In this third article, the focus turns to an earlier time, a time when a certain amount of preventive forethought can make a tremendous difference when illness, physical or mental disability, or death eventually does strike. As a trusted financial advisor, I have learned the importance of having my clients spend a little time now to get their financial and legal houses in order, rather than trying to do so some day in the future when it will be much more difficult to locate crucial information and physical items. There will be plenty to have to deal with when an emergency, a disabling medical event, or death itself strikes, so why not take a few simple steps now to help substantially ease your burdens later on?

Step 1: A Meeting of the Minds

As the diagram below shows, the first step is for the husband and wife to have a “meeting of the minds” as to gathering together crucial identification and account information (plus the location of certain physical items) in a single accessible place. This is important, because it will, in fact, take some focused thought, legwork, and general running around to gather the information described below on the “same page.”

The time and effort you put in now will be more than well worth it when—whether it is a matter of months or a matter of decades—illness, incapacity, or death does strike. So yes, you will have to do a bit of work now, but this will both pay real-time peace of mind dividends and make things much easier for you—and for those who come to assist you in your time of need, such as your children—in the future.
Step 2: Reviewing and Updating Core Legal and Financial Documents

Before (or perhaps at the same time as) you proceed to gather together your crucial information in one coherent place, there is one additional step that all couples should consider undertaking. Specifically, with the help of your attorney and other professional advisors, such as your insurance agent and your financial advisor, you should review and update all key life documents, including:

• Your wills and estate plan (and funeral arrangements)
• The titling and beneficiary designations (where relevant) on all major assets, including real estate, financial accounts, and insurance policies
• Powers of attorney, medical powers of attorney, and physicians directives
• Any other key life, financial, or legal documents relevant to your situation

Put simply, having ready access during difficult times to these various documents, accounts, and policies will not be nearly as helpful if they are not updated and do not reflect your considered intentions. The required review and updating will give you a chance to consider or reconsider what is most important to you and your family in terms of your own long-term plans and the ultimate disposition of your estate once you are gone.

Step 3: Gathering Together Key Information Including Location of Physical Items

It is now time to gather the crucial items, both informational and physical, that will make matters so very much easier to deal with in difficult times. Importantly, the information that is gathered together and collected in one coherent and usable document that can be readily accessed during difficult times will be of three different kinds:

• Account and Access Information: Identification information (such as user IDs), passwords, account numbers (including bank accounts, investment accounts, and credit card accounts), policy numbers (including insurance policies), phone numbers (including cell phone numbers), and so on. All current subscriptions, services, and memberships should also be noted so that in times of trouble these can be paid, renewed, or canceled. Email accounts, IDs, and passwords should also be gathered, since online banking and bill paying is becoming increasingly common—the one thing you don’t want to have happen when you are focused on a health crisis or a death is to miss payments on critical bills such as the mortgage, insurance policies, and so on.
• Location and Access Information for Important Documents: The location, and any necessary access information, should be collected for important documents including wills, trusts, estate plans, life insurance policies, real estate deeds, Social Security cards, passports, and so on. Ideally, you will gather the documents themselves, to the degree possible, in one physical location that will be noted on your “same page.”
• Location and Access Information for Important Physical Items: In some cases, such as with safe-deposit box keys, physical items need to be identified and their precise location noted. This category also includes other keys (such as to real estate, boats, cars, etc.) as well as particularly valuable physical items such as jewelry, paintings, coins, and other collectibles (and any associated documentation related to value or authenticity), as well as irreplaceable audio and video recordings, family mementos, family Bibles, photographs, etc.

When you’ve completed all these steps, all the vital information you will want and need to have on hand during an emergency will effectively be available in one place. Put differently, in this one document you will have: (1) a list of all your important financial and other accounts, including email, online accounts, and phone numbers, along with associated ID and password information, as well as a list of all subscriptions, services, and memberships; (2) a list of the location of all other important documents, such as wills, life insurance policies, deeds, and authoritative identification information, all of which should ideally be gathered together in one physical location; and (3) a list of, along with the location of and any necessary access information for, all important physical items, especially safe-deposit box keys and other keys, along with irreplaceable personal physical items and collectibles.

The Two Final Steps

Once you have gotten on the same page mentally, reviewed and updated your key financial and legal documents, and then put together all this information in one place as just described, there are still two steps remaining.

