I have been thinking increasingly about this fact of life over the last few years since I have retired.  But one incident really brought this home to me last year while we were away for a month.  When we travel I take my laptop with me so I can log on to my bank’s website and the website’s of our credit cards and other vendor accounts so I can pay bills and stay abreast of my financial situation.  I forget now whether I was in my Quicken program or on my bank’s website but wherever I was I thought I was in the other place.

I was beginning to fuss and fume in an ever increasingly loud voice because nothing was working the way it should have.  Once I embarrassingly discovered that I wasn’t where I thought I was I sheepishly began to reflect on the other times I had made similar errors in my handling of my finances.  Nothing terribly bad but things like putting the wrong check in the wrong envelope or sending the payment slip without the check or writing a check on the wrong account --- I could go on but I won’t.  It is too embarrassing!  I am supposed to be the financial expert!

As you may have discovered already on this website I like to tell stories.  So let me tell you a few stories that relate to this subject.  First of all let me tell you about one of my very first clients.  He was a long time school teacher who lived rather modestly.  In those early days I had no office so I met with him and his wife in their home one evening.  I was in the process of gathering the usual and customary financial facts when I asked about how much money in had in bank accounts.  His wife gave a chuckle and said, “Wait until to see this!”  My client went to the refrigerator and out of the vegetable draw he pulled a pile of bank books; 55 in all.  Each account had less than $100 in them.  This was back in the days when the savings and loans paid interest quarterly and served cookies and coffee each quarter for those who came in to have their interest posted to their bank book.  My client loved going from savings and loans one Saturday every month to get his interested posted and having his cookies and coffee.  He also had forgotten to declare his interest for one account one year on his income tax return and received a notice of underpayment of income taxes from the IRS.  He was terrified and vowed never to let that happen again so he kept his accounts low enough so the bank wasn’t required to report the interest to the IRS; hence the 55 accounts.  The complexity caused by his desire for cookies and coffee led to forgetting to report the interest on one account which led to even more accounts – and off course, more cookies and coffee.

In my role as deacon in our church I am occasionally asked to help a church member to has found themselves in a difficult financial situation.  One such event I think contains a lesson for all of us who are progressing through our senescence.  The person I was asked to counsel with had lost his wife a year or two earlier.  His wife had taken care of all the finances.  They had very modest circumstances so their financial situation was not very complex but he was afraid of overlooking something or forgetting something to the point of being almost paranoid about it.  So he responded to every piece of mail he got and every phone call he got.  He also felt a need to enter any and every contest and lottery that came to his attention in order to help his financial situation.  He became the target of every solicitor imaginable.  This expressed itself dramatically in the form of magazine subscriptions.  By the time I was asked to help he was inundated with magazines and mail from every imaginable source and in over his head in bills he couldn’t pay even if he could keep track of them all.

Another early client of mine was a widow and also a school teacher.  She had been widowed a long while by the time I met her.  Her husband had been in the real estate business and had acquired a number of low-income, single family homes as rentals.  She had never sold them or re-rented them as they became vacant because she was afraid of making a mistake and dishonoring her husband’s memory.  She also never threw a piece of paper away for fear of throwing out something important.  She kept teaching long past the normal retirement age because she didn’t want to face all of the other problems she kept accumulating in these piles of papers at home.  I was able to bring some semblance of organization to her recordkeeping and got her to sell the vacant real estate but in between my visits with her annually it would just accumulate all over again.  She needed me or someone there when she made the decision to keep, file or throw away something.

I have already shared with you some of the life stories of my father, father-in-law and mother-in-law.  My father was a financial professional and was competent to keep his personal financial affairs in order almost right up to the date of his death but a year or two before it just was too much of an emotional and physical drain on him to do so as he was fighting bone cancer.  So I took over the day to day management of his financial life.  It wasn’t all that complicated but there were some trusts that needed extra oversight that I still manage today.  My father-in-law worked for the IRS and was financially astute.  He had his personal financial affairs in order but as he approached the end of his life he suffered from dementia so my wife and I had to take over their day to day financial affairs.  And the same was true after he died because my mother-in-law couldn’t see well enough to do the job.  And eventually her dementia would have been a problem as well.

My background and experience in the financial services world allowed me to help my clients and family members who found themselves overwhelmed by and confused about the day to day management of their financial lives.  But what about you and me?  Let me tell you a little about my situation.  I am the trustee of two trusts I encouraged my father to set up for the benefit of my sister and brothers.  My wife is the trustee of a trust I encouraged my mother-in-law to set up to help preserve her estate through the death of my sister-in-law and husband and my wife and myself for the benefit of her grandchildren.  I am the successor trustee of this trust.  My wife and I are the trustees of a charitable trust we set up to preserve the after-tax value of a rental property we had upon its sale and for the ultimate benefit of a charity that was important to us.  We have a family trust we are both trustees of, that will clone itself into two or three trusts at the first death and the surviving spouse will be the successor trustee.  We have an IRA each and a Roth IRA each plus a brokerage account all of which I do the investment management for and all the recordkeeping.  We also have a rental property that is 900 miles from where we live.  Oh, of course, we have our house and personal property.  So now you know why I travel with my laptop.  And perhaps you also know why there is room for confusion once in awhile.

So the question is when will I need help and who will I turn to and will I know I need help before it is too late?  And that is a question I hope this essay will provoke in you as well.  There are a number of avenues to take in searching out an answer to this question but you need to be aware of what they are and be willing to explore them before you need or want the help.

Just know that whether you have a complex financial situation similar to mine (and there are many of you who have a much more complex situation) or just 55 passbooks, there can come a time when either you or your surviving spouse or children will want or need help in managing your financial circumstances.  The articles in this topic section hopefully will open up to you all of the avenues you need to explore.