#212 – Spending Our Anxieties: The Motivations Of Financial Decision-Making With Christine Moriarty

Christine Moriarty [00:02:26]:
Well, I got started in finance because I was a finance major as an undergrad. And when I graduated, I was not interested in big finance at all. And financial planning had just started up. I was interested in people, and that made me get into the field. And it took a while because you got to get your CFP, you have to work in the industry. And then I went to grad school at Babson and wrote my business plan for my business before starting it in Boston 30 years ago. And I worked with individual clients, and I loved it for 25 years. And on the side, I was speaking and writing, and that’s where my heart is.

Christine Moriarty [00:03:14]:
I want to educate other financial planners with the experience of the intersection between psychology and money because I like people and I wanted to write more, and I was doing both of those, but not enough. So in 2019, I sold my book of business and decided I’d go on the road speaking and writing. We know I got sidetracked because of that little thing, Covid but that did.

Wes Moss [00:03:42]:
Put a dent in big public events, didn’t it?

Christine Moriarty [00:03:44]:
It certainly did, but it gave me more opportunity to write and refine a lot of my work. And now I’m getting back on the road again and hoping to educate individuals as well as other planners, because you have lived through it. And we need to tell the planners to keep their eye open for situations of money and memory issues.

Wes Moss [00:04:08]:
So I want to talk about money and memory issues. I think I wanted to ask you, though, first just your thoughts and some of your work around the psychology of money. And I know that that’s been a big part of that. You’ve certainly written about that and maybe coming at peace with money. I think of, we’ve had a few psychologists here that talk about that. I know you’re not necessarily a psychologist, but you’ve practiced this. And I wonder if there’s just so many things around money and money, anxiety and the fear of running out of money. And then you’ve got, you think about the upping of negative words in headlines.

Wes Moss [00:04:49]:
I don’t know if you’ve read about this, but if you track headlines over the last 20 years, the propensity for sadness and fear and shock have gone up by 300% in headlines. So we’re all a little more on edge. And it just makes, even though we have way more information and almost full democratized information in the United States, it probably makes it even harder from a money perspective to be an investor. So I guess I wanted your thoughts around how you coached people over time on that side of the ledger, on.

Christine Moriarty [00:05:21]:
That side of the equation. And I tread lightly here, but social media and media on television, they’re designed to have shock value and do have leads that are going to catch your attention in a business of 25 years. I went through many ups and downs with clients in the financial markets, and often I would tell them, turn off the news or don’t open your statements. You can open them and look at them once a year. So you have to streamline that information that’s out there. There is a whole wealth of information out there, which is great, and we need to know that then objective advice is even more important now. So having someone learn how to decipher the financial information is as important as the information itself, knowing where it came from.

Wes Moss [00:06:24]:
So what was the biggest challenge when it came to clients and them being good investors over time? What was, what did you see as the biggest roadblock to that?

Christine Moriarty [00:06:34]:
The biggest roadblock was getting them to acknowledge where their fears or their hesitations were coming from, because often they were coming from their family, not really looking at the $50,000, $200,000 that they have invested. I had one client who came in and they were terrified of everything going on because they didn’t have enough money. They bought me a list of their assets. Obviously, it was a first time client. It was written on a little piece of note paper this big. And they had over a million dollars.

Wes Moss [00:07:13]:
In assets spread out in a bunch of different cash and stocks kind of all over the place.

Christine Moriarty [00:07:19]:
But think what credit they gave it, that it was on a three and a half by five piece of paper. They just couldn’t even look at it because they just felt so poor to begin with, that this wasn’t anything of value. So we had to go do the deeper dive in conjunction with this. Some of my clients used to call me a financial therapist, but I always did the work of the kind of therapy steps with the finances.

Wes Moss [00:07:50]:
I, for example. So what are some of the. Yeah, give me some examples around this.

Christine Moriarty [00:07:56]:
First and greatest thing that I, I like talking to people about. Well, first talking to people, clients come in, whether they have a little piece of paper or notebooks full of their financial information. I’d say, put that down. I’m going to talk to you, and I’m sure, just by your way, in the pot doing the podcast, you do the same thing. I need to talk to you. And I’d talk about what’s their values, what’s their priorities, and then I would go around the block some and say, no, tell me about how you grew up and learning what their history was with money within their family, or perhaps they had a previous marriage. Then what was that like? That sets up where they’re at today. So no matter how much money they have, no matter how little debt they had, they were stuck in a behavior patent from the past.

Christine Moriarty [00:08:54]:
And then we did steps to get out of that.