The first is to decide exactly who will have access to this information, and the second, to actually give the document to this person or persons. It may just be the two of you, as husband and wife, and you may decide to further keep this information safely stored in a place that only you two know about, or that only you two have a key to, or that only you two have the password to if you keep it stored only digitally. (There are many password-protection systems and methods, but discussing these is beyond the scope of this article.) Needless to say, if you do only store your collected information digitally, make sure that (a) there is a backup, and (b) if you rely on one master password, make sure you don’t forget it or write it down some place that only you know about. But you may want to share the collected information with one or more of your children (if you have any), with another close relative, or with a completely trustworthy close friend. The bottom line is that having put in the effort to gather all this information in one place, it would be a true shame to not be able to find it during the chaos that occurs when truly overwhelming hard times strike.

Finally, the last step is to make a commitment to review and update all of this at least every year or two. If you don’t, a good deal of the information you have collected—ID information and passwords, account information of various sorts, memberships and subscriptions—might change or go stale. The best plan is to pick an interval that feels right to you—say, one year or 18 months—and calendar it ahead of time so that you will know when it is time to review and revise the collected information.

It may be hard to be proactive—to spend the time and energy to first “get on the same page” and next review and update core financial, life, and legal documents and then create the physical “same page” that will contain or refer to where all the necessary informational and physical items can be found. But trust me: it will be much, much harder on you and everyone in your life, when the time comes, if you have not already gathered all this information together. Given the realities of the modern world, almost no one can hold all this information in his or her head. Gathering this information now is more responsible and more effective, and will give you more peace of mind both today and in the future.

While I’m not a psychologist, clergyman, or professional grief counselor, as a financial advisor I am someone who has worked hand-in-hand with many people, especially widows, who’ve lost the person in the world closest to them. Over the past two decades I’ve become much more comfortable at being with those who are grieving, and learned some things about how to best support and serve them. I wrote this article so I could share my observations about how those who are grieving can more gracefully grapple with necessarily details in a timely way.

Almost everyone can benefit from a deeper understanding of grief—we all play many roles in life, and eventually nearly every one of us experiences deep personal loss—but you may find this article particularly useful if you fall into one of these categories:

• You’ve recently experienced a deep personal loss and are intensely grieving
• You’re a relative (especially a spouse, child, parent, or sibling) or close friend of someone who is intensely grieving
• You’re a professional, such as a lawyer, accountant, or financial advisor, who has occasion to work with clients who are intensely grieving

Five Guidelines For Grieving

The chart below provides five general guidelines for the griever and those spending time with him or her. Obviously, we all differ, so use your best judgment as you read and think through these guidelines and gently and reassuringly apply them to the situation at hand.

The first guideline concerns “Uniqueness.” Everyone deals with grief differently, and there are as many different ways to grieve as there are people. Some of us have time to prepare, while for others, death arrives without a moment’s notice. Whether you’re grieving or attending to someone who’s grieving, allow yourself to release any expectations or judgments about what the grieving process is supposed to look like.

The second guideline, “No Timeline,” emphasizes that just as everyone’s grief process is unique, the timetable for that grief process is also unique. Grief doesn’t take place on a schedule. Some people actively grieve for only a relatively short period, while others find that grief takes months or years to substantially subside. For some, the intensity of grief diminishes but never really goes away entirely, while for others, the thought of the departed eventually brings up mainly good feelings and joyful remembrances.

In some cases, grief can come back very strongly, even after many months or years. If you are the griever, be easy on yourself if this happens to you, but if your feelings persist, consider getting professional grief counseling. If you’re assisting someone whose grief returns full force, make sure you let the griever know, even in the midst of his or her despair and irrational thoughts, that this is normal, and that one day he or she will more than likely feel much better. However, if the grief strongly returns and persists, or if it never diminished in the first place, professional counseling may be called for.

The third guideline is “Support.” The key here is to provide the griever with the kind of support they really need and want, not what others might think they need and want. We’re all familiar with the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But there’s also a Platinum Rule, which states that you should “Do unto others how they would have you do unto them.”

One way or another, the person undergoing intense grief should receive the kind of support that they most want and need. If it makes you uncomfortable to be around intense grieving, then you may not be able to offer the kind of support that’s called for. If so, then find a substitute for yourself if at all possible, someone who can provide the grieving person with just the kind of support they most desire. And if you yourself are grieving, then don’t be shy or embarrassed about asking for what you need. You’ve been through a really rough time, and deserve the best possible support.

