This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Love, Money & Aging Parents: How to Plan Care (Before the Crisis) with Beth Pinsker | 359

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Caregiving is not an easy thing. It’s paperwork, passwords, POAs, and the courage to say the hard things before the crisis hits. In this episode, we get real about the emotional and financial marathon of caring for aging parents, why women disproportionately shoulder the load, and exactly what to do now so your future self isn’t rage-crying in probate court. Our guest, Beth Pinsker—MarketWatch financial-planning columnist, CFP®, and author of My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving—walks us through the must-have documents, the family conversations that actually prevent sibling warfare, and how to set boundaries when love meets logistics. (Yes, you can be loving and say “nope, that won’t work.”) We cover: The caregiving reality check: why daughters so often become default CFOs of aging parents (and what to do about it). The legal minimums: power of attorney, healthcare proxy, will vs. trust, and when each one matters. Costly myths to ditch: “We’ll figure it out later,” “It’ll be obvious who does what,” and “We don’t need it in writing.” Crisis-proofing your finances: automation, a single “pay-from” account, and creating a breadcrumb trail someone else can actually follow. End-of-life wishes: how to handle DNR/DNI and hospice decisions without guilt (clarity > chaos). If you’re the money person: how to leave a map your family can use (and if you’re not the money person, how to get up to speed—without becoming the household bookkeeper). Because love isn’t just casseroles and hand-holding; sometimes it’s signatures, spreadsheets, and setting your people up to survive the hardest days with clarity and dignity. Thank you to our sponsors! Get 20% off your first order at curehydration.com/WOMANSWORK with code WOMANSWORK — and if you get a post-purchase survey, mention you heard about Cure here to help support the show!  Connect with Beth: Website: https://bethpinsker.com/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/bethpinsker_ny  LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bpinsker  Related Podcast Episodes: How To Have A Good Death with Suzanne B. O’Brien, RN | 292 You Only Die Once with Jodi Wellman | 262 060 / Caring For An Aging Parent with Rayna Neises Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us. And contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast. We're together. We're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. And sometimes that work looks like leading teams, building businesses, or chasing dreams.

And sometimes it looks like sitting across from your aging parent, trying to untangle decades of financial decisions, family dynamics, and denial, all while keeping your sanity, your family, your career, and your life intact. Here's the thing. Nothing brings out family dysfunction faster than money and mortality. Add illness or dementia into the mix, and it's like a marathon of emotional endurance you never signed up for. And if history and research or any guide, it's probably you, the daughter, the sister, the white, who will end up managing it all, because when caregiving calls, it's still women who pick up the phone. I've seen this all firsthand for my previous career in finance, how unprepared families

get crushed by the financial fallout of death or disability. And it's not just the bills. It's the resentment, the confusion, the relationships that don't recover. And I know it personally, too. My sister and I are living this now, navigating how to care for our dad, who's losing pieces of himself to what we believe is dementia. Some days he's kind, but most days he's angry, paranoid, and convinced that we're stealing from him. It's heartbreaking and exhausting, trying to protect him while being treated like the enemy. And as brutal as it has been, I can't imagine what it would be like if we hadn't had the conversations, the financial plan, the living trust, the clarity of what he wanted before things got bad, because that's the only thing

keeping this from completely breaking us. So I'll say what most people don't. You need to have these conversations. I don't care about your discomfort or theirs. Get over it. Because trust me, you're trading discomfort now for unbelievable pain later. Have the conversations with your parents,

with your partner, with your kids. Hell, even with your best friends. I've told mine exactly what I want so they can back my people up and tell any outsider with an opinion to go fuck off if needed. Because this isn't just about money. It's about love, respect, and protecting the people who will have to care for and clean up after us. Our guest today knows all this better than most. Beth Pinsker is a financial planning columnist at MarketWatch, a certified financial

