Episode 451: Financial Caregiving, Family Conversations, and Planning Ahead with Beth Pinsker

Beth Pinsker 0:02

We're all working with the magic of compounding interest. And if you take a hit in any given year and your cash outflows go down, then your growth is going to be impacted. And so you have to know what you're in for 10 seconds.

Intro 0:21

Welcome to the journey to launch podcast with your host Jamila Souffrant as a money expert who walks her talk she helps brave journeyers like you get out of debt, save, invest and build real wealth. Join her on the journey to launch to financial freedom in 5432, 54321,

Jamila Souffrant 0:48

if you want the episode show notes for this episode, go to journey to launch.com or click the description of wherever you're listening to this episode. In the show notes, you'll get the transcribed version of the conversation, the links that we mentioned, and so much more also, whether you are an OG journeyer or brand new to the podcast, I've created a free jumpstart guide to help you on your financial freedom journey. It includes the top episodes to listen to, stages to go through to reach financial freedom resources and so much more. You can go to journey to launch.com/jumpstart to get your guide right now. Okay, let's hop into the episode.

Jamila Souffrant 1:29

Hey, hey, hey, journeyers, welcome to the journey to launch Podcast. Today we have guest Beth Pinsker. She is a financial planning columnist for market. Watch, she's been a Certified Financial Planner, CFP since 2018

Jamila Souffrant 1:45

she's worked at routers, fidelity, amongst other places, and prior to covering personal finance, she was a film critic and entertainment business reporter. She has her first book coming out, probably maybe out by the time you hear it. Maybe not, but coming out soon. It's called My mother's money, a guide to financial caregiving. I'm so happy to have you on the show. Beth, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so Beth, I definitely want to get into the wealth of information in your book, where we are, where you are talking about how to care for people in your life as a caregiver and their money. But I do want to go back a bit into your history and your career, because I love that you made a career out of writing professionally. And I want to take it back a bit because I know I have a lot of people who are writers or want to be writers, and want to know how to make that work for themselves. So can you take so can you take us back to what you thought you'd do in college? I think I saw you went to Harvard, yes, and then what happened after that?

Beth Pinsker 2:51

Yeah, I always wanted to be a writer. I used to make little newspapers in my basement on when we first got a computer, and, like, make little newsletters and things like that, and hand them out to people. That's just all I ever wanted to do. And my kids make fun of me. They say that I would. They don't understand how it is that I get paid for what I do, because it would be what I do all day long, every day. And so, yeah, I'm sort of just living out the thoughts in my it's very satisfying. I really, you know, I really love it.

Jamila Souffrant 3:24

I love that because, honestly, I find it. I've come across, I've interviewed a lot of people where their creative and or professional endeavors are also their actual like true life dreams, like, if they weren't getting paid for it, they'll do it. But I also feel like there's so many people who are not able to get paid for what they actually like to do, and that's why they push themselves to perhaps finding and accomplishing the financial independence trying to escape from their work. So I do want to get into kind of you, honing in and making a career out of writing, for those who are also figuring out, or trying to figure out how they can do that, too.

Beth Pinsker 4:01

Yeah, I never thought that I would end up in financial writing. I started out as a film critic. I started out, you know, I did that career path right out of college. I worked on my college newspaper, and I started to, you know, I remember sending out 100 resumes, and I could not get a job before the end of college and everybody around me, you know, Harvard is a pretty intense place sometimes, and at the end of the year, right before graduation, it's very intense, because everybody has something amazing to do it. I had nothing to do. I was just going to go home and do nothing. It was 1993 there was a recession. It was a bad time to be getting a job. And I actually found this letter when I was going through my parents stuff. I had sent out so many resumes, it became like a family joke, and I sent a resume to my parents with a cover letter and asked to be their unemployed daughter and live at you know and and work for room and board as their unemployed daughter. Letter, and my dad sent me back a rejection letter. And it was the funniest thing. And I posted it on my my social media a while back, and it, it was hysterical. Like, this is what goes for a joke in my family, like, I can't get it, um, you know, I'm just graduating from a high powered University. I can't get a job, and this, this is just what we poked fun at? What was your degree in English? Straight up, English, Major, English. Okay, I have a couple questions. So you could tell me if you don't want to talk about this, but I'm now thinking, because if my even now to this day, my kids think hopefully they have some direction of what they love by the time they get to college and they get into prestigious Harvard, and they tell me they want to be an English major. Now, unless I have a lot of money just to like, they could do whatever they want, I'm going to be like, is there a better major you could pick for the return? So what was that experience like? I live what I preach. I have a kid who's a music major. So I believe in following your dreams, and my parents believed in that. My parents one thing I'll say about my parents to draw it back to the book. My parents both died when they were 76 which I consider really young. They were my parents were five years apart, so they died five years apart, both at 76 and even though they died young, like they did not have, I don't think they had any regrets. They lived their lives to the fullest, and the example they set for me was like, do what you love, do what you love, make sure that you're doing all the things that you love. Don't miss out on anything and don't answer anybody else. And that's how that's how they set it up for me and I went out in the world. I think the only thing I could have done to disappoint them, was become a stockbroker, and, you know, a Republican stockbroker. And I didn't do that. I was an English major, and I came out and went into journalism, and I ended up loving personal finance. I kind of got into it by accident, and it just was the thing that stuck with me, because it was like my natural mode of handling the world. I'm a single parent, or a divorced single parent, I should say. And, you know, I'm careful with my money, and it all personal finance makes sense to me. And so that's why I ended up doing this. That's why I ended up, you know, taking it really seriously and getting a CFP, you know, I did pass a series seven test, so I got close to being a stock broker, but not enough to disappoint my parents,

