As a financial advisor, you have a responsibility to protect your clients’ best interests. Given the nature of your work, you’re entrusted with privileged information - and not just of the financial type. If you work with a client for a long time, you learn things about their family situation, their career, their health, even their doubts and values.
This can be especially true with senior clients. As individuals who are closer to the end of life, they have lots of particular issues to consider: retirement, healthcare planning, life settlements, long-term care, and estate planning, among others.
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No matter how much you’ve been able to save for retirement, there comes a point for many retirees when they begin to worry about having enough money to last them. Not having a paycheck, or even the prospect of a paycheck, can produce major feelings of anxiety - even if you thought you were fully prepared for that reality.
The good news is that retirement doesn’t have to be as expensive as you may think it does. With a few changes, you can easily live the lifestyle you love without depleting your retirement account.
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Choosing an assisted living facility, whether it’s for you or for a family member, is a major decision - perhaps one of the biggest decisions we have to make as we get older. Finding the right one means that you’ll not only receive the help and healthcare that you need, but that your transition into your new home will be easier, too.
While the right assisted living home is ultimately the one you feel most comfortable in, there are certain things you need to pay attention to at each facility you visit.
If you’re a member of the “sandwich generation” - adults who are caring for both their own young children and their elderly parents - then you’re no doubt familiar with the challenges and conflicts that arise on a monthly, weekly, even daily basis.
You’ve somehow got to make it to your son’s school play and mom’s doctor appointment at the same time. Your high school-aged daughter needs to borrow the car to go out with friends, but dad also needs a ride to his book club. You have to pick up prescriptions, haggle with mom’s insurance company, and drop the kids off at soccer practice right after work - oh, and somehow feed everybody dinner, too.
If caring for children can be emotionally overwhelming, caring for children and your aging parents at the same time can, at times, feel impossible. How do you balance the needs of your children with those of your parents - and, of course, your own? How can you give your children the opportunities you’ve always wanted to, while also financially supporting your parents?
As our parents age, we have to have many conversations that we know are necessary, but that we’d give anything to avoid.
Talking about your parent’s last wishes. Discussing long-term care options. Admitting to your parent that you alone can’t provide the care they need anymore. These are all difficult, and sometimes, necessary conversations.
If entered into without at least some consideration and planning, these conversations can quickly spiral into arguments that leave one or both parties feeling angry, resentful, and hurt. To prevent this, it’s important to prepare - both intellectually and emotionally.
As our parents age, adult children often find themselves having to adjust to new roles.
Where we once may have been firmly on the receiving end of advice about finances, purpose, and living well, we now are asked to give it.
Where it used to be us asking our parents to take a day off of work to spend time with us, now we may find our parents are the ones in need of that time.
The transition into retirement can be difficult, no matter how much our parents may have been looking forward to their new life. As retirees age, issues like health problems, boredom, and a lack of self-esteem or sense of purpose can begin to creep in.
Many adults are far too familiar with the ravages that Alzheimer’s disease can impose on a family. The gradual decline of a beloved parent or spouse is a painful thing to be a part of, and it forces some difficult questions. When should I start looking at long-term care? What can I do to keep mom safer at home? And perhaps the most difficult question of all: How do I safeguard this person’s finances when he isn’t able to do so himself?
Financial stress is nothing new. For decades, parents, grandparents, and retirees have been kept up at night worrying about how they’re going to pay for their child’s college, how to cover an expensive home repair, or how they’ll be able to handle a spouse’s unemployment.
But a new survey by the AARP has found that this financial stress seems to be growing in one area, at least: retirement.
According to the Life Reimagined survey, which was conducted among 1,026 adults over the age of 35, about 50 percent believe they will retire at an age older than their parents’ generation. While the respondents cited multiple reasons for this, most believe that they just won’t be able to afford to retire.
If you’ve attended any panels, webinars, or discussion groups centered on the topic of customer service in the past few years, you’ve likely heard the term omnichannel customer engagement.
It’s a term that’s arisen as our online lives have become not just more complex, but also more connected. Our Facebook profiles can be connected to our Instagram profiles, our blog posts can be shared via LinkedIn as well as our websites, and our advertising experiences are determined by the sites we visit and the links we click.
This means that our customer service expectations have changed, too. While just a few years ago, financial services providers might have been able to get away with simply having a nice-looking website, today’s clients demand much more.
If you're relatively new to the life settlement industry, it can be challenging to tell when you should bring up the possibility of selling a client's life insurance policy as a life settlement.
If there's little chance the client's policy will qualify, you don't want to get their hopes up needlessly. The same is true if you're unsure of whether or not a policy might qualify.
So what do you look for in a policy when you're trying to decide if a life settlement would be a good option for your client? Here's our brief guide.