planner, and the author of My Mother's Money, a guide to financial caregiving. After caring for her own mother, Beth turned her personal experience and a mountain of expert advice into a compassionate practical guide for navigating end-of-life financial decisions. She's here to help us do what most families avoid until it's too late. Talk about the hard stuff before it becomes impossible. So, Beth, thank you for being our guest. And I want to make sure to give our listeners practical, actionable tips. But I'd like to start by asking you to share a bit about your story of being both a financial planner and having to care for your own mom. Hi, thank you for having me here today. It's great to be here. My mom was 76 when she went in for back surgery. And she

was a fully competent, you know, successful human being at that point. She ran her own life. I didn't have anything to do with it. And, you know, she was the person I called for advice on any topic because she always knew how to do everything. And all of a sudden, she needed help. And I had to go there and do it. You know, you get that phone call. Everybody gets one of them. If you're on the list as their person, you're going to get a call on an emergency. So my mom had this surgery coming up, and she called me and she said, hey, you know, I'm going to need some help. Can you come and do whatever it is that needs to be done? And we both thought that this was going to be very temporary. She had never needed that kind of help before. I wasn't sure I could live up to her standards. And, you know,

I went down there just not knowing what to expect. And what I got was, you know, a nine-month roller coaster of complication after complication and hospital stay and rehab stay and, you know, finally hospice. And then she passed away. And I ended up taking on full control of her financial life, her daily life, her medical decisions, all the things that you have to do, except the daily physical caregiving, because we had people that we hired to do that. And, you know, that's, that was my task along with a full-time job, two teenagers, a dog, a boyfriend, you know, and all the rest of the things that come with life. And Beth, do you have siblings or was this all on you? I have an older brother who is a very wonderful and competent human being who is very private

and doesn't like to be talked about. His forte was dealing with the doctors. I hated the doctors. I hated dealing with the whole medical establishment. And he was much better at that than I was. And I dealt with the bills because that's my forte. The person in the family, besides my financial training, I'm just the person that gets stuff done. And you need, you know, most of this stuff is not.

hard core financial knowledge. It's just being organized and being willing to make the phone calls. And that's what I was able to do the best. But on those eight months, you know, we had to divvy up the labor because, you know, we had no idea what kind of time frame we were in for. It could have been 10 years for all we knew. And so we both have kids the same age. We both have full-time jobs and we couldn't both be there at the same time all the time. So what we did was established a sort of leapfrogging system. He would go for a week. I would go for a week. Then he would go back for a week. Then I would go for a week. Then I would go for two weeks. Then he would come. You know, like we just went back and forth according to who could get off. I'm divorced and I have a every other

week custody schedule. And so it was really hard for me to go down there for more than a week because I would miss my time with my kids. And so I would go in between that and my, you know, like my brother would go when he could. Yeah. So correct me from wrong. I'm operating under the assumption. It sounds like your brother was very involved and that's amazing. I am operating under the assumption, though, that in a lot of cases, in most cases, the caregiving work often falls to the daughters or the sisters or the wives.

It's almost always the woman in their relationship who kind of steps up. And maybe it's because we're used to getting things done or we have the reputation for being able to handle it all. Who knows? But is that actually the case? Is that what's happening? Absolutely. The majority of family caregivers are women.

It hits women in their peak earning peak career years. 51 is the average age of the family caregiver. And I think 60 to 70% of them are women, according to like the AARP study that comes out every year. And, you know, altogether family caregivers are about 63 million people in the United States. It's not a little group. I mean, almost every one of us is out there doing something. And the scarier number is that 70% of us as human beings are going to face a caregiving situation for ourselves at some point. So already 63 million people are caring for somebody else, 70% of us are going to need care at some point for us.

And the same time that you have to figure out how you're going to care for your parent or an aunt or a friend, you have to figure out who's going to care for you. And that's the situation my mom was in. My mom cared for my grandparents. My mom cared for my father. And, you know, he was sick for four years before he died. I didn't have to do very much in that circumstance because she was there. when my mom had to hire caregivers to help with my dad, it blew up their budget. Like, she didn't know how long that situation would last either, and they had to pay out

of pocket for that because my dad didn't have any insurance of any kind that would cover that. And she got scared, and she needed to talk to somebody about it. And, you know, the caregiving work is a mental load, too. And so that's where my caregiving journey started. It was just listening to my mother. Somebody had to be there for her to talk to and, you know, know that she was doing the right thing at all of those at the points along the way with my dad.

