Tomaro has a client who lost his 50-year-old wife to cancer and had to leave his job in New York City to be more available to his special needs child.
“He did not realize he could collect Social Security on his wife’s earnings,” Tomaro says. “Talk to the client to see what he knows and be strong for the client. You may feel like crying with him, but you can’t.”
Advisors also need to have resources to call on to help some clients, such as therapists, attorneys and CPAs, says Leslie Thompson, managing principal at Spectrum Management Group in Indianapolis. Thompson is currently working with a client who lost her husband and then her 21-year-old son within three years of each other.
“Some things are beyond our scope, and you have to have a network of people to draw on for the client,” Thompson says. “In this client’s case, I have to convince her she cannot quit working, because she needs the money but also because she needs to get out of the house.
“I could show her the numbers, but she is not hearing me right now.”
Thompson, who says she is usually successful at keeping clients from making bad decisions, is hoping for a good outcome for this client.
Tom West, a senior associate with SEIA, a financial advisory firm in Los Angeles, sometimes leans on social workers with nursing or direct care backgrounds to help clients through the grieving process. Most of his clients have the resources to hire a team of financial, legal and psychological assistants, he says.
If a client has difficulty making decisions while grieving, “we look back at past financial problems to see how they solved them and we find a thread to apply to the current situation,” West says. “You have to spend time with the client and keep them talking” in order to find a solution.