How Do You Avoid Losing Your Wealth After the Death of your Spouse? Retirement Survivorship

Jessica Cannella: Welcome back to our series on Survivorship and the importance of taking care of your financial picture when you lose a spouse. Today, we have a very important guest with us and a familiar face with Troy Sharpe, who is the CEO and Co-founder of Oak Harvests Financial Group. I am Jessica Cannella, Co-founder, and President of Oak Harvest.

Troy and I today are going to discuss with you, where you want to start with a financial conversation once you lose your spouse, critical information that you need to address with your financial advisor. If you’re not currently working with a financial advisor, hopefully, this will inspire you to facilitate that relationship. We’ve talked about it throughout this series. The importance of being proactive when it comes to your finances while your spouse is still alive is the best time, most optimal time to meet with a financial advisor, a CPA, and an estate attorney.

If your spouse has already passed recently or even a couple of years ago, it’s still in your best interest to meet with these professionals to help you stay on the same page with your finances and really understand big picture your portfolio and what is most important to you and leaning on professionals to help give you that type of guidance. Today, we’re going to be chatting with Troy about where to start with the finances. What have you seen as a financial advisor at Oak Harvest? Talking to the team of advisors that we have, where do people generally want to start with that conversation once they have lost their spouse?

Troy Sharpe: I know you’ve covered in the first couple videos in this series before but I just want to first and foremost stress the importance of communication. The majority of wealth is lost. I think the statistic is 90% of all wealth is lost by the third generation in this country. When you look at the amount of wealth that you’ve worked your entire life for, the primary cause of that wealth being lost by that third generation is a lack of community communication throughout the family.

I just want to stress that because when you’re talking about the relationship between two spouses, we’ve seen so much over the years. I remember back in 2008 when one spouse would refuse to tell the other spouse how much money they’d actually lost because of the stock market crash. We have a policy here where we need to get to know your spouse.

We need to get to know not just one of you, two of you. I remember back then, people would flat-out refuse to bring their spouse on appointments because they didn’t want their wife, or typically it was the wife to know how much money they’d actually lost in the stock market. When we talk about some of the things that we’ve seen over the years, that’s a really big one. We can prevent so many bad things from happening by just communicating where the accounts are, what the goal of the retirement plan is, all of those things.

I just want to stress that. When it comes to when you’ve now lost a spouse and this, of course, could happen, suddenly this could happen where it’s something that you knew was coming and those are two different scenarios. Usually, if it’s coming and it’s something you’ve been preparing for for a while typically the morning period isn’t as long. We can tackle some of the challenges that are those next steps pretty quickly. If it’s sudden and completely unexpected, we want to wait usually a few months at least, if not six months or so before we really start to dive in, because it is a lot of work when you lose a spouse.

Jessica: Yes and there you never want to make, we’ve stressed this throughout this series, you don’t want to make a major financial decision when you’re under emotional duress. Again, the best time to do it is even before somebody gets a bad diagnosis, while you’re both healthy and together because emotions are not involved and you’re able to think with a clear head and go into it with a stable mind.

We talked a little bit with Josh in our last video, the fourth video in the series, what you need to know about your taxes in the calendar year that your spouse dies. I would lean on the earlier side of maybe two to three months after a spouse passes, depending on what time of year it is. I know that that sounds harsh, but there’s some really critical steps that you can take from a tax implication standpoint, in the calendar year that your spouse passes. If they pass in November, you don’t have the luxury of six months to make some of these decisions. It doesn’t mean that you have to make a decision, it’s facilitating the conversation.

Again, the best place to make a decision from is an unemotional standpoint and that’s a lot of the reason why people pay their financial advisors to make decisions with their accounts because we are unemotional about your money and that pays. There’s been numerous studies that show that that pays when it comes to investing. Emotions are temporary and logic is permanent, hopefully.

Troy: Just a lot of times when emotions, all the time, for the most part, overrule the logical side of the brain. When we look at the steps that you go through whenever you do lose a spouse, first and foremost, there’s a lot of paperwork involved. Here at Oak Harvest Financial Group, we have what we call a concierge team. This is the most important part of our relationship with you and your family, is not just the planning and the preparation we’ve done up to that point, but the sad part about our job is every year we lose somewhere between 10 to 20 clients.