And so part of it is sometimes it just starts by listening. And you have to, you know, be available for that. And I have seen, I have been, I have done this myself and I've seen people do it. You get that call. You're busy. It's in the middle of your day and the phone rings. And you look at who it is and it's mom or dad.

And you're like, oh, God. And you have to kind of be on duty for that for a long time and be aware of it to know when it shifts. You have to know when the tone of voice starts to change, when the calls come one after the other asking the same thing and the person doesn't remember that they called before. You know, you have to be watching out for some of that stuff. I would look for little clues. My mom's big tell when she started to get. was that she didn't want to talk. I would call and she would tell me she was busy, even though I knew she wasn't busy. And, you know, I had to figure out, you know, what was going on. What was she trying not to tell us? There are a lot of things that are rolling through my mind. One of them, and I don't think we can tackle this at least not in a few minutes, but, you know, how frustrating it is that we as a culture and a society don't do it.

great job taking care of our elderly citizens and we don't have a lot of support in place. And so it does fall on to us, the children, the relatives, to not just manage, but also often provide the care. And that was something my parents and I talked about as they wanted us to be in a position where we could manage the care and not have to provide it. And so long-term care insurance came into place, savings, having a plan. That was always very important to them. And I could not be any more appreciative of that because I don't think any of us wanted to be changing diapers or having to quit jobs or leave families in order to provide care. I will also tell you one of the things I knew it because I'd heard other people say it, but I didn't know it at the level until I

experienced it myself, how all consuming this can be. We're talking about a, you know, sometimes minute by minute in your day, it can impact your career, your relationship with your chosen family, with your siblings, with it can, you know, sometimes like you mentioned the phone calls, I've gotten to the point where I don't answer because I don't know which version I'm going to get. And so I wait to hear the voicemail to have an idea of what I'm walking into. The burden feels all consuming and then I have a ton of guilt about how, I consider it an obligation because my desire is to care for my parents. My desire is for them to lead the best lives they can for as long as they can.

You know, there is a desire element. But in it, when you're in it in the day to day, I feel a ton of guilt and a ton of overwhelm about how all-consuming it is and can be. And it really does impact everything. and it does feel like a burden a lot of the time. Any thoughts or reactions there other than I sound like a jerk? We were in the same boat as you. And the thing that I, the reason I wanted to write this book was because you can pay for a lot of the care,

but this financial stuff, because it's so legal related and you have to have a trusted person doing the money stuff that you can't really buy your way out of it. And, you know, you could be the most wealthy person in the world. world. And if your mother is sick, you still have to be her power of attorney. You know, if you're, and if your parents die, you know, you're going to be named as the executor on the estate. You may be able to pay for some help to assist you, but at the end of the day, you're the one that's going to have to call the credit card company and close the account because your name is on the paperwork as their trusted person. And you can't just hire, the same person who changes your mom's diaper cannot have her

ATM card to go to the ATM machine and get her cash. Like those have to be two separate people. And the person with the ATM code, you know, for the most part, they have to be either a close family friend or some kind of family member who you trust. And not all family members are trustworthy. So, you know, you don't want to use them exclusively. And you can hire some trust managers, but those are complicated relationships. and you have complicated payment structures.

And they're really cumbersome for real people to use. And the people who end up using them are the people who are going to be solo agers who really don't have any family left but still have affairs that they need to manage. And those people need to hire some sort of company that has like a longevity to it Because if you're going to set that up, you know, 20 years before you might be dying, you want to make sure that that person who you hire is still going to be there in 20 years. I think, you know, if you look at like a situation like Gene Hackman, I think Gene Hackman outlasted all of his, you know, lawyers and financial advisors.