Jamila Souffrant 7:29

yeah, but I just actually love that you brought home that point of following what you truly loved and also doing, you know, still, it's something you put work behind. You got a degree in it. You were very focused, and so it wasn't just a hobby, but something that you really invested in, which was able to take you places. So I just think that's a really nice lesson as a parent myself now, who will have to help guide my kids and want them to be free in their choices and happy it's Hey, like, Are you committed to this thing, and do you really love it? And if you are, you know, let's, let's go for it. So I love that. Thank you for reminding me.

Beth Pinsker 8:08

The thing I tell my kids is that the jobs they're going to end up doing haven't been invented yet, so there's no reason to go down any particular path on a journey to one destination when you don't even know what that destination is at the moment. You're too young, and the world's gonna change. And nothing anybody thought that like, you know, most of the jobs that are available today, I didn't even know, you know, didn't exist when I was younger, right?

Jamila Souffrant 8:34

I actually heard, I it wouldn't have been a daily podcast episode about coding and how, you know, years ago, coding was something they were pushing kids into, because we're going to need coders, and now how that most of the people who are graduating with coding degrees can't get jobs, because that's being taken by AI. And there's so much of that happening. So very interesting, which can probably be another episode. But Beth, tell me so you said both of your parents passed away at what you feel is a young age, and then you had to take on this responsibility of caregiving while they were alive, but then now after care of their finances. Can you tell us a little bit about that, and then we'll get more into the book.

Beth Pinsker 9:13

Yeah. So I was kind of like your stereotype, caregiving typically hits mid career women, you know, right around the age of 50, I was 51 got a phone call from my mom. She said she was having back surgery. I'm the daughter, you know, like, that's, that's, you're, you're on deck, right? You know, my dad was already gone. And I'm the person that you know you call to take care of you in that situation, and she wasn't in any sort of other decline, like all her faculties were there. It was just the fact that she was having this surgery on her spine, and she didn't know how fast she would get back up to speed. So I just said, can you come and help me out with whatever I need? And you know, we'll see where it goes. So I'm like, yeah, obviously I. Gonna say, you know, do everything I'm supposed to do in that situation. But once I got into it, she started to have complications. There were lots of ups and downs. It was a very fast, sort of eight, nine months of in and out, of very serious illness for her. And I ended up having to do a lot more than I anticipated in terms of taking over the daily management of her household. You know, I'm an adult with two children. I manage a household. It's already hard to manage your own household like she was a fully fledged adult, with all the things that a fully fledged adult has, a mortgage, car payments, cable bill, electric bill, you know, I had to sit down and reverse engineer everything about her financial existence and then start managing it for the long term caregivers. How much can we afford? Can we afford to keep her where she is? And I had to sort of do all of that without much input from her, because she was in and out of being able to focus on that sort of stuff. And so that becomes a big task, you know, like that is a full time job in and of itself, to manage that for somebody else. So the book goes into, like, you know, I took all the financial planning courses I, you know, study this. I talk to people who do this every day, and none of that's in any of the books, right? They will tell you the macro economic theory. They will, you know, you can study bond ratios and yields and all of that stuff, and nobody tells you how to transfer money from one bank to another bank, you know, because they make that really hard, and there's no rule book for it, because every bank does it a little bit differently. And you want to be power of attorney for your mom, well, you're going to have to jump through hoops, you know, and each bank is going to have a different set of hoops, and you're not going to have any standardization of any of it. And nobody tells you any of this. So I wanted to write a guidebook for somebody like me who is in that position and put it all together so that you knew from point A to point Z of how this stuff all fits together and works together.

