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“Ann” hired me a few months after losing her husband. She was approximately the same age as my parents—late 70s at the time, pre-Covid—and her two adult daughters were about my age. At our first meeting she sat across from me, composed but clearly holding years of bottled up anger. Her words were unflinching:
“He used money to control me. He made me return things to the store that I didn’t get permission to buy a few times a year. He always told me we were poor. This is a man who would not turn on the AC in Virginia summers because it was too expensive. He would embarrass me in front of family and friends about how I blow my ‘allowance’. I resent him so much now that I know we’ve always had money.
“The girls have had it worse. Neither can hold a job. One is overwhelmed with three young kids she is raising alone and the other one has mental health issues. And he never supported them, emotionally or financially, unless one was about to be evicted or a hospital bill or something.”
And then, memorably,
“That fucker can spin in his grave. Tom, you need to help me fix this, for me and for the girls. There’s enough money to get this right before at least the grandkids grow up. I will not let the girls down and I’ll do whatever it takes.”
Ann had I’m looking at a portfolio of a few million dollars and a paid off house. Quick math suggested Ann could retool her wealth to support herself and her two girls (and grandkids) to a good degree with some forethought and planning. I told my team that this was a case where we could do some good, maybe right some wrongs, and get this family headed in a more stable and functional direction.
My white knight helmet seemed to fit just fine.
Arm time bomb: first home visit
Ann greeted me at the door of her 1960’s era split level, and introduced me to Barbara, her youngest daughter. Quick first impressions: Ann had difficulty navigating the internal steps from her front door, and she “surfed” from sofa to counter to chair with a wobbly shuffle.
Barbara seemed committed to making sure that her mom was taken care of financially and that we developed “Team Ann” with full transparency about finances and her ability to afford both care needs and broader support for her family.
Ann told me, very much on brand,
“This is about the girls and the grandkids. This isn’t about me.”
Tick tick: a hopeful year and the permanent houseguests
My team worked on multiple spending scenarios for Ann and calibrated the portfolio appropriately. In the meantime, daughter Caroline and her two middle-schoolers moved in with Ann to save on rent and to keep an extra eye on her mom. I was happy that Ann wasn’t alone during the early days of Covid when securing home care for her increasing dependency was a dicey proposition.
Ann also had asked about putting her daughters on her accounts as joint owners, ensuring, in her mind frictionless access and authority for the family. I coached against that for a variety of reasons and worked to have her accounts put into a trust with her daughters as successor trustees in the event that Ann wasn’t able to act. Everybody seemed happy with that setup.
Caroline, the daughter at home, called into the office once to authorize a withdrawal of $50,000 for a bathroom renovation for Ann, a ramp, and grab bars. I re-directed her to Ann since she was the decision-maker. I didn’t hear from the family for a few months after that.
Tick tick: Watching the money disappear
During the next few years, Ann gave me a number of causes for concern. She started to ask for larger and larger withdrawals out of the portfolio to support her daughters. Sometimes they were for home improvements that would support her lessened mobility. But there were also withdrawals for a new car, vacations, and most unusually to purchase a house in the neighborhood for Caroline’s ex-husband, ostensibly for additional help for child care.
These withdrawals were adding up to over 20% annually of her entire portfolio, putting her on the path to exhausting the accounts in just a few years.
As her advisor, I was distraught at my inability to get her to reduce the spending. I was vigilant for financial abuse, but each and every time we discussed the next draw from the investments, Ann was alert, balanced, and articulated the exact reasons behind her decisions, even as they threatened her financial independence.
She was not impaired or incompetent. I believe in respecting older adults’ agency and autonomy to make their own decisions, even when those decisions are terrible. I still reported the case to all of the relevant compliance and regulatory bodies and made countless referrals to other professionals, therapeutic and otherwise, in hopes of protecting Ann’s financial security.
I eventually insisted on a family meeting to show Ann and her daughters the downward path they were on. I hadn’t seen Ann in person since before Covid, and I was hopeful that an intervention from a trusted advisor with real numbers and projections would staunch the financial bleeding. After months of trying, I finally got them to schedule a meeting.
Tick tick: the ugly reveal
Before I even got out of the car, I knew it wouldn’t go well. The house was a dump, with knee-high weeds partially obscuring faded plastic toys amid piles of dog poop. There was a brand new Mustang in the driveway with high school bumper stickers all over it.