And, you know, they were down to like third successor trustees on that case. Like, you don't know who's going to go first. And this is why solo agers have such a hard time of it. You know, if you're 65 and all your friends are 65, who's going to manage your affairs? Like, which one of you is going to go first? You don't know. Impossible to know that sort of thing. And so family is going to get stuck with these caregiving tasks.

And they're not intuitive. If you were able to know how to do this stuff, it would be in a book that I learned in financial planning class. And none of this stuff was in any of the. two years of course work that I encountered in financial planning land. Yeah. Okay. So one side thought that popped up when you were talking is if you're working with a financial advisor on your estate planning or succession plan or whatever you want to call it, to ask the question, what's their succession plan? Because most of the time we work with financial

advisors or attorneys or CPAs who are our age or older. And so making sure that there are actually going to be people in place who can execute on and follow through, on facilitate the things you put in place, I think is hugely important. So I want to get a little practical and tactical because I kind of got a little snippy at the intro and I said, you know, I don't care how uncomfortable these conversations are. You need to have them. And I acknowledge that they're uncomfortable and hard to have. So what are some of the tips? What are some things that we need to be talking about what are things that we need to kind of check the boxes on to put ourselves there is no like good situation i don't think to find ourselves in like you said where it's all intuitive and

perfectly mapped out and everything goes according to plan but there are some things that we should be talking about well in advance what are those things who's on your list you know who do you want to take care of you uh and take care of things for you and do you have that written down and if on that person, I need a copy of it. And the thing I suggest to people is very simple. Send down an email. If you, you know, like I know that I personally, me as a human being, am on the list to take care of a whole number of people who aren't actually related to me and some that are related to me. And I don't know where all of those people are with their paperwork. You know, I have a bunch of friends who are aging, who are not married. I have relatives.

I have, you know, other people who count on me. And if there's an emergency and I'm going to get that phone call, I need to know, you know, do you have a power of attorney? Do you have a health care proxy? Do you have a will or a trust or some kind of statement that covers you, your affairs after you die? And if I'm that person, please send me a copy of it. If you want me to be that person and you don't have any of that paperwork, then here's a link, download the forms. get them notarized, and send me a copy, please. Like, that's simple.

Like, it's one email that you can blast out to everybody on your list. Your adult children, your next-door neighbor that you've taken a shine to, and counts on you, your single friends, your aunt, your uncle, your parents, you know, whoever it needs to be. If you're going to get that phone call and they don't have those things, you're in a world of pain. Like, the difference is, very stark. If you have, if you can get those documents, they're generally free, or you might,

for a simple will, for a simple power of attorney and health care proxy, you shouldn't be paying more than like $90 to $100. For a will, a couple hundred dollars, for a trust, you know, a couple thousand dollars. And if you don't have those things, if, so take the free power of attorney. If you don't have the free power of attorney and you need it, you're going to go into court. You're going to need to hire a lawyer. It's going to cost you $18,000 and a year of your life. Right. If you don't have a will.

And a lot of pain and friction and relationships and, yeah, all the things. Yeah, all the things. It's bad. You don't, like, I've read the cases, you don't want to go to probate court. If you don't have a will and you die without a will, your family is going to have to have to hire a a lawyer after you're dead that's going to cost way more than it would cost before you die. And they're going to be in probate court for up to, for starting at three years and up to 10 years. It could take a really long time if there are any fights. If you get a trust and you spend,

you know, four or five thousand dollars on the trust, you escape all the costs of, you know, probating a will after, after you're gone. And those are costs that, you know, you're going. And those are costs that, are not just upfront costs, right? Like, it's not just the cost for the lawyer to administer the will. It's the fact that you inherited a house from your mom, and you can't sell that house until you have the legal authority to sell that house, which means you have to file the will in probate court. You have to wait for the letters of administration.

Then you have to wait for probate to clear, and that could be a year. You have to pay the mortgage, the taxes, the upkeep, the heat and electric. You know, you have to pay, you have to carry that house until it's legally yours. And that is a lot of money in some cases that people don't have on hand because the estate hasn't settled. And that's even worse if you don't have any paperwork at all. And you're tied up in court for five years and this property is sitting fallow with nothing you can do about it. And a lot of families end up in that situation because 70% of people in this country do not have a will. If you're anything like me, drinking enough water every day sounds great in theory.

