Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Beth Pinsker on ‘My Mother’s Money’ and The Advisor’s Frontline Role When Financial Decisions Turn Emotional
3 Playsin 5 minutes
MarketWatch financial planning columnist Beth Pinsker, CFP, has plenty of experience guiding her readers, but she admits “book smarts” didn’t prepare her for an inevitable inflection point.
In her new book “My Mother's Money,” she chronicles how she assumed the responsibilities of financial caregiver and end-of-life planner for her own mother, emphasizing how overwhelmingly complicated the process was from healthcare to estate planning.
On this episode of the Synergize podcast, Beth shares her story and explains why navigating this complex transition could be a make-or-break client retention moment for financial advisors:
- Chronicling the Emotional Journey and Sharing Her Mom’s Final Lesson: What Beth’s personal journey can teach advisors about the hidden gaps in caregiving and financial consequences clients may face if they don’t engage in end-of-life planning.
- The Advisor’s Opportunity to Become the Frontline: Beth argues that crisis management is harder and more painful than uncomfortable conversations. She says family emergencies and health scares are moments when RIAs could proactively step up to guide clients through honest family meetings and prepare for wealth transitions.
- Navigating the Blur Between Emotional and Financial: How advisors can step in when fear, grief, and emotion complicate critical financial and elder care decisions.
- Risks To Retaining The Next Generation: Beth shares why an advisor mishandling financial caregiving poses a client retention threat for RIAs and shares a simple fix to form connections with the whole family.
Copyright 2026. TradePMR, Inc. For a transcript of this episode with sources, visit synergizepodcast.com. Beth Pinsker and MarketWatch are unaffiliated with TradePMR. If you want to join the conversation or connect with us, please visit us at synergizepodcast.com. This content is provided for general information purposes only.The views expressed by non-affiliated guest speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of TradePMR Inc. or its affiliates. TradePMR Inc. and its affiliates do not endorse any guest speakers or their companies and therefore give no assurances as to the quality of their products and services. This channel is not monitored by TradePMR Inc. TradePMR Inc. does not provide investment advice, tax advice or legal advice. TradePMR Inc. is a member of FINRA and SIPC. TradePMR, Inc.,is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission {SEC) and the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB). TradePMR provides brokerage and account services to registered investment advisors. Custodial services provided by First Clearing. Clearing is a trade name used by Wells Fargo Clearing Services, LLC, Member SIPC, a registered broker dealer and non-bank affiliate of Wells Fargo & Company.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Synergize Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to Synergize, unscripted conversations where we explore the evolving role of the financial advisor in an emerging AI driven world. Join us as we bring together thought leaders across a range of disciplines and industry experts, sharing insights designed to help RIAs thrive in the industry of tomorrow.
00:00:27
Speaker
Welcome back to Synergize.
Hosts Introduction
00:00:29
Speaker
I'm Bill Capell, Chief Client Growth Officer at Trade PMR, a Robinhood company. And I'm Ryan Neal, Editorial Manager at Trade PMR Robinhood. And Bill, last night I had a conversation with my mother that i don't know if I was ready for. She called me to say she was meeting with the attorneys, meeting with her financial advisor to do a will planning and estate planning and trust, all that stuff, and wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be personally offended if she named my sister
00:00:58
Speaker
the the ah the ah power of attorney because she's a closer in proximity. She's on the West Coast. I'm on the East Coast. My mom lives
Incorporating End-of-Life in Financial Advising
00:01:06
Speaker
in Sacramento. And, you know, got me thinking perfect timing for our episode because we have a guest today who talks all about this kind of stuff about, you know, financial advisors spend so much their time retirement planning, portfolio planning. But what about what comes after that? The when health issues arise and long term care and and and death in the family, a lot of advisors still aren't bringing that into their practice.
00:01:29
Speaker
You're so right, Ryan, and it's a really, really important issue. And it's the one thing that I think lot of advisors are uncomfortable when it comes to actually the implementation of a plan, particularly when you're facing end of life situation.