We understand what this is like. It’s a very emotional time as you’ve stated, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done as well. The concierge team, their job is to help fill out all that paperwork for you to the greatest extent possible. This is transferring accounts from one spouse to the other spouse. If it’s a retirement account, you may want to do what we call a spousal rollover to where now that retirement account becomes yours. There could be different choices you make, though you may want to do that as an inherited IRA, depending on the age difference, because the required minimum distribution for that retirement account can be different depending on how that new account is titled.

There’s some pre-planning there as well with non-retirement account assets. That, again, probably for the prior segment with Josh and taxes, but I’ll share a quick story. I had a client, probably, he was a prospective client coming in. He’d listened to me on the radio show and he’s, “Troy, I just want you to know, before we get started in this process, my wife had recently passed away. She had dealt with a long-term illness and it was going on for a couple of years.”

They had some stock in the company that he worked for that he had owned for 30 years, and it kept accumulating to that position. It was growing, growing, growing, and he had a very small basis compared to what the value of it was today. Long story short, the advisor that they were with didn’t do any tax planning. The proper thing to do, now, the rules are a little bit different if you’re in a community property state versus a separate property state, and this client was in a separate property state, which most of you watching this probably are because there’s only nine community property states in the country.

To make this short, if they would’ve retitled those assets from strictly in his name into the wife’s name, all of those gains in those stocks over the years that they had accumulated, they would’ve passed from the wife to him 100% tax-free. The previous advisor didn’t title the account appropriately because there was no tax planning, and it wasn’t anything that was-

Jessica: It’s not intentional.

Troy: -not intentional.

Jessica: It’s an oversight.

Troy: It’s just probably a lack of education, because most investment advisors aren’t really educated in a ton of financial planning concepts. This is pretty sophisticated tax planning topic. Long story short, there is a one-year rule there, but proper planning would’ve been to do a spousal gift, put that account in his wife’s name because he knew she was going to pass away. Then when she passed away, that money would’ve went to him 100% with what we call a step up in basis. That would’ve been 100% tax-free.
It costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now getting back to the process of when one spouse does pass away and what do we do after it. A lot of paperwork, as I said, you need to check the beneficiaries on all of your retirement accounts. Make sure you make those changes. I could tell stories. I have so many stories in the back of my head, but I remember a long time ago we met with someone who had been married 30 years ago, got divorced, but they never changed the beneficiary designation on their retirement account when they got remarried.

When he passed away, the retirement account was– The wife thought she was going to receive it, but because when he got divorced, he had never changed the beneficiary designation, the money actually went to the first spouse. Again, poor planning, but we want to make sure those beneficiary designations are getting changed. That’s really important. The life insurance, you want to make sure you know where the life insurance is, make sure those beneficiaries are correct.

Jessica: Yes, I had a client recently come in, a personal friend of mine actually, her husband was killed unexpectedly on a motorcycle just a month ago. She had no idea if he had life insurance or not. He’d never spoke about it. 77 years old, both of them. We were able to locate a life insurance policy for them. There’s a website that our team uses to go ahead and search to see if you are the beneficiary of a life insurance policy using that person’s social security number and really being able to find that policy and it turns out he did have a policy.

It’s $100,000, but every penny counts especially when you were looking at her net worth. It’s really important to do that inventory list that we talk about on the first video and make sure that you’ve got all your ducks in a row and call previous employers and check to see if there’s life insurance. If you think there might be, we can also assist with that as we did for my friend Mary Ellen

Troy: Goes back to my first point, communication. It’s a good example of a lack of communication within a relationship.

Jessica: He handled everything. Finance wasn’t her thing, which is common for so many women in that age range.

Troy: We have a saying around here where a lot of times maybe if the husband is meeting with us for the first time, one on one, they may tell us, “Hey, look, my wife isn’t interested in this stuff.” It’s true, maybe she’s not interested, but I absolutely promise you that she cares. That’s why we have that requirement where, at some point, in this process, when you’re coming aboard at Oak Harvests, we need to get to know both of you. If something does happen to you, Mr. Client, when you pass away, that’s not the first time we’re meeting your wife.