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conversations, but equally is important that it gets put in writing. If it's not in writing, it doesn't mean anything. Right. It doesn't count. Or you can be like, you know, this sibling was like, oh, we had this conversation. And another sibling says something different. And then it's like the he said, she said, my opinion, it's again, super convoluted. And just to reiterate up front, most of this stuff is easy.

and inexpensive or free and somewhat simple. Sure, there are some things that a little bit more complicated and a little bit more costly, but if you need those things, no matter how you slice it, it's all going to be more costly in the back end versus setting it up right in the beginning. Now, what would you say, I've heard this back in the day when I would ask people if they'd had their trust done or their wills or whatever. They would, often the reason that they gave for not having done it was because there wasn't agreement on certain things. We don't agree who would take the kids. We don't agree, you know, spouses might not agree who gets what or what have you. What is your response when somebody says, well, don't have it all figured out

and that's why I'm delaying putting it all in writing? Figured out. Yeah, put something. The hard truth is you have to figure it out because if you don't figure it out, somebody else is going to figure it out for you, and that person is going to be a judge. And the judge has a rulebook, and that rule book is unflinching. So my husband and I, when we were married, and my kids were young, decided that we wanted our friend to be the guardian of our children. But we never put that in writing, because we never gone around to doing our will while we were married.

And if something would have happened to both of us, a judge would have decided where my children would have gone to live. And it would not have been with the friend that we had intended because she's nowhere on the list that goes in front of a judge. Somebody would have said, oh, Beth wanted her, you know, her kids to go to this person. And the judge would have been like, that person's not a direct blood relative, you know, not happening. It wasn't until I got divorced, and I was walking home one night on a very icy night, and I thought, if I fall and hit my head, what happens to all my money? And it would go to my children, but it would go to my children in the care of my ex-husband. And, you know, I didn't like the way he handled money.

And so I said, there has to be some way to fix that. And yes, there is. Indeed, it's a trust. You set up a trust for your kids, and you name you. named my mom as the executor. And so if anything were to happen to me, my money would be there protected by my mother for my children. And that's why you need to sort of think about these and have some sort of epiphany. And my goal with this book was to live through all of these hard thoughts for people so that they don't actually have to live through that bad situation. Like I had that scary

bad thought coming home one night. I'm going to tell you about it. And then you don't have to have that scary bad thought. You could just do something. And also, say that like I've gone and gotten a trust done. My mom went and got a trust done. It's really no harder than filling out like the forms when you go to a new doctor. Like it's really not, you're not writing a trust. You don't have to learn anything about it. You don't have to know how to do brain surgery before you go in for, you know, an operation. Like you fill out some forms and the lawyer does it. That's why you hire them. That's why it costs a couple thousand dollars because it's specialized knowledge. But you don't have to do anything. And not all of us

need trusts, right? There is sort of a, I don't know, if there's a line of demarcation or whatever, but like in this situation, you might need a trust if you have a certain amount of assets or a certain really complex situation. Yeah, I go through all this in the book. There's a, there's a chart, you know, to figure out, like when you need certain things. Like 18-year-olds don't need a trust. But an 18-year-old absolutely needs a health care proxy and a power of attorney. I had to use one the other day just to make a doctor's appointment for my 19-year-old. I got them on the phone. He's away college.

And I was like, oh, I need to make him a doctor's appointment for winter break. And I call up and they're like, oh, you need a health care proxy in order to make an appointment for him. And I'm like, really? Like, that must stop a lot of people. Of course, I have one because that's who I am. But you need this stuff. That's what you need for an 18-year-old or anybody 18-plus.

