Ep 106: Empowering Widows Financially By Helping Them Navigate The 3 Stages of Widowhood with Kathleen Rehl
Financial Advisor Success
Michael Kitces
4.8 • 696 Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2019
⏱️ 101 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest today works with financial advisors to teach them how to handle a tricky area for a lot of firms: working with widows. Kathleen Rehl is a speaker, trainer, and researcher specializing in the particular challenges of widowhood and how advisors can be more effective in dealing with these issues. Also the author of Moving Forward on Your Own: A Financial Guidebook for Widows, Kathleen spent seventeen years working as a financial advisor before becoming a widow herself and shifting her focus to helping other women in similar circumstances.
In this episode, she talks in depth about what advisors need to understand about helping widows through their financial transitions, as well as what to say and what not to say in the process. Listen in to hear how to avoid pushing the wrong financial issues after the death of a client’s spouse, tips for handling the three stages of widowhood, and what Kathleen’s research tells us about how financial planning affects widows’ outlook and confidence in their financial future.
For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/106
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with financial planner, |
| 0:08.4 | speaker and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial advisors |
| 0:13.6 | navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight from leading |
| 0:19.2 | industry consultants about how to break through to the |
| 0:22.0 | next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone. |
| 0:29.2 | Welcome to the 106th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest in today's podcast |
| 0:34.8 | is Kathleen Real. Kathleen is a researcher on the money issues that widows face, the author of Moving |
| 0:40.6 | Forward on Your Own, a financial guidebook for widows, and a speaker and trainer for financial |
| 0:45.4 | advisors on how to work better with widowed clients. |
| 0:49.0 | What's unique about Kathleen, though, is that she's also a former financial advisor herself, |
| 0:53.8 | having spent 17 years |
| 0:55.2 | operating as an independent RAA before sadly becoming widowed, at which point she decided |
| 1:00.5 | to sell her advisory firm and shift her focus to empowering widows financially as an |
| 1:05.0 | on-core career. In this episode, we talk in depth about the challenges in working with recent widows, the words |
| 1:12.7 | to use and what to say as well as what not to say when working with a recent widow, |
| 1:18.1 | how widows typically progress from a grief stage where it's so difficult to make good decisions |
| 1:22.9 | that Kathleen simply advocates for a decision-free zone for six to 12 months, to a growth phase where the |
| 1:29.1 | transition work really gets underway to begin rebuilding the widow's financial life, and then a |
| 1:33.5 | grace stage that not all widows reach, where the foundation is set for a new life in a new direction, |
| 1:40.3 | which is important to understand because financial advisors that push the wrong financial |
| 1:44.5 | issues to a widow's current phase will likely become part of that now infamous statistic |
| 1:49.6 | that 70% of widows end up changing financial advisors, precisely because so few have a real |
... |
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