Jessica: Yes. There’s, just to stick out there that 77% of women change financial advisors when their husband passes away, if the husband was the person who was handling the finances. Why do you think that is? Because they never met the advisor and they’re asked to blindly trust somebody that’s got a little letters at the end of their name that they’ve earned for themselves.

Without a level of understanding, trust cannot be built. I don’t personally, a lot of our advisors won’t progress somebody through our process if we don’t meet the spouse by the second visit. The first one is a grace period to see if we connect, but if I’m not meeting your spouse by the second visit, then we’re not moving forward because it is so important that we all feel comfortable communicating with each other because, to your point, that is the biggest area of which is going to benefit you in the event that your spouse passes, is that everybody’s on the same page.

Troy: Yes. We’re building a plan for families. We’re financial planners, we’re retirement planners. If you’re married, we’re building a plan for both of you, that’s because we have to not only get the information from you, one of the prospective clients, but we need to need to know what’s important to both of you.

Jessica: Yes. The surviving spouse. I open every meeting with them. My duty is when we talk about legacy, here’s how most of our clients feel. My duty is to take care of you as a couple and then to take care of the surviving spouse. If there’s money left over for the kids, unless there’s a special needs event or something where you know it is on your heart to leave a large legacy to the kids, our duty is you as a couple then surviving spouse. One of the things that we have a chat with our clients when they do lose a spouse is who’s going to take care of you in the event that you need medical assistance, long-term care. That’s built into every retirement success plan that we put together.

Then spoiler alert, we’re going to, or a little teaser, we’re going to have, our next series will be on Wealth Transfer Legacy beyond the spouses. What happens when both of you are deceased? How do we get ahead of that? If you have elderly parents, who are ill or in their 80s and 90s, end of life is approaching, how do we make sure that it’s a smooth wealth transfer process for your family? That will be our next YouTube series that we hope to launch in December.
Troy: That’s part of the entire retirement success plan.

Jessica: It’s not something that most advisors are talking about, at least outside of our firm, because they’re purely focused on the asset management piece, which is a component. It’s a big component to a plan, but it’s not a financial plan.

Troy: I don’t want to go too far down the wealth transfer process in the wealth planning process, but again, it comes back to communication. This is where we see a lot of challenges because we have clients that we know are inheriting money from their elderly mother or father, but that generation a lot of times especially, doesn’t want to open up. They don’t like to-

Jessica: They really called the silent generation.

Troy: They don’t want to communicate. We had someone not too long ago where clearly laid out how there was hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential difference in the decisions that they made with their parents’ assets as far as the setup and what they wanted to happen. If nothing changed, this is what was going to happen versus this is how they should be doing it. They said, “Look, I tried to bring it up to my father, and he just, he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it and he’s just not going to talk about it with you.”

Jessica: That will be the very first video in the series, is how to have the conversation with your elderly parents, how to approach that. Please check back and ring the notification bell so that you can subscribe to when we are going to be releasing that video. You’ll be notified that that has released because that is a very important conversation and another teaser.

It doesn’t generally happen with one conversation, it’s how you approach it over a series of times and Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas is probably not the best time to have it. I have a client, he is 72, and his parents are in their early 90s, and he has repeatedly requested a key to their house, and the dad’s response is, “Why do you need a key to the house? Knock on the front door?” He’s like, in case something happens, so literally called the silent generation.
There are some ways to move the needle with your aging parents, so we’ll cover that in our next series. Back to the conversation about where we start with our clients in the process of losing a spouse, income is definitely a headliner when we’re talking about losing a spouse, and I’ll let you dive a little deeper into that. What changes around income?

Troy: It’s a personal thing, you’re absolutely going to lose one social security check, assuming both spouses have social security. The tax component of that is big because unless you have dependent children that live with you, you’re going to go from the married filing jointly brackets to the single brackets where essentially you can have half the income and fall into the same tax bracket range.