Jamila Souffrant 12:13

Now there's different stages of when someone can approach this task of being responsible for their parents or someone else's money, right? That could be a proactive way before the person gets sick. Could be the conversations you have before, right, like that happens, or it happens while it's everything's going down. Can you talk about maybe that first part of before the person is sick, or before things start happening? How you can approach that? Because I know some pushback, depending on culture and family dynamics, can be difficult to bring that up to someone, yeah,

Beth Pinsker 12:50

I think the most important thing to tell people is that when you set up a plan for if you get sick in some capacity, you're not handing over any of the tasks, the legal document that you need in those circumstances is a health care proxy and a power of attorney form. And none of those come into effect until you are completely incapacitated. But the thing is, if you're incapacitated, you can't fill them out. So if you already need one, you're stuck. So that's why you want to do them when you're well and what they're conditional. They're like, if I should happen to be in a situation where I can't make decisions for myself, I want this person to act on my behalf. Some people freeze and say, Oh, well, I don't want to hand over control of my whole life to my son or my daughter. I'm not ready for that. I don't need that, but you do need it, because it's too late if something actually happens to you. And so every adult over the age of 18 needs these because, like, we're all independent, legal human beings in the eyes of financial companies and healthcare companies. And so like the other day my son, my son is 19, and he is away at college, and I needed to make a doctor's appointment for him, and so I call up the doctor because, you know, that's what moms do, and 19 year olds are not like 19 year olds in the past, and they still need you to make doctor's appointments for them. Well, they wouldn't let me. I couldn't make a doctor's I couldn't even make an appointment for him without a health care proxy, because he's a legal adult. Of course, I have a health care proxy for him, so I'm like, Okay, well, you know, do you want me to fax the form? Because, like, that's, that's how I roll. I got one for him as soon as he turned 18. But, you know, and also, I'm a divorced person. I'm not remarried. Like nobody can make decisions for me. You know, my mom was my person, and so when she passed away, I had to think about like, oh, well, who's we're going to be responsible for me? Like I have a boyfriend, but he's not I'm not married to him. I have a 19 year old kid. Jamila, who's not able to make all of these decisions yet. So like, what am I supposed to do? So you know, I had to come to some resolution for that. In my mind, I ended up making it my son. But you know, I would know he would need help with anything. Like, if something were to happen to me, he couldn't do all this stuff on his own. But you know, my book is an instruction manual so you would be able to figure it out.

Jamila Souffrant 15:23

Yeah, no, I love that. I love the idea of being so proactive, even with your own children, like knowing once they hit a certain age, you have to have these forms filled out, and then for yourself, who was that person? For you, you have to think about those things, so not only thinking about your parents, but as the adult now who's going to be the person? Do you have your forms filled out?

Beth Pinsker 15:43

So I suggest in the book that you, like, send out an email blast, like in your family, like you should know in your world, there's also a thing for this in the book too. There's like, a family map, and the map doesn't have all the lines connected, because not everybody's related by blood, right? And you just need to know who's in your orbit. If something were to happen to any of the people on this list, would they be calling me? Would I be the call that is made? And if so, you want to make sure those people have the right forms, because otherwise you can't help them. So if it's aunt, sue your mom, your dad, a cousin, your elderly neighbor, who has nobody else, your adult, young adult children, you know, whoever it is that's in your orbit that they would call you. You want to email blast everybody and say, where are we on this? Do you need a link? Do you need Do you need help with a download? Because it's going to take you five minutes. You can do it most places for free. I'll send you a link, download the form, sign it and get it notarized, and then let me know where you are on that. And you know, if you're that person in the family that gathers everybody up like that and gets them to do stuff, make that your responsibility. It's, it's an email. You know, it's not a big, like, a big amount of time, it's like, email them a link and have them fill out a

Jamila Souffrant 17:04

form. And so forms, let's be specific, which form should they be wanting to take care of right away,

Beth Pinsker 17:09

a health care proxy and a durable power of attorney.

Jamila Souffrant 17:12

So another thing that might pop up for people is, well, do I need to get an estate attorney and a lawyer to be able to do this, which then complicates things and then makes them take longer to execute on this.

Beth Pinsker 17:23

Yes, so you can do those two things, generally speaking, without a lawyer. Like it's better to always have everything personalized and set to your locality and your circumstances, but those are pretty standard forms. And you know, you're not going to go to arrive, you're going to go do a will, a living will, a trust of any sort. Well, trust you actually need a lawyer. You can't really download those from the internet. So if you need anything like that, you're going to need to get an attorney. But think about it this way, you have young kids, you need a will. I have a list in my book of like circumstances, what you need for various plannings. You turn 18, you need that durable power of attorney and the healthcare proxy. You get married, you need to have something that states that you have a legal relationship with the person, and some sort of division of the assets that you both bring to the marriage. You have kids. You got to name a guardian for them. What if something happened to you like I admit that I kind of whiffed this in the beginning. Right my I didn't get a will until my kids were about, like, five and seven, and those early years, my husband and I had talked about it and who we would want to be their guardian, and we had come to resolution on that, but we never formalized it. And so if something would have happened to us, nobody would have gone to the person that we wanted our kids to go to. They would have gone to a family member. And you know, it would have been hard for them. And so when I got divorced, I was walking home, there was a really icy winter, and one of you know, like, I don't know if you remember, but it was like the black ice winter, and cars were skidding around everywhere. This is in New York, right? Yeah, you can't even walk down the sidewalk, it, you know? And I thought I was walking home one day slipping and sliding. I was like, if I fell and hit my head right now, because I wasn't fully divorced yet, I was just separated as like, all of my assets would go to the kids, but they would be in the control of their father, and that's not a situation I want, because he's not responsible with money. So what do you do in that circumstance? Well, that's when you want to trust, because a trust can divert that money from you know, because kids can't control money on their own, I was able to create a trust where my mother was the trustee. All my assets would go into the trust. My mother would control it for the benefit of my children. And you know, the kids would still go to my ex husband if I were to die, but she at least would make sure that they were responsible. Possibly financially cared for, and that didn't happen until they were five and seven. And I was like, how did I survive sleeping like for those five to seven years after the after I did, I was like, Oh my God. Like, I should have. I don't know understand what prevented me from doing that earlier. I should have. I should have. But I did it

