The health and financial damage brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic comes as no surprise to Dr. Carolyn McClanahan, who also is a practicing financial advisor in Jacksonville, Fla. “God, I was right, and I hate that I was,” she said in an interview.

For more than a decade, McClanahan has been tirelessly advocating for public health reforms and funding. She has written about it, spoken with congressional leaders about it and tweeted often about it.

Her stories, which have appeared in various publications, followed reports from the World Health Organization about the 2013 Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) that originated in Saudi Arabia.

McClanahan, who has a background in epidemiology and virology, warned in her writings that if there was a pandemic, America would not be prepared. She pointed to the 2013 outbreak as an example and cautioned that there may well be more pandemics to come. Other prominent students of global health care, most notably Bill Gates, have issued similar warnings about what we can expect in what is becoming an increasingly small world.

McClanahan, who went back to school for financial planning after she began her career as an emergency room physician, said the pandemic should serve as a wake-up call for the financial advisory industry. She founded Life Planning Partners in 2004.

The virus, which WHO had warned could be passed between people in close contact, affected mainly countries in the Middle East and some European countries including France and Italy. And while it was fatal, it was not as contagious as SARS and Ebola.

“There are about 1,000 viruses out there that could potentially cause problems. We just don’t know when they are going to cause problems,” she said then.

To hammer home her point about the need for public health care, McClanahan took to Twitter and began to sound alarms via a series of tweets, one of which referred to the coronavirus as “our next black swan.” Another tweet stated: “No one will worry about the stock market, politics or anything else when this nasty coronavirus hits.” And another said: “People should worry about this instead of money and politics, #pandemic.”

On March 21, she tweeted @realDonaldTrump and tagged her series of tweets with the message, “FYI, here are all my #coronavirus tweets from 2013. To say we didn’t know about this is a bald face lie. This and other viruses is why I’ve screamed about public health and community health for a decade now.”

McClanahan said she is furious because public health funding is not a priority in the U.S. She said various presidents made it a priority during their administrations, but over the years it would get cut. It was wiped out when Trump was elected, she said.

“It’s a discretionary item in the budget and it needs to be mandatory funding every year,” she said.

She noted public health officials have been fighting for funding for the past decade. “They are still having to fight for funding every year, and this is why we are in the predicament we are in right now, because our health care system is so fragmented, and our public health funding is so bad,” she said.

She hopes financial advisors are taking notice and will rethink their strategies with clients. Financial planners, she said, spends too much time predicting a future that is not predictable and not enough time creating resiliency for their clients so that they can withstand the impact of troubled times.

“We give people these projections about retirement and we try to predict the economy. That’s bull. Instead, we need to be helping people create a great life,” she said.

She said the focus in her practice revolves around making sure people are saving for the future with an emphasis on resiliency, not retirement. She pointed out that retirement was invented in the 1930s with Social Security at a time when the average life expectancy for U.S. residents was under 65.

“Now we live another 20 to 30 years past that, and so to me people shouldn’t be quitting work at 65. And this goes into public policy because there is so much ageism," she argues. "We need to create policies to keep people working as long as possible, doing something, because that’s your greatest way to maintain financial security."

If you are able to save a lot of money and it is much less than you spend, then you can give up the ability to work, she said. But she cautions people not to count on the stock market to take care of them for 30 years. “And this [latest bear market] is a perfect example,” she said of the pandemic.  

McClanahan also faults financial advisors for allowing clients to be too aggressive with their investments in retirement. “You can’t afford to take that kind of risk if you are no longer working. If you have a lot of money, yes, but if you have just enough, you have to be really careful with that,” she said.

At her firm, clients who are in retirement or near retirement have at least five years of cash flow and most of them have no more than 30% to 40% stock in their portfolio, she said. “It’s making certain that if the bottom drops out that your clients know that they are OK in the short term, and ideally the market will come back in the long term,” she said.

Financial advisors, she said, should prepare their clients for hard times and make sure they have an emergency fund that helps to provide for cash flow that’s going to meet their needs no matter what the market is doing. They also need to be appropriately insured, have all their estate planning documents up to date and have a good financial plan, she said.

“If you look at the Great Depression, it took 20 years for the stock market to come back. So, never let people take more risk than they can afford financially to meet their needs,” she said.   

Today, McClanahan focuses on family medicine as a volunteer and continues to offer financial advice to clients. She said she's commited to continuing the fight for public health funding. “We should be creating resiliency within our systems instead of panicking when something big occurs,” she said.