Guest Introduction: Beth Pinsker
00:01:45
Speaker
And our guest today really has done an amazing job with a book she's written around what it's like to contemplate these kinds of challenges and where your advice as an advisor becomes extremely important in building relationships, not only for the immediate generation, but for those that follow.
00:02:05
Speaker
That's right. Our guest is Beth Pinsker. She is the author of My Mother's Money, A Guide to Financial Caregiving. She's also a certified financial planner and a retirement columnist at MarketWatch with decades of financial journalism under her belt. ah So Beth, welcome to the show.
00:02:22
Speaker
Thanks for having me. Well, let's get right into it, because, Beth, you really, you know, i really admire that you've been willing to, you know, take your own personal experience and share it through this book, as well as the work you've done, both in journalism as well as being a CFP. You've seen a lot.
00:02:42
Speaker
um You know, give us a little bit of background, if you will, and tell us how this came about. What motivated you to write this book? What was that experience that really triggered it? What triggered it was living through it and realizing how little there is out there as a practical matter for going through this. I have a lot of book learning. I know a lot of things. I studied a lot. I passed a lot of tests. But that doesn't tell you what people go through in real life.
00:03:11
Speaker
and the problems that they encounter with the the systems we have in place in this country. And what I wanted to do is serve as people's cautionary tales. It's sort of like, I lived through this hard stuff. I'm gonna explain it to you so that you don't have to go through something hard like I had to
Role of Advisors in Personal Situations
00:03:32
Speaker
go through.
00:03:32
Speaker
And maybe we can just sort of share a little knowledge. um you know my My mother's money is written about me and my mom. My mom was a school teacher. She was a high school teacher.
00:03:43
Speaker
And, you know, this is sort of like her last lesson that she had to to give out to people. And she was a part of the first half of the book um when I was caring for her while she was incapacitated. And then her spirit is with me as the second half of the book unfolds and I am taking care of her estate.
00:04:07
Speaker
Also, what I think is really interesting is you're you're both a financial columnist and a CFP, and you know this stuff very well, but you still you wrote about you encountered a lot of stress, a lot of confusion, a lot of emotional times. So when we talk about you know financial advisors may feel uncomfortable about bringing this into their practice, that's probably why, right? Like it's very stressful, intense conversation. So how are you able to navigate that? And and I guess, do you have any lessons for advisors that maybe want to step into that?
00:04:36
Speaker
Well, i think the role for advisors here is to be the frontline coach, basically.
Family Dynamics in Financial Planning
00:04:43
Speaker
you know like you the Advisors hear from their clients a lot and they have you know casual conversations with them and they have you know charts and graph conversations with them. And in the casual conversation is when you find out all of the stuff that's going on in their lives that's relevant to their finances, but might not be readily apparent or that they might not even have put down on some sort of intake form.
00:05:10
Speaker
You know, you call them up for a quarterly meeting and they're like, oh, I've been so stressed. My mom has been sick. Well, that should be you know a light bulb moment for a financial advisor where the financial advisor is like, OK, my client's mother is sick.
00:05:26
Speaker
Is this going to impact their finances? Because oftentimes it will. um Your clients don't live in a bubble. They are connected to other people both by blood and by um community relationships. And you have to know to advise them, you have to know who those people are. You have to know who's in their orbit, you know, beyond just... you know, mom, dad, son, daughter.
Practical vs. Theoretical Financial Planning
00:05:54
Speaker
There's more to it than that these days. There might be a disabled sibling that who's an adult and, you know, now their parents are gone. And so, you know, your client might be responsible for their older brother, their younger sister, or an aunt or an uncle, or, you know, a neighbor that they've taken a liking to, you know, like things run deep in this country now. Like we have a lot of people to take care of What's interesting about what you're saying there is, it reminds me of a quote out of the book, and I want to read it because I i want you to expand upon it. But you write, you had a lot of book knowledge, and in a situation demanded street smarts.