Jamila Souffrant 20:21

right. I think for a lot of people, it's it's just not thinking about it and just hoping nothing bad happens. Because the amount of whether it's emotional, mental or physical work to do it feels so heavy, like you said, based on all the responsibilities we already have, managing your own life as a single person is like keeping up on all the appointments and things you need to do and paying these taxes or bills, versus now you have kids. Now you have parents to take care of it, so much so I I can see why people bury their head under the sand, but it's so important that we hopefully you're listening to this wake up and get things done, because it is so important to

Beth Pinsker 20:59

be prepared. Yeah, I think people overestimate how hard it is, because I put that, I put this in my book, to be honest about things and be really detailed, going to an estate attorney to get a simple trust drawn up. You know, it's going to cost you three to $5,000 it costs my mom 5000 and cost me less because mine was less complicated, because I have less stuff. But it's like when you go to the doctor's office and you have to fill out the form like, nobody says, Oh, I'm not going to the doctor's office because I don't want to fill out my medical history form. Like going to an attorney to get this done. You're not doing it yourself. The whole point of hiring a professional Is it, is it like you give them a little bit of information, the same kind of information that goes on a medical form, and they go and do it for you. So when people say it's, oh, it's so hard, well, it's not really that hard, you know, like, you got to fill out a couple of forms and and write a check. And then I point out, because a lot of people don't understand this part of it, but the $4,000 I spent on my trust? Well, let's go with my mom's the $5,000 my mom spent on her trust probably saved us from spending 10 to $15,000 after she died, or more even. But she put her house into her apartment into a trust, and that allowed me and my brother to sell it immediately and not have to pay the mortgage and the electricity and all of that for months while we went through probate and we didn't have to pay for an attorney to do like a very complicated probate. So her $5,000 saved us from 10s of 1000s of dollars of expenses on the other end of things. So if she hadn't had done that, we would have ended up paying more than than she paid for that. So, you know, it's one of those things that, like, okay, you can download this power of attorney from the internet for free, or for maybe, you know, if you want to pay for a customized one, like, 90 bucks is the going rate. If you don't have that and you need it and you have to go to court $18,000 it costs $18,000 and about a year of your life going in and out of court hearings to get guardianship over somebody. And it happens a lot like look at Jay Leno. Jay Leno has been in the news because his wife had dementia, has dementia, and he didn't have a power of attorney for her so that he could set up a trust, and so he had to go to court and get guardianship. And we know about this because guardianship is a public process, and, you know, the reporters are all over it, but it's an it's an object lesson and a cautionary tale for the rest of us. Like, do you want to be in court spending your time doing that and your money, or do you want to just download something in five minutes from the internet? Like, you know, it's up to you.

Jamila Souffrant 23:46

Yeah, well, you mentioned you have a brother, so I know the other thing that happens is where there's more than one person and who who can have a say or isn't involved with the aging parent or sick parent. How, how do you approach those conversations, if there is a difference of opinion or maybe mistrust or people not getting along,

Beth Pinsker 24:05

yeah, luckily, I didn't face too much of that. My mom made me and my brother co everything. So if we needed to make a decision for her, we had to agree on it. Luckily, you know, we didn't have to make any really hard decisions that we disagreed on. But when it came to my son having to pick I didn't want him to make me and my ex husband, you know, co proxies on his health care form, or CO executors on his power of attorney form, like that, to me, sounded like a disaster. And most attorneys I talked to for the for the book said making people co anything is is kind of a bad idea, because you never know if that's going to turn into conflict. And the problem with all of this is that there's no arbiter for ending a dispute except for going to court like mom and dad. I was like, Mom and Dad are not coming back from the. Grave to, like, slap somebody on the head to them, you know, like mom and dad are good at disputes like that, but nobody else can can settle things. So if you get in a fight with the sibling and you can't settle it on your own, you're going to court. And courts a bad, bad place to be.

Jamila Souffrant 25:19

So then is the recommendation like this to say, I am a like, I'm older. My kids are older. Now is it that I choose one kid where that might be an issue if the other kids are like, Why? Why did you choose them?