Sitting down at the dining room table, I noticed that there weren’t any assistive improvements in the house, no ramps, grab bars, or anything. Ann furniture-surfed her way around as before, brushing up against boxes of stuff that weren’t there during my last visit. The house smelled like ammonia.
The cash-flow audit I conducted for the audience of three was horrible. Caroline stormed out of the room when it showed most of the withdrawals going to her and her kids. I never saw her again. Barbara demanded that Ann “make her whole” from the injustice of disproportionate support for her sister.
All the while, Ann came off as defiant, not sad or ashamed. She had a year, maybe a year and a half, before the money ran out.
Tick tick: the resignation
“Tom, I want you to know I appreciate what you were trying to do in there. I believe you care, and that’s saying something. Your facts are what they are. I believe you and I always have. I’m sorry my family is so broken. This”—she waved her hand at the yard—“is a shit show, literally.
“But all the money decisions were mine and are mine. I wasn’t twisted into anything, and you’ve been warning me for years about what would happen. I’m just not going to say no to them. I promised. But thank you. And I hope you will still want to work with me.”
I told her something to the effect that I wasn’t having it. Just because she was okay with “family comes first” at the expense of her own security and safety didn’t mean I was okay with it. I didn’t see evidence that she was getting the support she’d need when things took a turn.
“Sorry about your daughter’s hard road, but you are my client, you pay the bills, and you are the one that needs help. They aren’t.” I told her I was letting her go as a client if she didn’t take measures to shore up things for herself. She surprised me by giving me a hug.
“Thank you anyway. I understand. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. Nobody is the boss of me. And I’m going to send you a present, but I don’t know if you are going to want it.”
Tick tick: a package and a phone call
A few weeks later, I received a package, a quarter-inch stack of notes.
A Post-it said:
Thanks for steering me right. Guess I went left!
Keep this in case the girls come around bitching. – Ann
The notes were dated from every conversation I’d had with Ann. There must have been about a hundred entries.
March 2016: Ask T about $50K for France. Portfolio ok. Tell C. (lots of numbers)
March 2016: T says NO FRANCE. Officially Dr. No.
May 2016 Call: Dr. No to get $15K to finish paying off France trip.
Aug 2018: Congressional (Private School in DC) tuition $20K per, need $100K
Aug 2018: Dr. No says No.
Aug 2018: (Reverse Mortgage Company) $400K, deduction?
And so on. She’d written down every piece of advice I’d given her and that she’d promptly ignored, with rare exceptions.
I later found out Ann had lost her home.
Barbara called me last year to let me know Ann had died. She had fallen and was admitted to a rehab nursing home and almost had to go on Medicaid toward the end. I also found out that Ann had borrowed from a reverse mortgage company each time I thought I’d convinced her to hold off on a spend. She never told me or her daughters. She had given each of the girls a copy of the notebook “for posterity,” but neither of them looked at it until the money was all gone.
Barbara told me that she was estranged from her sister and that her nieces and nephew had blown to the winds, only visible on Facebook.
She told me, “I wanted to call and say thanks, sorta, and that you should know she died. I hated you for letting my Mom blow all of her money for a long time, almost as much as my sister. But I guess it was Mom all along. So sorry, I guess. Thanks for trying, Dr. No.”
Purpose in wreckage: three lessons from Ann’s story
I ruminate on Ann’s story all the time. There are elements of angry impulsivity, deceit, financial exploitation, emotional trauma, depression, and illiteracy about money every time I turn it over in my head. We will explore many of these in future articles.
I’m still wrestling with my own conclusions. How do we make sense of this cautionary tale? Here are the takeaways that have bubbled up so far:
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We are not aging in a vacuum.
We are attached to people we love and care about who bring their own opportunities and hardships with them. They are characters in your story and they will affect the plot. -
We have a responsibility to ourselves to understand our own true circumstances.
Always know where you stand with your health, your money, and how things can change in the future. Better yet, try to be aware of the circumstances for the people closest to you, who can also affect your own outcomes. -
Understand your purpose.
The best advice about aging almost always includes something about finding your purpose. I’m struck by Ann finding her unexpected purpose as a widow—to spend her money recklessly on her girls. However ill-informed that purpose was, it was still something of her own. As she’d said, she’d do whatever it takes to “not let the girls down.”
However, maybe the takeaway from Ann is that if we don’t intentionally forge our purpose as we get older, another rogue purpose might hijack us in ways we don’t expect. And that can leave you with—waves hand—a real shit show.
Related: Before We Become Ghosts: The Life Lessons Hidden in Halloween and Día de Los Muertos