00:06:35
Speaker
And, you know, it's that crossover from... ah knowing how to do things, right? And then the application of that in real time. And as advisors, we're trained how to do things.
00:06:47
Speaker
Where we're probably not as sharp as we need to is on two fronts, right? One is listening and and and kind of interpreting. And the other one is having that ability to have the right level of emotional intelligence to translate the technical stuff you're talking about into real life application.
00:07:07
Speaker
You know, for you, you live through this in real time. Share with our audience a little bit about when that aha moment struck you to say, well, I know this. I'm a CFP. I know all this stuff.
00:07:18
Speaker
But why is it so hard? Yeah. So, I mean, I got right into it. My mom had surgery on a Wednesday or a Tuesday. I can't even remember at this point. And by Friday, the caregivers needed to be paid.
00:07:36
Speaker
Now, you can talk about budgets, you can be a financial planner, and you can work out the money on the back end, you can talk about portfolio construction or whatever. um I am a person then at that point, an adult child sitting by my mother's bedside with a power of attorney documents in one hand and a checkbook in the other.
00:07:55
Speaker
And what am I supposed to do? This is what I mean by book learning, meaning real life and street smarts. um You know, my choices at that moment with the power of attorney that was not enacted at a bank, I can't legally sign the check for my mother in my name.
00:08:17
Speaker
And signing it with her signature, like her name, would be forging it, right? So I know as a professional that signing her name is wrong. I know also as a professional that signing my name without enacting the power of attorney first at the bank is wrong.
00:08:34
Speaker
um So then my choice is, do I write a check for my so for my own account um and cover the money for my mother and hope to get it back you know in my account at some point um or or not? And this is what your clients are going through. This is what real people face. um so if you know And three weeks after that, I realized that my mother's, or two weeks after that, realized that my mother's long-term care insurance premium was past due.
00:09:04
Speaker
And I had to write out a check for $6,800. The caregiver checks were $3,000.
00:09:11
Speaker
So, you know, all a sudden I'm laying out a lot of money. I don't necessarily keep that much cash on hand in my real life. Like as an advisor, you would tell people, there's no need for you to have $20,000 in cash. You should be putting that money to work for you.
00:09:27
Speaker
Well, in real life, I needed to put my hands on it.
Real-Life Financial Emergencies
00:09:30
Speaker
Um, and so if I had called, and if I had an advisor at that point, who wasn't me, cause I'm a CFP, um, and I don't have an advisor, but if I had one at that point, I would have called them up and said, I need to free up, you know, $20,000 to cover costs for my mom. And I don't know when I'm going to put it back.
00:09:47
Speaker
Um, so as an advisor, you know, like that might be the first call you receive to know that there is trouble happening right now. So what are you going to do? um You know, my suggestion is that the the advisors um sort of step up as soon as they notice that there is an issue brewing and say, hey, you know, I think you should have a family meeting um and have everybody come, Zoom or whatever, and put all the family cards on the table.
00:10:18
Speaker
Here's what mom has, here's what dad has, here's what brother and sister have to contribute, here's who can come in an emergency, here's who can pay in an emergency. you know here's Here are all the resources at the disposal of the primary people involved.
00:10:35
Speaker
um and see where you are on that. And then the advisor is there to do the math um because this is not math regular people can do.
00:10:46
Speaker
This is math that your software does. This is math that your financial calculator does where you can compute contributions you know coming in from income, social security, pensions and whatnot, and interest growing at the same time you're taking money away um nobody Nobody can do that on the back of an envelope or in their head. Not to interrupt, but particularly in an emotional moment that you're describing. yeah This is, again, an example where book smarts meets street smarts, right?