When you have kids, you need to have a will that names a guardian for them that, you know, aligns with your wishes. If you have a house, you need to either name, you know, you can put it in a will. A trust is more efficient in most states. Some states have what's called a transfer on death deed of some sort. So you can just basically name a beneficiary for the house. But states like California and community property states in general, a trust really helps with the house. house. Otherwise, probate just, the courts are so backed up and probate's expensive and you end up just locked up for a really long time. If you want to leave money with any sort of condition on it,

say for instance, somebody in your family has an addiction problem or a mental health problem or has a special need of some sort. You need to have a trust for those kind of people. And the evil step-parent trope, if you have any sort of blended family, you need a trust because then you have the situation that automatically almost always leads to bad feelings, right? There are divorces and remarriages and money that you think is intended for the children of the first marriage ends up going to the children of the second marriage, or the stepmother gets the house sold out from under them and they have to move even though they're 80, you know, and every evil step-parent scenario that you can come up with could be solved with a simple trust.

Right. Okay. So those are some of the, like, legal paperwork, financial things. Any other things that you talk about in the book, specifically for the person who would be providing the care? Are there things that we should know or have our ducks in a row that, you know, we decide or that we have to communicate? So, for example, I think of, you know, you said earlier, deciding who you want to care for you. Well, if my mom says, well, I want Nicole to care for me, it's not an automatic yes. I love my mom.

I will make sure that she's cared for. I would want to be with her and spend time with her. And I have a full-time career. I have a daughter. I have a family. And so it isn't just this automatic, this person gets to decide. Or like this person says, oh, I want to live like this. Well, it's like, okay, but the reality is you don't have the full.

finances to live like that. So as the person who's going to be providing the care or managing the finances, what are some things that we need to get our ducks in a row on or communicate in order to set ourselves up well? Yeah, I think that that's where the family conversation comes in, because you have to know what your boundaries are. And yeah, you cannot buy legal fiat putting your will, I don't ever want to go in a nursing home. And your children have to abide by that. Like, this is all a discussion. That's all a negotiation. And so that's where you need to know what your parent really wants. For my mom, the real key was she had very strong feelings about her end of life trajectory. And those are hard conversations to have too. And you know, you have people with different

religious beliefs in the same family and different political beliefs and not everybody's on the same page about that kind of stuff, but my mom did not, you know, she wanted a DNR, she wanted do not intubate, she wanted go on hospice care, like she wanted control over those sorts of decisions while she had her faculties. And you have to have family members who are willing to allow those decisions to happen. And, you know, that takes some convincing sometimes. That's a sensitive topic. And I would say that when we came to face those decisions, there were a lot of people on hand who were helpful at that stage. Counselors, hospice workers, the whole hospital administration system was set up to sort of help people through that. The estate lawyer, like,

there are people on hand who can help families mediate that, like, last discussion to have. But it's always better to know it ahead of time because I think one of the greatest things that gave me peace of mind throughout my whole journey with my mom is that I always knew exactly what she wanted she was absolutely clear and I didn't have to feel any of those like hard feelings like oh my god I'm killing her oh my god I'm doing the wrong thing I'm not providing enough care I'm not doing what she wants like that guilty feeling is awful she absolved me of that because she was so clear her whole life about what she wanted you know we would talk about this when my grandmother was sick. And she'd be like, don't do that to me. I don't want what she had. And when my father got

sick, she would be like, I'm doing this for him, but don't do that for me. And she, she made her wishes known. And that relieved me of a lot of responsibility for it. And that was psychologically very helpful. Yeah, I can attest to that as well. My last question is related, but kind of a little bit of an offshoot in most marriages or committed long-term relationships, there's more often than not one person who sort of manages the money or handles the finances. And so I'm going more down the road if in a marriage or in a long-term relationship, if one spouse, the spouse who manages all the finances and all that passes away or it becomes unable to manage anymore, any advice of for the other spouse, what are the financial pieces of information we need to know or we need

to be part of whether or not we're managing the finances? Like, I just don't think we can abdicate the money any longer. I'm watching that one cold in real time right now with a relative. And, you know, it's, it's hard. My mom was the financial manager and of the whole family for her whole life. And so she didn't have any problem with that part of it. But I'm watching this happen now with relatives. And the mother in the family is having a hard time with it. The father got sick and, you know, was sick for three weeks. And that crossed over a bill cycle. And bills didn't get paid. You know, they got past due notices. And she didn't know where anything was or how anything got paid or where any of the money was. And so, you know, her son had to step in. And the purse,