You’re going to lose a social security check, which impacts the income. If there’s a pension, it may go away, we’ve seen before where a significant chunk of somebody’s retirement income was dependent on an annuity that one spouse held, but that annuity was a single life-only annuity. What that means is when one spouse passes away and the annuity is on their life only that guaranteed lifetime income check, the income goes away.

It’s not there for that second spouse. Again, from a planning perspective, these are things that we uncover on that 1st, 2nd, 3rd visit. When someone becomes a client and we’re putting together a comprehensive plan, these are all the things that we do that we’re checking on that maybe even existing clients don’t necessarily know that we’ve done for them.

Or maybe they knew at the time, but they don’t remember because we cover so much ground in the financial planning process because there is so much to cover in retirement. Looking at all the various sources of income, and I guess, I should break this apart because there’s really two different types of people that we see in this scenario. Ones that are existing clients now, existing clients, we’ve already put in place these safeguards as part of the retirement success plan.

We don’t have to worry about the surprises for existing clients because this is the process that we’ve walked them through to make sure that there won’t be any line or landmines whenever one spouse does pass away. Then the 2nd type that we’ll see is someone who comes in to see us because their spouse passed away, and then a friend refers them to us. They say, “Hey, I’ve been working with this group for a long time. Give them a call, see if you’re a good fit.” Then we’ll come in and it’s a lot more work then because typically, we see a lot of different things that have been overlooked and it’s like a deer in the headlights type moment.

Jessica: I just think of the dining room table that’s the thing that just stands out to me is that my assistant Nicole, certified financial planner myself, we’ve sat at dining room tables of our clients and it’s just full of unopened mail, and piles and to-do lists and all of that, and it’s so overwhelming for the client, all the admin stuff, but that’s really where our concierge team steps up to bad and helps to alleviate some of that burden when it comes to the administrative part of things, which is very daunting.

Troy: That’s not to even mention the legal side of thing. If there’s trusts involved or if there’s entities like LLCs or possibly a family limited partnership, you need to have your agreements in place and all your legal documentation because when you go to get money from the bank, you not only need the court order, but you need some other pieces of verification to prove that, hey, this money is actually, it belongs to me. We could go into the probate process there, but really so many things to cover, so many, boxes to check I to dot, T’s to cross.

Jessica: That’s where leaning on the dream team and we’re defining the dream team as having a CPA, an estate planner, and a financial advisor, financial planner, all working on your behalf and in your best interest. Having those three individuals will be a checks and balance system for the client who is experiencing this overwhelm because they’ll know exactly where to turn and get legal advice, tax advice, and have somebody, the financial planner is really like the quarterback that’s calling the plays and working with you to coordinate with these other individuals. having that team to back you is just essential.

Troy: I wanted to bring that point up because most people don’t realize this, and this is the common practice, at least for my experience in this country. Someone thinks they want to trust, so they go to an attorney and they get a trust. Well, I just had this the other day, I was speaking with someone and he told me he wanted to get a trust. I said, “Well, why do you want to get a trust?” He says, “Well, my daughter, she’s successful, but whatever’s left, I want to go to her. She’s married, but the relationship’s on a little bit off the rocks and there may be a divorce down the road so I want to have a trust in place to make sure that if she gets divorced, that her may-be soon-to-be future ex-husband doesn’t get half of everything that I’ve-”

Jessica: Her inheritance.

Troy: Yes, her inheritance so he said, yes. I went to an attorney. I told them I wanted a revocable living trust and the attorney gave me a revocable living trust.

Jessica: Comes at a fee.

Troy: Yes. The point here was that a revocable living trust is going to do absolutely nothing to accomplish the objective of what he wanted to accomplish so if you go to an attorney and you tell them, I want a revocable living trust, they’re going to say, sure, it’s 3,500 bucks. 4,500 bucks and they’re going to.

Jessica: That’s a fee inside of it.

Troy: Take about 10 minutes of work to draw up that revocable living trust, typically, it’s mostly a template, maybe some little bit of customization there, and charge you the fee and you’re going to get that revocable living trust, but it’s not the financial tool that you actually need. That’s a different type of trust that would need to be set up with specific provisions that allowed your objectives to come to fruition.