00:11:15
Speaker
And you know just to add on to that, um you know what you're pointing out here, which I think is incredibly important, I want to underscore this for our audience, is that you got to get everybody involved in the family. You've got to sit down. you know The reality here is that this is not the time to put your head in the ground.
00:11:31
Speaker
You know, you don't want your emotions to override the mission of caring for that loved one in a manner that provides dignity, that provides comfort.
00:11:43
Speaker
And certainly that's what's going to give you peace of mind. At what point did that hit you? When did you actually have that experience? Yeah. That hits so it just hits immediately. Like I knew nothing about my mom's life before I stepped in to run her finances.
00:12:00
Speaker
She called me up and said, I'm having surgery. Can you come take care of things? At that moment, she was a 76 year old human being who had full control over her life, ah was a fully cognizant human being and and lived a full life. It's not like a child you're taking care of. um you know, who's 17 and has been under your, you know, thumb their whole lives and, you know, has $12 in the bank. My mom had a mortgage. She had utility payments. She had, ah you know, annuity contracts. um
00:12:33
Speaker
You know, she had all sorts of things going on in her life. And as my father had died five years prior to her getting sick and, You know, it was all in her head.
00:12:44
Speaker
You know, she didn't have to consult with anybody. She just did whatever she wanted to do as a as a fully fledged adult. When I stepped in, i was like, oh, my God, ah how do you pay your electric bill? Where's the where's the coupon for your quarterly maintenance payment? um You know, where like, why do I keep finding envelopes with cash in the middle of papers in your drawers? Like, I don't understand your financial thinking. I don't know where anything is Did she work with an advisor at all? Did she have her own advisor or not at all?
00:13:17
Speaker
She had an advisor for certain select things. My parents were both teachers and they lived in that 403B world, um which is sort of, you know, back in the the olden days. um when they were setting all of this stuff up. So she didn't regularly consult with anybody, but my mom was pretty on top of things and she was engaged and she made decisions for herself and she knew exactly what she was doing and what she wanted. She was just extremely um risk averse um as ah as a human being. And we had a cash crisis at the beginning of her illness and I ran the numbers And, um you know, it was June. And I said, okay, we have enough cash to last until August, but her RMDs don't come out of her account until December.
00:14:11
Speaker
I need to speed up that process because I need money, a significant amount of money in August that I could not cover without breaking into my retirement. um And so the money's got to come out of somebody's accounts in August to fund you know, $15,000 a month in care costs.
00:14:31
Speaker
um And where are we going to get bridge the gap between August and December? We need, we need money. um And that was a problem that was, it was going to cost us money to get access to our own money.
00:14:47
Speaker
um And I wouldn't have been happy with that situation. It turns out that life, you know, has its own plans. um And ah my mom didn't make it to August of that year.
00:14:58
Speaker
So we didn't need to go through any of those steps. But, you know, an advisor can't tell you that that's going to happen either. Right. so But what it does point to, Beth, is ah an important issue that you're raising, which is there's a big difference between a plan and reality, right? And you know um I know as an advisor, for me, the hardest conversations, oddly enough,
00:15:24
Speaker
we're trying to get clients to think a little bit more than you know two weeks out or a month out or six months out. you know usually so you know So in any kind of a scenario, how much cash should we be have on the side, right? This concept of being fully invested, I think we've got to really break that down a little bit further to say fully invested means your resources is available when you need them at an appropriate time. And what you're saying here is, well, on paper, that an insurance contract, likely an annuity of some kind, was set up to distribute an ample amount of income at a point in time, but it didn't recognize what life is really like. And that's what I'm kind of hearing you saying. Does that make sense? Right.
00:16:07
Speaker
Yeah, or or just diversification in general. You know, if my mom had had 75% of her savings in that vehicle and 25% in something that I could access more readily, that would have even been helpful. She had 100% of her money, you know, locked in something that had a five-year surrender cap on it. And to go in before the five years would have, you know, cost some sort of surrender fee.