The fourth guideline concerns the variety of Resources available to assist those who are grieving. Timing is important here: the griever should wait until he or she is really ready before accessing either written resources or real-world support groups. When ready, the works of H. Norman Wright can be very helpful; his official website is at http://www.hnormanwright.com/. Also, How to Survive the Loss of a Love, by Colgrove, Bloomfield, and McWilliams, is an excellent book attuned to those intensely grieving; it’s available for free online at http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/sur/srtoc.htm.

Many local communities and churches offer grief support groups, and professional grief counseling is widely available. For those who experience intense loneliness as part of their grief—imagine a widow or widower waking up alone after decades of having their spouse at their side each morning—such a group can provide welcome social contact amidst an understanding community.

Responding to Pressing Real World Needs

The fifth and final guideline concerns the need to respond to Real-World Needs of the legal and financial sort. It seems unfair, but such needs, like paying ongoing bills such as a mortgage or revolving credit card, or handling the legal or financial details relating directly to death certificates and funeral arrangements, cannot be ignored for long without triggering significant negative consequences.

Now, it should also be said that there are a variety of other real-time needs, such as safety needs, home maintenance needs, and sometimes even nutrition and personal care needs, that may be difficult for an intensely grieving individual to address. A follow-up article will provide a checklist of these items to assist the overwhelmed griever in these matters.

For now, though, we’re just considering the kinds of financial and legal needs that call for information or decisions with long-term consequences. If you’re in grief, you should recognize that while many items—like thinking about where you want to live going forward, updating your will and estate plan, or repositioning your investment portfolio—can and should be postponed until you’re feeling somewhat better, others simply must be attended to right away.

Even providing the necessary information for finalizing a death certificate can be overwhelming and beyond the range of someone who is intensely grieving. And attending to detailed financial items concerning insurance or social security and pension elections will simply be out of the question. If you are intensely grieving and you know that you just can’t do what needs to be done, then you simply must find someone to lean on who can help you through this period. That someone can be a relative, a close friend, or a competent professional, like a lawyer or financial advisor, used to working with those in grief.

If you’re a relative or close friend, you’ll no doubt want the grieving individual to get better quickly, in part perhaps because you feel badly that they are in so much emotional pain. But your “job” is to be there and to help out, not to try to speed the process along because you think it would be good for the griever or because you’re uncomfortable. Similarly, if you’re a lawyer, accountant, or other professional services provider who’s been called in during intense grieving, you must simply learn to be comfortable with whatever is going on with your grieving client. Don’t expect the griever to get better right away, don’t encourage him or her to feel better or to “get over it,” and let it be perfectly all right with you if the griever breaks down or becomes extremely emotional in your presence.

Grief is never easy, but with some awareness and forethought, it can be made less difficult. The Guidelines offered here should help you through, whether you’re grieving or called in to assist someone who is grieving. Good luck, and remember above all to be gentle and patient as you respect the unique grieving process unfolding before you.

Let me begin by clarifying three points. First, while I am a financial advisor and not a professional grief counselor, psychologist, or pastor, my purpose in writing this series of articles and addressing you directly, person to person, is because I care and have been privileged to learn a great deal over two decades of being with and serving those who are grieving. Second, if you are having trouble concerning any of your basic life needs—receiving adequate nutrition, getting a minimal amount of exercise, staying in contact with other people—don’t hesitate to seek personal or professional help from your friends, family, or community.

Third, like it or not, this period of financial housekeeping may come when you are far from having finished your acute grieving process. The first article in this series (which you can find at http://www.chessmanwealth.com/financial-planning/) focused on how you can gracefully grapple with your grief by honoring your own unique grieving process and timeline, and by taking advantage of the variety of types of support and resources available to you. Even if you feel you may be mostly past the initial intense grief period, I urge you to read through that first article for additional ideas that may prove useful.

First Things First: Time Management and Delegation

As the chart in the next section of this article will readily demonstrate, there are a large number of important financial and legal items that you will want to quickly and thoughtfully attend to. But given the other real-world demands on your time, and given the fact that ongoing grieving may sap your energy or make it difficult to focus, it is absolutely imperative that you find a way to separate out what is really important and what is not. That is, especially in this initial period after your husband’s passing, you must find ways of prioritizing your time and focus, or you can easily become overwhelmed or simply fail to make critical choices or take necessary actions.

In his bestselling 1994 book First Things First, Steven Covey (and his co-authors) developed a prioritization methodology that many people have used and that may prove useful to you. (Even if you don’t follow the methodology exactly, it may give you some good ideas for determining how to sort things through.) Essentially, Covey came up with a 2×2 matrix, illustrated below, that parses all items along two axes—Important vs. Not Important, and Urgent vs. Not Urgent.