Beth Pinsker 25:33

The attorneys I spoke to said that most of the conflict can go away if you discuss it. So if Mom, mom leaves a will and like oftentimes this, this is a scenario that happens. You have one kid who's a teacher and one kid who's a lawyer, right? One makes significantly less than the other, and mom leaves more money to the kid who's a teacher than the kid who's a lawyer who doesn't need it. And if you talk about it beforehand. Nobody gets upset. Nobody sues. If you don't talk about it, then the lawyer, kid you know, gets to the reading of the will, and it's like mom didn't want me to have the same amount as my sibling. I'm, I'm upset that can't be true. I'm gonna, I'm gonna sue if you talk about it and everybody understands that this is your wish, and you explain it like, you know, child a makes less than child B, so I'm gonna make it equitable, instead of being 5050, fair. Then people get it, you know, like you can't really argue with that. Yeah,

Jamila Souffrant 26:37

reasonable people get it. Reasonable people get it, you would think so. Hey, journeyers, if you are loving this podcast, then you will love my book, Your journey to financial freedom, a step by step guide to achieving wealth and happiness. I wrote this book for you. This book is for you. If you want a clear and enjoyable path to having more money, options and a rich life, this book is for you. If you hate your commute and the fact that you need to seek approval or permission from a boss, I hated that when I worked. This book is for you. If you weren't born into wealth, you didn't marry rich or won the lottery, but you still want freedom. This book is for you. If you're at a crossroads, a major decision or event is imminent, maybe a career change, marriage, starting a family, pressures are reaching a tipping point, and the discomfort and the desire for more can no longer be ignored. And this book is for you. If you find yourself zoned out at meetings, looking out the window or daydreaming about the life you truly want. So go pick up your journey to financial freedom.com. So I can show you how to map out how to get from where you are today to where you ultimately want to be. And enjoy the journey while you're on the path, head over to your journey to financial freedom.com. To see where you can pick the book up. It's available on Amazon bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore everywhere go to your journey to financial freedom.com. To get the book now. This also goes into a deeper conversation of just family dynamics and how you raise your children, because as I think about raising my kids, you know, I'm already setting the tone with them, that just because your brother or sister got something doesn't mean you're going to get it. You don't need sneakers right now, right? But they need sneakers. Their sneakers are falling apart. And so it's simple things, and I think it's the dynamics of a family, and it's, it's takes decades and generations almost, right, like hopefully that it's not toxic to where, if you when you pass, hopefully before your children do that, there is respect and common ground and understanding. But it's like, if there was problems, and the way you raised your kids wasn't like that, and you had dissension and drama and kids jealousy, and you kind of stoke that fire, then I can see how that's going to be all drama, if you when you pass too.

Beth Pinsker 29:06

Yeah, I talk in the book we have one item, one special item in our family, and that's a pair of candlesticks. And we're Jewish, so candlesticks have a lot of meaning, and they came over from Russia with the first ancestor who came over in the late 1800s you know, under somebody's skirt leg tied to their leg. You know, like it's got a great family history. They're very ornate. They're not worth very much money, but there, there's only one set of them, and they have been passed down since the 1800s and the thing that my family did was, you know, because it's a Jewish family, and there's like a whole hierarchy and stuff, the candlesticks presumably always went to the oldest daughter. So they went from the person from Franny who brought them over to my great grandmother, then to. Her daughter, who was my grandmother, then to my mother, then to me. So they're sitting upstairs in my dining room right now, and we don't think about gender the same way. We're not the same religious people that you know first came over here all those years ago, and I don't know who I'm gonna I haven't really settled and written down who gets the candlesticks. But like my brother and I didn't fight about them, my mom didn't specify anything, but my brother just assumed that we've always had this family thing where the oldest daughter gets the candlestick. So of course, I'm I'm the younger child, but the oldest daughter the only daughter, and so I got the candlesticks, and I don't know which of my kids was gonna get the candlesticks. I'm not gonna decide based on gender, but it's a decision I have to face, and it kind of, it kind of weighs on me a little bit, because I don't, I don't know what's fair in that circumstance, you know, do I give them to the one who I think will have kids? You know, I don't know at this point which one of them will have kids. I don't know which one will be more religious than the other, or would find more value in a pair of candlesticks. So like, they're too young right now to sort any of that out. So right now they're just happily sitting on a shelf, and we look at them and appreciate them, and I have no idea what I'm gonna do with them,

Jamila Souffrant 31:22

and it goes to thinking about just while we're talking about caregiving and people who we are looking after their assets and things that matter to them, it's also thinking through what matters to us, especially as we are getting older, and what happens next. I just think it's just being just thoughtful and intentional about it, because your kids, whatever you decide or not decide or not talk about like that, all impacts your kids now when they come of age and need to help you.