00:16:37
Speaker
And we were before the five years. So, um you know, that's fine for some of your money, but maybe not for all of your money. And that's where guidance can come into play. um She also may have, and, you know, it's hard for me to go back and track all of her ins and outs. She might have had other money set aside, but she might have spent through it.
00:17:01
Speaker
and um And that was the remaining money was all locked up. But, you know, the the guidance of an in of an advisor could have helped her, um you know,
00:17:13
Speaker
diversify as she went um so that she never ended up with 100% of her money locked up. um
Building Generational Trust
00:17:21
Speaker
And I think that's the thing. The situation is, you know, the person who was guiding her um to on that path who was managing that that contract, um you know, is not going to get the next generation on board, right? So, like, as soon as my mom passed away and that money had to be moved somewhere else...
00:17:45
Speaker
I was not, for instance, going to stay in that same contract with that same broker who had you know guided my mom to it. that's I'm not the same age as my mother. i don't have the same risk tolerance. That wasn't a relationship that I was going to keep. And I think what a lot of advisors face, if they don't deal with the whole family at some point, that There's a death at some point. it could even be a divorce, some sort of split in the family. um And you don't retain the assets in your management that that that family had. And
00:18:22
Speaker
If you go the next step and engage the other family members, even if it's like a husband and wife or two spouses of any gender, and one is involved in the financial planning and the other isn't, that's often a time when the relationship deteriorates. you know The primary spouse who was dealing with the money passes away,
00:18:45
Speaker
The next the the spouse is left to deal with the money if they don't have a relationship with the advisor that's close enough. They're just gonna they're just gonna leave. Yeah, well, you just hit on so many of the things that we we talk about a ton on this show right Bill is ah building those those relationships across generations and across the whole
Engaging Families in Financial Planning
00:19:03
Speaker
family. um I know part of the work you do is talking to financial advisors and and getting them on board so they can start serving families in this way. And that's also part of, i think, why you wrote the book. Can you talk about what you still see out there when you do meet with advisors, when you do talk to them?
00:19:20
Speaker
Where are their gaps? Where are they still getting things wrong? And and how can they improve to to make this more of a part of the service they offer? Yeah, I still see a lot of one party in the family is interested in making decisions and the other party couldn't tell you where the tax returns are kept.
00:19:40
Speaker
Like couldn't tell you anything. um You know, I see this still in my own family with other family members, you know, and if one of, if the person who's managing things gets sick,
00:19:52
Speaker
um You know, the whole family kind of goes goes under because it's ah all hands on deck emergency at that point. um I see it with myself. You know, I'm a divorced adult human being.
00:20:05
Speaker
My power of attorney, trustee, you know, whoever takes over for me in an emergency is my 19 year old son. um You know, so I have to have a financial system that makes sense to somebody who doesn't have, you know, much life experience handling, you know, upper level family finances. And I still see that a lot where there's one person and everything that gets managed in the household is in that person's head.
00:20:38
Speaker
And nobody else knows. And to be honest, the only person who if that person has an advisor of any sort, that's the only other person who would know how to handle things. um So then that advisor becomes the key point of contact when something bad goes down. And that person has to step in and guide the spouse or the other family member who doesn't know anything.
00:20:58
Speaker
So we' along those lines, the transfer of of of the relationship, let's call, let's put the wealth aside, but the transfer of the relationship from one parent to the next generation of the advisor is almost more valuable than the assets that are involved here. How do you coach advisors to prepare to engage differently with those those different generations?
00:21:18
Speaker
Well, I think one of the things is, and I wrote an article about this recently, is how many advisors still will have meetings with just one like one partner in a couple, you know, and without even thinking about it.
00:21:31
Speaker
Like, you know, I know that there are time constraints and it's hard to... negotiate people's schedules and and all sorts of things like that. And you might truly get other spouses, you know, who say, I'm not interested, just talk to just talk to the other party. And you got to fight past that, like you shouldn't be having consequential meetings to decide the finances of a couple without talking to both of them.