The point there is that the financial advisor should be, assuming they’re qualified in financial planning and retirement planning, and they’ve been doing this for a long time, they should be the focal point of those discussions. Your estate wants or needs who you want the money to go to, to whom, and the tax discussion as well. CPAs often don’t have the full financial picture of all of your assets.

Jessica: They’re historians so they want to look at what happened in the years prior and not be forward thinking and if you check out our previous video with Joshua Langford, our CPA, you’ll hear why it’s so important to do forward-thinking, especially in the calendar year that your spouse passes and a CPA can help but really the directive comes from the financial advisor.

Troy: Yes. Since we’ve opened our tax department here, I’ve learned so much more about CPAs in general and one of the reasons why CPAs don’t do that type of forward planning is because CPA practices typically aren’t profitable in the first few years. You have to build up a client base, and when you’re looking at trying to make a CPA practice as profitable as it can be, you have only a limited amount of capacity so tax returns take time, 5 hours to 10 hours, depending on possibly more, depending on how simple or complex that tax return is.

If you’re going to have a profitable CPA practice, the challenge is you’re working with a limited amount of capacity in terms of the hours that you can work and these are billable hours so CPAs typically aren’t doing financial planning because they’re taking away from their more profitable billable hours that they have for putting tax returns together and bringing more clients on.

If they were doing forward planning, they wouldn’t be able to take, as many clients and do as many tax returns, they’d make less money and ultimately, they’re not financial planners, they’re CPAs. Long story short, the financial planner should be the center of that universe, should be the person that you’re talking to about your estate planning desires and objectives.

Then you have to work with an attorney to draft those legal documents but that financial advisor should also be working with that attorney to explain what’s important to you, what we’re trying to accomplish from a financial planning perspective and then the big one, which is extremely important, once those legal entities are created, you want to make sure that you transfer the title of those assets into the trust or into the LLC or into whatever entity is created to complete that estate plan. I can’t tell you how many times, and I hate to say this, but this is close to probably 100% of the time, it seems realistically 90%, where we’ll have a client come in, say, “Troy, I went to go see an attorney. I got this trust.”

How, and when did that happen? Well, that was two years ago. Well, thanks for catching me up during this timeframe. I said, “Do have you retitled your assets into the trust?” They say, “No, I didn’t know I was supposed to do that” and so typically, what’ll happen is the attorney will have a conversation with them, maybe give them a piece of paper with some instructions, and of course, the client gets busy, goes on about their life and doesn’t do it so they paid all this money for these legal documents and entities, but they’ve never completed the estate plan so having the financial advisor, and I shouldn’t say financial advisor because all financial advisors are not created equally.

Some of us are planners and where that is our core, that is who we are, we’re planners. We just use tools like the stock market for investments. We use tax strategies for tax planning, but we’re not just investment people or not just tax people, we’re financial planners. We look at all of that but having that financial planner at the center of that discussion is going to ensure that you complete that estate plan. At least that’s their responsibility.

Same thing on the tax side. If we need to have a conversation with the CPA, this is why we open our tax department because come March or April, if I have questions for a client’s CPA and I need to submit an email or give a phone call, there’s very little chance that I’m going to get a response from that outside CPA because they’re so busy doing their work. Having the advisor, the planner at the focal point, that’s going to make sure that all these different parts, and we call it the retirement success plan. It’s a process, it’s a structured process where we’re looking at the different aspects. Then when someone is a client, that’s a lot of what the reviews are about ongoing, making sure those things are in process.

Jessica: Proactive, which keeps our clientele very accountable to the plan. That’s the most important piece. It’s like right back to those estate documents, it’s like it’s not enough to just do it. You have to formalize it, sign on the dotted line, make sure that it’s properly titled and that it’s actually enacted. That is the accountability piece and where having a team of professionals really behooves our clients because we proactively call out the way that we use a retirement success plan.