Beth Pinsker 31:52

Yeah, and there's also a financial planning element to it, you know, if you're trying to be financially independent, you know, in your 40s or 50s, or whatever age you choose as your target. What's left over at the end? You know, we all do these projections, and we don't know, like, I see some projections, and people have their plans laid out, and they have three or 4 million dot, like, if they live till 90, the graphs go up, and they're like, at the end of their life, they have three or 4 million million dollars. And I'm like, well, what's the point of that three or $4 million like, you're controlling your spending right now and restricting in order to achieve financial independence, but you could probably spend a little bit more, like, you know, you're gonna have money left over in most of these circumstances, and you know, you you have to decide what you're going to do with it. I especially, I have this one part in my book where I talk about crypto, because crypto is is one asset where people don't like to give up control, and it's like a bearer bond, and whoever has the the keys, you know, can walk off with it. So how do you leave your crypto? You know, to somebody, because you have to write down instructions. And nobody wants to write down instructions for how to leave their crypto. But it's the same thing if it's cash too, like you have to have a plan for it. Somebody's going to get it in the end. If you have leftovers,

Jamila Souffrant 33:19

it reminds me of Bill Perkins book, die with zero, and that thought process of actually winding down, where the goal is to not have anything and to spend that money or give that money away before you die. And it makes so much sense, I think often about my one of my my first purchase, my condo, you know, I still own and rent it out. And my hope and goal is that it does stay within the family, and after I pass, it's an asset for them. But ultimately, unless I specify that it can't be sold, they they can do they can say, all right, Mom, you're like, you saved all this money. You didn't buy that nice car you and dad wanted you. You didn't restricted all these things so that we could have these assets, and they have a different mind set and view of what they want their life to be. And can't necessarily blame them for that either, which is why there has to be like this thought process of, what do you need in your life to be comfortable and happy, and then, of course, thoughtfully, what do you want to leave behind for other generations?

Beth Pinsker 34:20

Yeah, I have to say, with financial caregiving, you know, I got to experience ahead of time, it was kind of like a mini preview to spending down your money. And, you know, there are most, most of us are not prepared for the spending of the money accumulators. And people who are, you know, working towards a goal, are very good at working towards that goal, and the back end of it is really hard, and when you are spending down a finite amount of money, it's really scary. You have a lot of thoughts of like, I have a whole section of the book that's how to make the money last right. By the time you are 76 as my mom was, that's the. Money you have. There's not a whole lot that gets generated new after that point. And when the caregiving costs just keep coming, going up and up and up. My mom's, you know, caregivers cost $12,000 a month, and there's not a lot of fortunes that will sustain $12,000 a month in spending on just caregiving. One person I interviewed for the book, her mother, was in dementia care, in memory care for 12 years, and they just kept spending down the money and spending down the money and spending down the money. And the woman's brother, you know what woke up like two years before the end, it was like, holy cow, we're getting close. We're gonna have to watch it. And you know, the person I interviewed was like, we're already watching it, don't worry. But the mother ended up dying one month and one day after her money ran out. And you know, she was pretty sick at that point, and in her early 90s, and the kids had to decide, you know, kids, but you know, they're adults, they had to decide, like, Mom is, you know, she graduated from hospice, you know, she's on in memory care for 12 years. Like, are we going to move her now? Are we going to put her on Medicaid? Like, what are we going to do? And they're like, Okay, let's just pay for a month of the nursing home and see what happens. And then, you know, they paid for the second month of the nursing home and she died. And then the nursing homes is like, you got to come get her stuff right away, or we're going to charge you for another month. And they're like, can we have a minute please? Like, you know, we're not ready to do this yet, but you know, things move on, like the money stuff doesn't stop for anybody.

Jamila Souffrant 36:48

You bring up, like financial independence, and a lot of my listeners are that's the goal, that's the dream, and working towards, like investing and saving to get hopefully there earlier than than the standard age, but anything can happen outside of your control. You know, things that are in our control happen just because we are humans, and we make mistakes and life happens. But then you have so many factors. You know, the people you love, whether it's your children or older people in your family or your spouse, like anything can happen to them and just throw your plan off track. So let's talk a little bit about that too.