00:21:58
Speaker
Like those meetings just shouldn't be happening. you You should, you know, as an advisor be like, I can't very well make this decision without talking to both of you. You know, can we please make some time? Can I meet with, you know, the one who's not interested separately? Maybe we could go to lunch. Maybe we could find an atmosphere where that person feels comfortable and engaged. I just keep hitting home the point over and over again that family is more than just the two people in a married couple.
00:22:26
Speaker
Like, You are responsible for your parents at the end of the day. And if they don't have their planning together, you're going to end up ah hurting your finances to help them in some way. So you you have to think beyond, you have to think broader. Yeah. I mean, it sounds so almost simple and basic. That's like, you know, duh, why isn't everybody doing this? But we know that it's not happening. And I know personally, as I as i said at the in our introduction, I just had these conversations with my my mother, who I know works with a financial advisor. I know he's aware of me. um But i've never i've never I've never met the person. I've never met her advisor.
00:23:05
Speaker
He set up an account for my baby daughter, so his client's
Actionable Advice for Advisors
00:23:08
Speaker
grandchild. um But I've never had a conversation. They've never brought us into the meeting. And I just kind of find it wild. I'm like, you know you have...
00:23:15
Speaker
to you know possibly two generations of clients you could bring in, but it still just stocks to my mom and no one else. So anyway, i know we know it's an issue and it's and it's a challenge to to get the industry to change, but I do want to run to our wrap up here. Something we'd love to do on our podcast is to give one actionable piece of advice for our listeners out there, give them something they can take back like and and implement to to get on the path, to start bringing these conversations into their practice. So what would be your your takeaway for them?
00:23:45
Speaker
I would ask, this is something I ask at every presentation I do, how many of you have know that your primary clients have a power of attorney, a valid current power attorney? How about their adult children over the age of 18?
00:24:00
Speaker
How about your parents or your client's parents in in this sense? Like you have to ripple out. Like don't just focus on what your clients have, but make sure everybody has the primary document you need if ah if an emergency happens. And that is power of attorney.
00:24:19
Speaker
That's great. I love that. That's a nice, succinct, ah great starting point for for folks out there. Great. Well, thank you so much, Beth, for joining us. We appreciate having you. And as always, thank you, everyone, for listening. Wherever you're getting this podcast, whether it's ah YouTube, Apple, Spotify, anywhere else, if you could take that time to like, subscribe, share, hit the buttons, all the stuff, it helps the algorithm, and we really appreciate it. ah So thank you, and we'll catch you on the next one.
00:24:45
Speaker
Yes, and I'd like to encourage our readers to do check out Beth's book, My Mother's Money. It's a wonderful story that will touch all of us at some point. Better to be prepared than wait for it to happen.
00:24:57
Speaker
ah Please tune in to our next episode where we'll share more insights and actionable ideas to help you grow your
Podcast Wrap-Up
00:25:03
Speaker
business. And remember, the challenge is yours to take advantage of what the future has to offer. The
00:25:12
Speaker
Future Future
00:25:16
Speaker
If you want to join the conversation or connect with us, please visit us at synergizepodcast.com. This content is provided for general information purposes only. The views expressed by non-affiliated guest speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Trade PMR or its affiliates.
00:25:34
Speaker
Trade PMR and its affiliates do not endorse any guest speakers or their companies and therefore give no assurances as to the quality of their products and services. This channel is not monitored by Trade PMR. Trade PMR does not provide investment advice, tax advice, or legal advice. Trade PMR is a member of FINRA and SIPC.
00:25:54
Speaker
Trade PMR Inc. is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, and the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board, and MSRB, Transcription by
00:26:19
Speaker
copyright twenty twenty six drake gmr in for a transcript of this episode with sources visit synergizepodcast dot
00:26:32
Speaker
you