It's on the person who is doing the money management. It's their responsibility to make sure that they leave a path that can be followed. You need to leave a breadcrumb trail. You need to make things easy for other people. And if you think you're starting to have trouble with it, you know, ask somebody for help or make sure that it's all at least automated in a sense that, like, all of my bills are automated. If something happened to me, life would just go on forever. Like the bills, the lights would stay on and everything would function as normal.

And my affairs would be very easy to follow, but not a lot of people do it that way. And their accounts hidden here or there and bills that they pay manually. Older people are very fond of writing a check and putting it in the mail. I have no idea why. But you have to make it so that somebody can step in and take care of you. You know, one bank account that you pay from, one credit card that you use. use. Write down the passwords if you can, have your phone available so that they can two-factor authenticate if they need to, you know, have your statements organized in a folder, have your

life insurance in a folder marked life insurance, for God's sake. You need to make it easy for somebody to find stuff. I'll also add, I agree with everything that you said. And I will also add that it's all of our responsibility to stay connected and aware. So I manage the household finance for our family, which is ironic because my husband's a financial advisor, but I manage the day to day and where all the accounts are. We always joke around that he doesn't even know where we bank. That's not true. But like it's, you know, I couldn't cook for myself if something happened to him and he couldn't pay the bills if something happened to me a joke, but we kind of divide and conquer. But my point being is that it is still both of our responsibility to connect once a month or once a quarter and

talk through our finances, that we make big financial decisions together, that he knows where those things are. I don't think we can any longer say, oh, I don't need to know I trust you or I don't care or whatever. Like Jay said that to me once. He's like, I trust you. And I'm like, great. And you still need to be involved. Like that doesn't, I appreciate it. And there are certain things that we need to talk about and be connected with and decide together. And I say that mostly because I think in a lot of cases it's women who do the, oh, I don't need to know or I trust you or I'm not involved and I don't know where everything is. And it's like, stop. Yes. Have the conversations. I'm a divorced lady. I don't trust anybody. I don't like people,

so I don't trust anybody. So we're on the same page. And my executor now and the person who's responsible for me if something happens to me is 19. So, you know, I need to to make sure that he understands stuff and that he knows where to go for help because, you know, I have a significant other, but we're not married. And so my 19-year-old is currently responsible for me in a worst-case scenario. And to me, that's terrifying. And I hope nothing ever happens to me. But, you know, I'm working on getting him prepared to, you know, be an adult and handle stuff like that. Right. Beth, I could, I have one million questions and we could talk about. this all day, but I want to make sure people know where to get their hands on your book. So the book

is my mother's money. You can order it on Amazon or go to your local bookstore. Let's keep them in business. And Beth's website is bethpinsker.com. We'll put all the links and all the ways to find and follow Beth in show notes. Thank you for writing this book for turning what I imagine was just challenging and hard and all the things into something practical and helpful for all of us. and thank you for being here today. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. All right, here's what I hope you take away from this conversation.

Love isn't just phone calls, memories, and showing up for birthdays. Sometimes love looks like spreadsheets, signatures, and the courage to talk about things that nobody wants to face. Avoidance doesn't protect you or them. It just defers and compounds the pain, yours, and the people you care most about. So have the conversations, make the plans, get the paperwork in order. Don't wait for the emergency or the diagnosis or the someday that turns into too late. Because this is what real care looks like. It's hard, it's messy, and it's

deeply human, but it's also one of the greatest gifts you can give. Choice, clarity, and dignity for the people you love and their legacy. And let me be clear, you will never catch me saying that caregiving is woman's work. We get that message far too often already. Caregiving is everyone's because caring for the people we love while still honoring ourselves might be some of the hardest and holiest work we'll ever do. And that is woman's work.