It’s almost like if you think of a timeline, we covered in reviews, but we also have subsequent meetings, a tax planning meeting. That’s its own meaning in and of itself done with our tax planning professionals. Sometimes in conjunction with the CPA. It’s really important to stay proactive and hold our clients accountable to it, or time’s going to pass. Like your client, two years will go by and you think you’ve completed something, come to find out you didn’t take the final step. We make sure that nothing goes overlooked.
One conversation I wanted to revisit was, especially if you have not been involved in financial conversations and you’ve recently lost your spouse, it’s extremely important to have a meeting with your financial advisor or get a second opinion from another financial advisor, ideally financial planner. As it relates to what is your risk capacity in your portfolio, how much risk can you afford to take? What is your risk tolerance?

My experience in the field as a financial advisor has been that it’s very rare that two partners in a couple have the exact same risk threshold or comfort level taking on risk. Generally, in my experience, it’s been that the male partner is a little bit more risky and the woman is a little bit more conservative. It’s important to look at your account, your investments with your financial advisor, and determine how is it currently structured and what was enough risk for you might be way too much for your husband or vice versa.
Troy: I’ll never forget this conversation again a few years back, but the, her husband had passed away and he primarily made all the investment decisions and he would look at the statements and the portfolios risk tolerance was based on their objectives as far as how much income they needed making the portfolio last. When I first met him on the very first appointment, he said, “Troy, the number one thing to me is that if something happens to me, my wife is taken care of.”

We build out the entire plan with that as the primary focus, making sure that if something happened to him, she would be taken care of, but she was not involved in the process except for to meet me on that one appointment and start to build that relationship. She would never come to any of the annual reviews. She would, she like we see some, a lot of times just really didn’t, just wasn’t there.

The long story short here is whenever the market would go down, then he and I had an understanding, of course, because the portfolio was set up for long-term growth, we had a certain amount in the equity bucket, and it didn’t matter what the fluctuation of value was because they had some more secure money. The income was coming from all these multiple different places. The equity bucket was just meant for very long-term capital appreciation. The short-term volatility didn’t impact their security. Now, when he passed away and I started working with her, she had an entirely different emotional reaction to the fluctuation of value inside the account.

Jessica: Pacing the hallways at night.

Troy: Well, my point was when we made the changes, she never had to go through that. Whenever we had a discussion about risk tolerance, when she came in and we went, the concierge team of course helped to transfer everything, change the beneficiaries, get all those ducks in the row, make it as seamless as possible from the administrative side of this transition in her life and really starting of a new chapter, once all that was taken care of, we had the discussion about risk and goals and the purpose of money and why we invest and the kids and the plan that we had in place, just refreshing her on things that I had told her several years prior, whenever she did participate in that planning process in the beginning, but it had been years since I had seen her.

As we dove deeper, it became very clear that her risk tolerance and I like to use the term risk willingness as opposed to tolerance personally just because how willing are we to stay invested in the market in our plan if the values are fluctuating like this? What is your willingness to stay committed to the plan that we put in place? That’s what I really need to know.

Risk tolerance it’s just kind of I don’t know. It became very clear that she was not willing to stay invested if values fluctuated to the downside and truth of the matter is the plan that we had in place, she didn’t need a significant amount of equity exposure for all the objectives that we had put in the plan to come to fruition. That conversation was extremely critical because their ability to stay invested through volatile periods of the stock market completely different sides of the spectrum.

Jessica: Yes. It’s different when I know for a lot of my clients that are not as interested in the financial piece and they trust their husbands so congratulations, husbands, out there. Your wife trusts you. If she’s not looking at the statements, but you’re looking at them and they try to read a little bit between the lines and see like okay is he facing the hallways? No, it’s just a, hey, no, I’m okay. We’re okay honey. It’s going to come back up. Then when it’s the shoes on the other foot, you lose that person that you trust implicitly and they’re not there to reassure you.

That’s when having a financial advisor to remind you of the context of the plan to revisit these risk willingness, I love that, those type of conversations becomes just essential to your peace of mind in retirement because he sad reality is you no longer have that person to reach across and touch you on the knee and say honey it’s okay the markets come back. We’re in this for the long term. It really is a personal decision what your risk willingness is and what’s going to bring you peace of mind. Also, one thing that I did want to circle back to was the income discussion is that it is typical, would you say, about a 15% to 20% reduction in expenses when we lose a spouse.

