What Keeps Me Up at Night As Your Advisor: Protecting Your Loved Ones From Financial Chaos

Most couples have one spouse who handles the finances. And for years, maybe decades, that works just fine.

Until it doesn’t.

When the financially savvy spouse passes away, the surviving spouse is often left with scattered accounts, unknown passwords, and no road map. It’s chaos at the worst possible moment.

In this video, Mike McCarthy walks through what we focus on with clients to prevent this scenario—from getting both spouses involved in the plan to handling the unglamorous details that matter when it matters most.

If you’re watching this and thinking, “We need to get our stuff together,” we can help. Call us at 410-823-7283 or visit financialconsulate.com to schedule a complimentary intro call.

Transcript

Your spouse passes away suddenly, and while you’re grieving, you’re also trying to figure out if you can even stay in your house. Not because the money isn’t there, because you literally can’t find all the accounts. There are six different banks, passwords you’ve never seen, and bills on autopay you didn’t even know existed. There’s even an old 401(k) from a job your spouse left 15 years ago that no one knows about. 

Organizing your finances while you’re healthy is an act of love

I’m Mike McCarthy from Financial Consulate, and this scenario keeps me up at night. Not market volatility or tax law changes, because when the financially savvy spouse handles everything for decades and then suddenly isn’t there, their surviving spouse is left with chaos at the worst possible moment.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Let me walk you through what we do with clients to prevent this. Not because we’re trying to scare you, but because organizing this stuff while you’re both healthy is an act of love.

One spouse handles the finances—until something happens

Most couples have one person who handles the finances, and there’s nothing wrong with that. One person that pays the bills, checks the statements, calls the financial advisor, and the other one trusts them to handle it. But if the financial spouse is the only one who knows where everything is and how it works, you’re setting up the surviving spouse for a nightmare.

Why both spouses need to be part of the financial conversation

So here’s what we do. We make sure both spouses are part of the conversation. I know the person who doesn’t normally deal with stuff often dreads these meetings.

You have a spouse who loves talking about tax strategies, withdrawal rates, and you’re there thinking, “Please tell me we’re okay so I can get out of here.” I understand. But if something happens to your spouse tomorrow, you need to know where things are, you need to know who to call, and you need to know the plan exists and what it says.

Making financial planning meetings about values, not just account balances

So we try to make these meetings more than just about the technical stuff. Yes, we’ll talk about your accounts and your tax strategy and all that, but we’ll also talk about what you want to do with your money, what matters to you, and your values. Maybe it’s travel, or maybe it’s the beach house you rent every summer with the whole family.

When both spouses understand what you’re working toward, not just the account balances, but the life you want to live, these meetings become a lot less painful.

Account consolidation and a coordinated team (advisor, CPA, estate attorney)

The consolidation piece helps too. When your accounts are under one custodian, your team is working together (your advisor, your CPA, your estate attorney), all looking at the same information, so the non-financial spouse isn’t left trying to call 15 different places if something happens. They know where things are and what the plan is, and they’re familiar with who the professionals are.

Insurance planning: life insurance and umbrella liability coverage

Let’s talk about insurance because no one ever says, “You know what I’m excited to discuss today? Life insurance.”

What keeps me up at night is young families with one primary earner and no life insurance, or couples in their peak earning years who dropped their coverage because they “don’t need it anymore.”

If you’re still working and people depend on your income, you might need life insurance and umbrella liability insurance. This is the coverage that protects you if you’re in a serious accident or someone gets hurt on your property and sues you for more than your auto or your homeowners policy will cover. We recommend it for pretty much everyone regardless of age. It’s inexpensive for what it does.

Long-term care planning: self-insure, long-term care insurance, or hybrid policies

Then there’s long-term care. Nobody wants to think about needing help with daily activities or moving into a facility, but we need to talk about it while you’re healthy because the conversation gets a lot harder if it happens suddenly.

We work with clients to figure out if they want to self-insure and pay out of pocket if needed, do they want to buy long-term care insurance, or do they want to do something like a hybrid insurance policy with long-term care benefits. There’s no one right answer, but there is a wrong answer, which is not talking about it at all.

Living wills and powers of attorney for healthcare and finance

While we’re on difficult topics, let’s talk about living wills, verbal powers of attorney for healthcare and finance.

If you can’t make decisions for yourself, who should? What do you want? What would be unbearable to you? We’re not estate planning attorneys, but we review these as part of the process because they affect your overall financial picture. And we see outdated estate plans constantly. Powers of attorney that name someone who no longer is able to serve, healthcare directives that don’t reflect what you actually want now.

Asset titling mistakes that create real problems after a death

Let’s talk about something that sounds incredibly boring but can cause real problems: how your assets are titled. Here’s what can happen.

One spouse passes away and their surviving spouse discovers the house and the cars were only titled in the deceased spouse’s name. Every credit card was in their name with the surviving spouse as an authorized user, not a joint account holder. When those credit cards get canceled because the primary account holder died, their surviving spouse has no credit in their own name and is forced to rebuild their credit history from scratch.

A checklist to review now: house title, vehicle access, and credit history

This is fixable if you look at it now. Is your house titled properly? If one spouse passes, will the surviving spouse still have access to a vehicle in their name? Do you both have credit established in your own names?

I know this sounds tedious, but getting this wrong creates awful problems when you’re already grieving. We check this during our Financial Physical process because if something is titled wrong, we want to know now, and not when it’s too late, because it’s still easy to fix right now.

Why this matters: grief is hard enough without a financial scavenger hunt

I’m not trying to be morbid, but I’ve sat with too many surviving spouses who were left in chaos because their partner thought they had more time to organize things or because they didn’t want to burden the spouse with financial details. Organizing your financial life isn’t about controlling your spouse. It’s about love. Making sure that if the worst happens, the people you love don’t spend their grief trying to piece together a puzzle. This is part of what we do at Financial Consulate.

The full picture: accounts, insurance, estate plan, and tax strategy working together

We’re not just running projections and managing investments. We’re making sure your entire financial picture (the accounts, the insurance, the estate plan, the tax strategy) all works together and makes sense to the people who will need to understand it someday. 

If you’re watching this and thinking, “Yeah, we need to get our stuff together,” give us a call. We’ll walk through it with both of you because your spouse needs to know this stuff too. 

And if nothing else, have the conversation with your spouse this week; not about all the technical details, just about where things are and who to call if something happens. Trust me, they’ll appreciate it, even if they start off by rolling their eyes.