 The real goal, Covey says, is to get to the point where you are spending most of your time and efforts on Quadrant 2—highlighted in yellow—where things are Important, but Not Urgent. In this post-passing period, however, you will have quite a few Urgent and Important matters, and these, of course, should be handled immediately. In order to gain the time to fully handle all Important matters, both Urgent and Not Urgent, to the greatest degree possible you should attempt to stay away from Not Important matters, whether Urgent (like interruptions) or Not Urgent (like trivia and busy work).

However, this is easier said than done. If you receive a phone call from a distant friend or relative wishing you condolences, while it is clear that such a call is Not Urgent, it is not quite as clear if such a call fits into the Important side or the Not Important, Not Urgent quadrant. In making these distinctions, remember that it is not necessarily all or nothing. While it is more important to attend to your pressing financial matters, it may also be important to talk to cousin Fred for at least a little while before letting him know that you have matters to attend to.

The next section of this article focuses only on matters that fit into the Important quadrants, but these can vary in degree of importance and in degree of urgency. While each item will be assigned a rough degree of importance and urgency, your particular situation will be unique to you, and only you will be able to decide what’s what and what’s next. Moreover, an accurate assessment of the importance and urgency of each item may be beyond your skill and knowledge, which brings us to another subject that Steven Covey found critical: delegation.

Simply put, in the post-passing period, you can and should either seek support from or fully delegate important actions to others who are equally or more capable than you are. In addition to describing the many different types of issues that you will need to keep tabs on and be proactive about, the next section of this article will describe the type of support available from a financial advisor such as the author and describe the qualifications of the kind of advisor you probably want to turn to during this critical and difficult time.

Taking Care of Business

As the chart below shows, it will benefit you to take care of many pressing financial and legal issues in the weeks and months after your husband’s passing. Unfortunately, in many cases you will not be able to wait too long, or you will either miss certain opportunities (like making a more advantageous election for your retirement payouts) or you will be setting yourself up to spend a great deal of future time and energy to fix things that are not right (for example, correctly re-titling property and assets). The good news is that while the chart and what it represents are somewhat daunting, it is not endless; that is, it fits on one page, and it is possible to get through all the necessary financial and legal choices and decision points, including eventually turning your focus to the critical long-term planning areas mentioned in the last box on the chart.

But given how much work there is to be done, and given that in many cases you may not know the right answer even if you understand the question or options before you, it makes a great deal of sense to work with a comprehensive financial advisor, sometimes called a “wealth manager,” to help you through this period. For example, you may have some tricky decisions to make with respect to elections as to Social Security, pensions, and insurance payouts. Unless you have a very good head for figures, and unless you already have a comprehensive long-term financial and life plan in place, it will be very difficult for you to know that you are making the right choice. Instead, if you work with a comprehensive financial advisor who is experienced in working with widows, and who deals with these kind of issues on a daily basis, you will be able to have a lot more confidence that you are doing all the right things. Additionally, such a financial advisor will be able to help you organize, prioritize, and execute on the many legal and financial details that will need attending to.

The bottom line is simple: this has no doubt been one of the most difficult periods in your life, and weeks after your husband has passed, things may not have brightened up very much. Given the number of legal and financial details that must be attended to, given your state of mind, and given how much is at stake both financially and emotionally, it makes profound sense for you to work with someone who can help you on all of this. For life to go on, the business of life must go on, and like always, it really does pay to work with someone who cares, who knows what he or she is doing, and who will help you get fully back on your feet as soon as possible

• assess your current financial situation.
• understand how to meet your financial and retirement goals.
• put your financial plan into action and monitor your progress.
• update your financial plan to grow with your changing needs and goals.

If you have any of these questions or concerns, you will benefit from a consultation with a Financial Advisor:

• Confusion about conflicting financial advice and options.
• Paying too much income tax.
• Not saving enough for retirement.
• Not sure where to invest money.
• Changes in life that affect your financial future, such as a career change, marriage, retirement, loss of a spouse, birth of a child, etc.
• Not enough time to attend to personal financial affairs.

Financial Advisors are licensed professionals with a broad background in finance. They can guide you through some important life decisions. They can help you manage the risk involved in making decisions that can paralyze some of us, such as:

• What kind of retirement plan do I need?
• Am I paying too much in taxes?
• How can I save money for retirement – tax free?
• How much life insurance do I need?
• How can I make sure my estate is left to family members, and does not depleted by probate court and government taxes?
• Can we afford college tuition for our children – and how do we save for this, knowing how much tuitions are spiraling?