Beth Pinsker 37:21

Yeah, let's because, you know, I deal with so many people who have, you know, questions about every bit of minutia of their financial planning, you know, Roth conversions and what's their Medicare Supplement going to be? And, like, they track everything down to the penny. Should I do this ETF or that? ETF, you know, and expense ratios and, and I'm like, Well, what's your mother up to? Like, how's your mom? You know, what are your kids doing? You know that that family map I was talking about that where, like, some of the lines might not be even connected by blood. Who's on that map? Like, who on that map Are you responsible for, because, like, you can do everything right? I talked to so many financial professionals from my book. Almost everybody I interviewed in the book was a financial professional, but also experiencing this at the same time. One of the guys I talked to was was head of wealth management and one of the big firms, and he had to help his mom after his father died with her Medicare choices, and he didn't know what to do, and he had to ask his clients what to do. Like, he's like, you've been through this. How do I help her make this Medicare choice? You know, we're all like, only as good as the person who needs the most help in our family. So you can do everything right and set your own plan, but you then have to look out beyond yourself and say, Okay, what are my responsibilities to the people around me? You know, is my mom okay? Is my dad? Okay? Step parents, your children, you know, any one of them could need something from you, and that blows your budget up, and that blows all your projections, and then all the nice rows on your spreadsheet, they start to go in the wrong direction. You know, your accumulation goals start to get less because, you know, we're all working with the the magic of compounding interest. And if you take a hit in any given year and your cash outflows go down, then your growth is going to be impacted, and so you have to know what you're in for. Like, I'll give you an example from my mom. When she first had her surgery, we thought she was going to be like, right back at her life, and she wasn't. And I went to her desk and had to sort through her bills, and she had a Past Due notice from her long term care insurance. She had lapsed on her paperwork so badly that she needed to pay a premium, and it was $6,000 but I didn't have any legal authority yet implemented because I wasn't expecting to need it. I hadn't enforced the power of attorney. I couldn't write a check from her account. I could. Didn't use her credit cards, you know, I couldn't even call the company and ask anything about it until I filed forms with them. And it turned out I had to, like, write a check from my own account for $6,000 and mail it off to them, knowing I would eventually be reimbursed. But I had to lay out that money. Well, it's not easy to come by $6,000 in my regular life. So, like, think about that. Like, you know, in an emergency situation, if somebody in your family, if you had to step in and cover for them, what would that do to your financial plan? You know, I had to shift stuff around. I had to make allowances for that so that, you know, I could, I could do that, and I got it back, you know, like, as soon as I sorted out all the paperwork they mailed, I had a FedEx them a check for $6,000 I find it absolutely ridiculous that when the money finally made its way back to me, it came regular mail. But that's just the way the financial world works. But that stuff that you're not counting on caregivers. The AARP does an annual survey about caregivers, and the annual out of pocket for caregivers is about $7,000 so if you are caring for somebody else, that's the little stuff. That's, oh, you know, mom needs a new pair of slippers, and I'm just going to order them from Amazon and have them sent to her house. That's a flight or several flights. I had to take eight flights during this time period. And not all of them were plannable at times when there would be, you know, low peak fares. Sometimes I had to go last minute. And, you know, fly at busy times and rent a car at certain times. And, you know, be off work and use up vacation days, and, you know, cover expenses and all sorts of things. You know, I had to lay out the entire funeral on my credit card. You know, it was reimbursed because she had a life insurance policy, but somebody had to put down a credit card to pay for things. And, you know, it was like me and my brother going, like, well, how much credit do you have available? How much credit do you have available? And like, who can plunk down a credit card for that amount of money? So I ended up doing it, but there are always financial costs at every turn with this sort of thing,

Jamila Souffrant 42:11

and it's just goes to show you, respectfully demanding to have these conversations with the people who you will be responsible for is important, because if something does happen, it will put you at risk or on notice for things that you're responsible for. And so it is only right that you know you're able to have these conversations with the people in your life to say, if something happens to you, I don't want to not be able to help. And so we need to have these conversations. And this is what it is now, some of the things you kind of mentioned, your mom had a life insurance policy. You were able to get reimbursed. So it sounds like she did a lot of things right, like, as she went on, yeah, so I would love to hear more about that. So you know, what are the things that she did right? And how was that helpful to you in the process,

Beth Pinsker 42:59

my mom did so many things right, and some of them were her own doing, and some of them were my with my help, the long term care insurance policy came about because my grandfather had early Alzheimer's and her brother had cancer, and when Her brother died of cancer, my parents had children young, and my brother and I were already grown. By that point, we were already out of college, and so they had a little extra money, and she got a long term care insurance policy because she was scared. She was like, I just watched my brother die. I watched my my father have Alzheimer's. These things are inheritable. I could have any of these things, and we don't have the money to pay for care. My grandmother ended up in assisted living, and then nursing care. And her journey was about 12 years, and she ran out of money most of the way through, and my uncle and my mother had to pay for her until my uncle died, and then my mother and my my aunt paid. And she didn't want me to have to do that. She didn't want me and my brother to have to pay for her to be cared for. That was something she wanted to lift off of us. And so she got this policy. My dad couldn't qualify because he had diabetes, and so when he needed some help, we had to pay out of pocket for that. And when that happened, my mom got terrified because it was blowing up her budget. You know, the care, care is really expensive. And my dad had a life insurance policy that was very robust. He was the primary breadwinner and a financial planner connected him with a life insurance policy that they had long ago gotten, and then in he had an annuity contract, and it had a life insurance rider on it, like a death benefit on his annuity. And so when he died, my mom was able to get some benefit from. From the life insurance companies, and that was the money she had for her because they didn't have, they were teachers, you know, they didn't have a whole bundle of money, but she got those death benefits. And so what she had, because she was the lower earner, was a life insurance policy that was only for a funeral, like it was just enough to cover a funeral, but that's great, because I didn't have to pay for a funeral. And funerals are expensive, and I don't know what choices I would have made if that was on me to have to it wasn't. It just wasn't what I wanted to think about right then, you know the cost of everything? It was just like, whatever is in this policy is enough to cover it. Here's my credit card. And I don't want to think about that part of things right now. This is hard enough. And the whole purpose of that kind of policy, which a lot of, especially older people these days, have those kind of policies. So it's the kind of policies that were sort of in vogue with their age group, and life insurance just isn't in vogue very much anymore, but it's really important for the people you have left behind, and more people should have it. Long Term Care Insurance isn't really viable for most people, but life insurance of some sort is, and it's important because, you know, we get covered generally by Term life insurance when you're working, but you're independent. So, and if the people in your audience are self employed in some in their major capacity, you have to think about this on your own. Like, if something happened to you, what happens to those around you, you know? Like, it's good if there is, you know, at the very least, just enough money to give you a nice send off without anybody having to worry about it. But more than that, you know your kids, education, the mortgage, you know all that stuff isn't going to get paid if you're the primary breadwinner. And it's really tough for families if they don't have that, it's worth the money.