That’s also something that we want to look at. Our clients we take them through our internal software and rerun numbers and look at okay we’re losing the lower of the two social security checks. Maybe there’s a spousal benefit on the pension. Maybe not. It’s just kind of dropped back to the drawing board because what worked as a unit could be so different now that we’ve lost our spouse.

Troy: Yes. We have a saying here and it’s we build the box around you as opposed to trying to fit you into this pre-made packaged box like a big box firm. I guess no pun intended there. I’ve seen it all types of different ways. I’ve seen it where the spending actually goes up, but typically, industrywide, it’s pretty standard assumption that about a 20% reduction in spending because you’re supporting one person as opposed to two people. A little bit less on the various on insurances so on and so forth. Pretty customary in the industry to have that 20% drop in estimated expenses.

Jessica: Yes. Then again that’s the importance of really getting inventory while your spouse is alive and understanding exactly what bills, memberships, credit cards that they’ve subscribed to that you might be unaware of. Check out the first video in the series if you haven’t gone through that drill with your spouse. If your spouse has already passed away, another way to do that would be to go through credit card statements and look at what the expenses were.

Check out the second video in the series for the first five things you’ll want to do as soon as your spouse passes to get ahead of that for yourself. I really appreciated the conversation. In closing is there anything that you would like to add that we haven’t covered?
Troy: Final thing for me is when a spouse does pass away, it truly is the most important job that we play in the relationship with your family here at Oak Harvest Financial Group. The planning, the investments, taxes, all that stuff we do leading up to that point where one spouse is lost. That’s all to prepare your family to be okay if something happens to one of you. Of course, we want you both to live a very, very long time, and the planning is designed to financially support you if you live a very, very long time. I think it’s very important for people to understand that it is the most important job that we have is to make sure that that surviving spouse, your surviving spouse, is taken care of if something happens to you.

Jessica: Yes. I think one of the hallmarks of my career and you were a part of it also was we have very dear clients to us and we were invited to a barbecue and I thought, okay, it would be the neighbor’s couple professional relationship, friends, family. It wasn’t. When we arrived there, Troy and I were the only people that were not family. We stood there and there was the client, I think she would be okay with us sharing his name, his name was Al, and he worked for the HPD for 40 years and passed away from cancer. We were there and witnessed her sister-in-law put together these hard pillows made for all of the grandkids and the siblings. Al was a big fan of Hawaiian shirts and so each pillow had its own Hawaiian pattern on it.

Troy: It was shirts from his closet.

Jessica: Yes, shirts literally from his closet. My favorite part of it, and it was just such a special moment in my career to see the importance of what we do. In addition to the pillows, there was a grandchild on the way, and they had a little teddy bear maid wearing one of Al’s Hawaiian shirts. Just such a special moment to be there and be like, wow, this is the impact. We’re the only people that are not family. Because she knew who to call the moment that Al passed and felt like we had supported her so much, we became family to them.

Just such a special moment and a testament to what we do and how you should, whether it’s with us or your own financial advisor at another practice, that’s the type of relationship that you want to have. Money is intimate. Relationships are intimate, and it’s important that you have that comfort level with your professionals that are going to guide you through life. Somebody can put together the most foolproof plan for you, and life has other plans, and plans seem to have flexibility. We never anticipate the loss of a spouse unless we have a diagnosis prior to our meeting, but those things happen.

I hope that you’ve found this series to be of value to you. I want to also remind you that we do have the Survivors Guide. If you click the link in the description box, everything that we’ve talked about throughout the series will be linked on the landing page there. You can also request your official Survivors Guide. It’s a workbook that’s going to have everything that we’ve discussed so far in the series, and it’s interactive to do with your spouse. I want to thank you for tuning into our Survivorship series. Thanks, Troy, for guest starring on our session today, and I look forward to seeing you back on our Legacy and Wealth Transfer series. Thank you so much, and be sure to subscribe to the channel.