Would you benefit from having professional advice when it comes to planning your financial future? A Financial Advisor is a partner that can help you understand your options and help you build and protect your assets.

A Financial Advisor can also help you evaluate different life insurance plans and help you determine which policy or product is best going to serve your own unique needs and budget.

To assess your financial position and learn about some of the ways in which we can assist you, call us to schedule an appointment. Evening hours are available, and we can meet in your home or our office.

Term life insurance

Term life insurance is the most traditional and best-known form of personal coverage, paying out to the policyholder’s dependents in the case of death. The main advantage of this insurance is that it is lower priced initially than other types of insurance, but it offers few other benefits.

This type of coverage typically operates for a fixed term of 10 to 30 years, depending upon the policy, and pays out the benefit amount if the policyholder dies.

Permanent Life Insurance

Permanent life insurance offers coverage for a lifetime, with a guaranteed payout upon death.

You choose the death benefit that will be paid upon death. You make payments in to the policy fund. So that any amount you pay into the fund on top of the premium is invested and building up a cash sum over time. This cash investment enables the value of the death benefit to increase, or allows loans to be taken against the policy, with many people seeing this as a viable income stream for their retirement plans.

Universal Life Insurance

Universal life insurance offers an extremely flexible middle way, combining life cover with the chance to build up an investment income, at a lower cost than fixed permanent life cover.

This type of cover can be very flexible and allows payments be varied, depending upon the current financial circumstances of the policyholder. Money paid over and above the normal premium can be used to either increase the cash value or increase the death benefit.

Summary

The three types of policies: TERM, UNIVERSAL, and PERMANENT insurance offer different benefits depending upon the needs of the policyholder.

The most affordable option, a simple Term policy, offers temporary coverage, but no other investment potential, and is usually a prerequisite when taking out a mortgage or a large loan.

Permanent and Universal Life Insurance are more flexible, offering tax-free investment potential alongside the lifetime coverage, allowing money to be invested into the death benefits or the investment account.

It is always important to seek independent financial advice before committing to any major financial decision and to be aware of all the long term investment opportunities available.

One of the easiest ways for you to make an informed decision before you buy life insurance is to sit down with a Financial Planner to evaluate your situation. A Financial Planner can help you determine the type of insurance coverage that is best for your unique situation.

“60% of people over 75 need long term care. The average facility stay for older folks is about 3 years.” – Business Week

“Over 50% of all people entering a care situation are penniless within one year.” – Harvard University

Long Term Care Insurance provides income should you end up requiring extended care. Long terms care typically includes rehabilitative care, nursing care, personal and in-home health care.

Long Term Care Insurance protects you in the event you have to enter a long term care facility. It can also help should you ever require at home health care assistance.

The most popular type of long term care policy is one that provides income to you to provide for any type of long term care service. Other types of policies reimburse you for eligible expenses or pay a set daily amount for expenses.

Insurance reduces risk and provides security for yourself and your family’s future. To know how much insurance you need, you’ll need to consider your lifestyle and what the possible risks that could affect it. When calculating how much life insurance you need, consider the following:

• Estate Expenses
• Funeral Expenses
• Mortgage
• Loans and Debts
• Replacing Annual Income (number of years?)
• Children’s education
• Resources available at death: Savings, Stocks, Mutual Funds, Retirement Funds, Life Insurance, and Other Assets

When you think of insurance, the first that comes to mind is auto and home insurance. Replacement of these assets in the event of damage can be very costly. Most people hold auto and home insurance policies.

Life insurance is essential to many families, giving extra security if the unthinkable should happen. The loss of a breadwinner is devastating enough, without having the added stress of worrying about how to cover the bills and mortgage.

Other types of insurance are equally important. Life events such as illness, accidental injury, loss of employment income, or a death in the family can affect family security. Yet these potential risks to your lifestyle can be reduced by the right insurance planning.

Changes in lifestyle also determine the types and amount of insurance you need. The amount of life insurance that you have will likely change throughout your life, depending on your life circumstances. Some of these changes might be getting married, starting a family, changing jobs or preparing for unexpected events.

To meet modern trends, life insurance providers also offer to act as an investment vehicle, building up a sum of extra equity over the lifetime of the policy. This can be withdrawn or borrowed against, and usually offers a tax-free sum on retirement or death.

Deciding on an amount of life insurance you should have requires careful consideration. A Financial Advisor can help you determine just how much insurance you need based on your age, your income, family circumstances and obligations, assets owned, and debts owed.