Vaguely Familiar Ground

Dearest Rachel –

So, yesterday saw me driving Mom to her investment advisors’ to deposit a refund check from Dad’s health insurance, as well as determine what to do with the life insurance payout she had already received. While I would point out that she could certainly have driven herself – she does so when she goes shopping and for physical therapy – I wasn’t there as a chauffer as much as an interpreter of all the financial jargon she knew she was about to be inundated with.

After all, this is vaguely familiar ground for you and me. You went through a bit of this with your dad’s stroke, and then the two of us were deeply involved with the financial aspect of your parents’ joint estate when your mom passed away. And then, after your accident, I had to go through pretty much everything that my mom is dealing with now, albeit without all the careful preparation, since neither of us saw your departure coming (and in any event, we assumed that we still needed to have things sorted out from your folks, which we hadn’t quite yet).

Because, you see, once Dad’s business began to grow from its first few years of barely “having two nickels to rub together,” as he would put it, he started salting away what he could both for his retirement and to provide for Mom when he was gone (like me, he assumed he would go first, due to the male tendency to do so and the fact that he was older than her by a year or so; unlike me, he was right about that). As of now, he left her a nest egg that should cover daily needs and wants until she passes the century mark, Lord willing – and that’s without even factoring in the life insurance payout, which, to be fair, was essentially a separate savings account to be liquidated upon his demise.

The only problem with his careful planning was that he did so without really involving Mom in the process. Oh, he kept her up to speed about it as best he could as he perused the statements that came in from month to month, but he never really required her to pay attention to it, so that when he was gone, she’d know what needed to be done to move things over to her name. It’s kind of like the chivalric trait he’d inherited from his father of taking care of the driving responsibilities – while Mom drove (unlike Grandma, which is a story unto itself), she never had to pump gas; Dad would always take the car out and do that for her, leaving her somewhat all thumbs now that she has to handle it herself.

To her credit, she seems to have picked up on the “how to pump gas” issue pretty well, as she’s told me, with some pride, about how she’s been able to do just that from time to time. There have been no stories of her spraying the car with gas, or driving off with the pump still stuck in the car, as we’ve seen on World’s Dumbest. Still, the fact that she reckons this as an accomplishment just goes to show how she’d been rather coddled throughout their nearly sixty-six years together.

So, too, with the finances. Dad, with the help of his cousin Dennis (the guy that inspired me to go into accountancy) set up his retirement savings decades ago, and kept track of his spending and saving meticulously, in order to ensure that there would be enough someday when he could no longer work. Granted, he wasn’t as frugal as your folks (again, as with his dad, there were fewer insults he could level at someone, in his mind, that were worse than “tight” or “cheap”), but he was careful with his expenditures, because even as he believed the Lord could come back any day, he realized that to God, “a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day,” so he needed to plan in case He tarried another “day.”

But this meant that, once at the brokers’, most of this was a foreign country to Mom, because she’d left it all in Dad’s capable hands. Which worked out fine up to this point, but now that she was to be entrusted with these savings, all the investment terms might as well have been Chinese. All she knew was that she had enough to make it through from one day to another.

Which, apart from the fact that she was now in charge of it all, should be quite sufficient. Their advisor had a basic plan to continue to deplete Dad’s retirement savings (which, per IRS rules, was required to be depleted, a certain amount each year, based on its total holdings and Mom’s age) and transfer it to his living trust, so it could be brought over to her saving account for any payments she would need to make during a given month. He made certain recommendations regarding continued giving to church and other organizations that the two of them contributed to regularly. But it was a lot of information to take in, especially for someone not steeped in the language the way I was. Hence, why I was brought along.

At the same time, I had to dial back my own instincts, too; you and I would have had fun with this portfolio, picking out strategies to grow this nest egg even further. But at her age, that’s not what Mom needs. Better to stick with the lower-risk, lower-return stuff that her advisor recommended than raise the possibility of significant loss, were she to go all-in on some of the companies that you and I would favor for ourselves. He and I bantered good-naturedly a bit back and forth about that while he tried to explain as much to Mom as she could take in.

For now, I think just about everything is going to be settled with this, although she still needs to understand how much is set up to run automatically at this point, and how much she still needs to initiate herself yet. Also, that health insurance check turned out to be impossible to deposit, as it’s made out to dad’s “estate” (which doesn’t exist, as everything is in a “living trust”), so I’ve had to call the insurance company to have them reissue the check to the trust (and send the old check back to them, with some additional paperwork explaining the situation; thank heavens for AI to devise a boilerplate cover letter for that! Yes, even I rely on others’ expertise). So even with all the planning he did, some things fall through the cracks, honey, so we don’t need to feel so bad for being unprepared.

Anyway, that was my day yesterday; involving myself with stuff that doesn’t matter much from where you are, but still matters deeply down here. Wish I could hear more from you about what sort of goings-on you deal with, but until such time as I get a response from you, this is what will have to do. Keep an eye on me (and Mom!), and wish us well; we’re going to need it.