I recently received an email that really touched me. It was from an editor of a newsletter for financial planners that I subscribe to. This man had tragically lost his wife a short time earlier, and this email informed his subscribers of the reason for his wife’s sudden death. She had committed suicide.

I recently wrote a column about “longevity insurance.” This topic raised the question of how financial planners estimate our clients’ life spans. Obviously, if we planners are going to tell you whether you’ll have enough money in retirement to last the rest of your life, we need to estimate when your time on earth will be over.

Here is a bit of news—my wife and I had a meeting with our financial planner this week. I can hear you thinking, “That’s news?”

Certainly, visiting your financial planner isn’t exactly news, any more than having an appointment with your accountant or getting your teeth cleaned would be news. It isn’t, at least, unless you are a financial planner yourself.

One of the ironies of my profession is that, if you want to accumulate wealth and financial security, you would benefit greatly from the services of a financial planner. Yet generally people can’t afford a financial planner until they have already accumulated some wealth.

This inherent contradiction raises a question.

For someone with a pattern of financial chaos, a first step toward better money management is getting organized. This requires creating a clear picture of where you’ve been and where you are in terms of income, expenses, and debt. To accomplish this, you will need to set up a bookkeeping system to track your income and expenses and pay bills.

Investing and financial planning, like other fields, have their own buzzwords and terms. Those of us in the profession use those terms so often that we don’t always stop to think that some of them might be unfamiliar or confusing to our clients. We also don’t always remember that some terms might have slightly different meanings to us than they do to the general public.

Mary, a retired professional woman who had never married, first came to see me in 1992, when she was 70. She had invested in three blue chip companies in the 1950’s and was savvy enough to hold onto those stocks through the years. As a result, her three investments had grown to a value of $1,000,000 by the time she became my client.

Most people have a family physician. Many, especially business owners, also have an accountant and an attorney. Fewer, however, have financial planners. Some of the reasons they give include:

• I am not sure what a financial planner does.

• I don’t know how to find a competent financial planner.

• I don’t have enough money to need financial planning.

Rick interviewed Glenn Roth, Vice President of Business Development of QMed, about his firm’s new healthcare product for stroke and heart attack victims.  The plan combines the best of a Medicare Part D and a Supplemental Plan, less the doughnut hole, for less money than the partient would otherwise pay.
The only catch is that you […]

We’ve just added a new feature to our website, at www.kahlerfinancial.com, that allows you to search on words or topics of interest.  The search box is on the lower left corner of the home page under "Search KFG".  On all other pages it is in the top right corner.
For example, if you wanted to […]