don’t know, I worked at Fidelity for a little bit and as part of the compliance process, you had to, basically, transfer all of your accounts to Fidelity and have them all in one place. Having all your stuff in an easy to follow roadmap is the single most useful thing because like, if somebody has to come in, like a forensic accountant and do stuff for you, they need to be able to follow your train of thinking. If you have stuff all over the place and randomly do this, that or the other thing, nobody’s going to. No. And it’s all going to fall apart. So the most useful thing you can do is just be simple.

Marcelo: That’s music to my ears.

Beth: Why do you need four savings accounts? Why do you have accounts in four different banks? Why do you have, you know, 401ks that you’ve never followed up on? You guys don’t have 401ks but retirement accounts from three jobs ago. Consolidate, consolidate, consolidate.

Marcelo: That’s music to my ears. And it’s something we appeal to here. It’s something we actually advocate. I would even tell you, we tell clients sometimes we want to split advisors. They come here, hey, I want to give you a few million here and maybe keep another few million with my other advisor. We’ll say, look, that’s great, but my advice is to choose one advisor. We hope it’s us, but if it’s the other person, it’s okay. But just have one person. It’ll make life easier.

Beth: Yeah. And we all have moms and dads.

Marcelo: That’s right. Beth, thank you so much for your time.

Beth: Thank you. Bye bye.

Keith: Thanks for listening to the Empowered Investor Podcast brought to you by Tulett, Matthews and Associates. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to follow or subscribe and share it with somebody who wants to invest with clarity and confidence. To learn more about how we help investors build lasting financial peace of mind, visit us at tma-invest.com. Until next time. Stay informed, stay empowered, and stay on track to your financial goals. Investment and investing strategies should be evaluated based on your own objectives. Listeners of this podcast should use their best judgment and consult a financial expert prior to making any investment decisions. Based on the information found in this podcast.