Jamila Souffrant 47:03

Yeah, no, I agree, regardless if you have kids or not, but especially if you have kids, that's something that my husband and I did years ago because it was just important, and we didn't want to have to have the other person, whatever it would be like, not just be single alone and then having to rush back to work or have to worry about finances on top of the loss of the partner. So with that, you know, there are some also other things we didn't mention, but I think are just quick to note that will be important is make sure your beneficiaries are updated right on your bank account and any investment accounts, that that's something that anyone can do or log in and make sure it's updated too, right? Absolutely.

Beth Pinsker 47:46

Yeah. There's a whole line of ex spouses who have inherited money, a lot of current spouses who are shut out because somebody didn't update the forms, right?

Jamila Souffrant 47:56

And that's something you can log in and do? You don't have to wait. You know, you don't need an attorney for that. Nope,

Beth Pinsker 48:02

there are some easy things. There's very many easy things you can do. And it boggles my mind that it takes a lot of convincing, and that's why I was hoping by being so open and honest about what I had to go through, that it would help people understand and connect the dots. And it was like I lived through all these hard things so that you don't have to,

Jamila Souffrant 48:25

yeah, I love that are any last like words or advice that you can give someone who maybe is currently going through this or needs to have the conversation. When it comes to managing someone they care about money or having the conversation about it,

Beth Pinsker 48:39

there is a solution to every problem. I have not yet run across something that can't be dealt with, just sometimes takes a lot of tenacity and stamping your feet and holding your ground and all those you know things, but I think that your audience is probably very tenacious and resilient, and would know that you don't make one phone call and get a no and then give up. I don't think those are I don't think those are your people. I think your your audience, is the kind that that is driven and if somebody says no to you, you're going to be like, No. I don't accept that as your answer. And I'm going to figure out a way to get this done. It's really hard when it's some you know, insane financial complication, and you have a person that you're dealing with who's sick, and you'd rather do that, but you know, most of these things can be taken care of in one way or another. It's just, it's good to know your rights and responsibilities and go forward from there, because there is a path. It just you have to you have to find it. You have to clear

Jamila Souffrant 49:46

it, and be brave to do it. Clear it yourself. I love this. This conversation was great. Beth, can you please tell everyone again the name of your book when it comes out and where they can find it, and more about you?

Beth Pinsker 49:56

Yes, it's my mother's money. I keep things simple in. My life. I'm just my name everywhere. So you can get the book information from bethpinsker.com Beth Pinsker on all social media. I'm Beth Pinsker on Market Watch. I've been in the you know, writing for 30 years, and I'm very easy to find. I answer questions on my website if you are still needing more information or have a specific situation that you can't find information on, and you know, always available. I

Jamila Souffrant 50:27

will link all of that in the episode show notes. Thank you so much again, Beth for coming on the show. Thank you. Don't forget. You can get the episode show notes for this episode by going to journey to launch.com or click the description of wherever you're listening to this, and you can still grab your jumpstart guide for free to help you on your journey to financial freedom by going to journey to launch.com/jumpstart

Jamila Souffrant 50:54

if you want to support me and the podcast and love the free content and information that you get here. Here are four ways that you can support me in the show. One, make sure you're subscribed to the podcast wherever you listen, whether that's Apple podcasts, that purple app on your phone, your Android device, YouTube, Spotify, wherever it is that you happen to listen, just subscribe so you are not missing an episode. And if you're happening to listen to this in Apple podcasts, rate review and subscribe there. I appreciate and read every single review. Number two, follow me on my social media accounts. I'm at journey to launch on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and I love, love, love interacting with journeyers. There three, support and check out the sponsors of this show. If you hear something that interests you. Sponsors are the main ways we keep the podcast lights on here, so show them some love for supporting your girl four. And last but not least, share this episode, this podcast, with a friend or family member or co worker so that we can spread the message of Journey to launch. All right, that's it until next week. Keep on journeying. Journeyers. You you.

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