Wes Moss [00:08:57]:
So Morgan Housel talks about this in his book that he’s, I think his first lesson around psychology of money is that nobody’s crazy because everyone’s, their financial opinions are rooted in however they grew up, it’s whatever. And that is an almost an endless fingerprint. That is unique to everybody, right? The timing, family wealth, the way the family spend. The hardships or non hardships that families went through. So everybody kind of has this unique DNA. Around how they think about money in the birth order. Well, what do you think about birth order? That’s. I don’t know.

Christine Moriarty [00:09:32]:
I haven’t.

Wes Moss [00:09:33]:
Tell me. Birth order.

Christine Moriarty [00:09:34]:
A personal example. Okay. So I have two older sisters. And then I have a brother who is two years older than me. So it makes those sisters significantly older in many ways. They’re eight and six years older. All from the same parents, by the way. My mother used to have to explain that.

Christine Moriarty [00:09:55]:
However, these. My brother and I were young when my father’s business turned more successful. So we went to Disney World three times. We went to, you know, Florida with my parents. My sisters went to outside Boston, Brent Rock, for a month. And I probably did too. I don’t really remember. Not a month, two or three weeks.

Christine Moriarty [00:10:23]:
But with my mother’s extended family who had all chipped in to buy this place. So my sister’s perception of money and how they grew up. Is very different than my brother and I. Even though we lived under the same roof our entire lives. What was opportunities for us was different.

Wes Moss [00:10:43]:
So it’s not necessarily birth order, as in, the oldest thinks this way, the youngest thinks this way. You’re saying that birth order in relation to how each one grew up economically in our situation.

Christine Moriarty [00:10:54]:
But also birth order. Because who’s responsible? You know, the oldest is the most responsible, typically, in a family. And the youngest is more fly by night. I can think of another family where the older kids were always giving the youngest one extra money in college in different places because they had no money. So who does that make you? You know?

Wes Moss [00:11:20]:
Yeah. So what? Okay, so so who became in your family, in your birth order, who were the risk? I don’t know if we could categorize it into more willing to take risk. Versus more conservative. With money in general. Who was who?

Christine Moriarty [00:11:34]:
My older sister would be the most conservative. I’m sure that was part her personality. But I think birth odor had something to do with it and what she experienced. I gotta look out for other people. I’m taking in more of what’s going on in the family dynamics. And then my brother and I are probably more risk takers when it comes to money.

Wes Moss [00:11:59]:
Well, you started your own business right out of school, for God’s sake. I mean, that’s that’s like the ultimate. That’s the. That’s a riskier move than being an all stock investor.

Christine Moriarty [00:12:07]:
Well, let’s go back to the psychology of entrepreneurship. My dad had his own business, so business owners are more successful when they see someone else up close and personal run a business.

Wes Moss [00:12:21]:
Yeah. I will tell you me growing up with my dad as a veterinarian, but he had his own practice. And I remember there’s so vivid the few moments that. How that trajectory changed. He was working for a. He was. I don’t think he was a partner with the vet he worked for when he got out of kind of his first steady, long term veterinary job. And I still remember it was.

Wes Moss [00:12:49]:
Doctor Cowan was the guy who. That he worked with. And my dad was young. Now, looking back on it, he was pretty young. I think in his early thirties. Doctor Cowan had kind of gotten old enough to say he was ready to go, and he had some health issues, and he offered to sell the practice to my dad. And boom. I remember that conversation.

Wes Moss [00:13:10]:
I was probably, I don’t know, ten or nine or eight. Yeah, I’m the oldest, so I remember when he said, gosh, it’s a. Yeah, you know, it costs a lot of money, but I’m going to own the practice. And then I saw him from age ten all the way till he sold it about right before COVID make that journey. And I was in the office. I was helping cleaning kennels, and he would always talk about the personnel and so hard to find doctors. And it was like, this tech was great, and this one was not great, and they had to fire this one and hire a. So my whole growing up from, like, age eight until really forever, was all about the business that he ran.

Wes Moss [00:13:54]:
And it was his entire. My entire conversation with him were all those years. So much of it was around that. And then I ended up really doing the exact. Almost the exact same thing. When I was 31 is when I left a big brokerage firm and partnered with who would today, to this day, be my existing partners. And we have a, you know, we have a business. We have a.

Wes Moss [00:14:15]:
We have a Ria.

Christine Moriarty [00:14:16]:
So it applies on money and. And risk. And it would be interesting if you have siblings to talk to them to see how much they got and all that, because sometimes everyone hears it and sometimes the younger ones don’t.

Wes Moss [00:14:31]:
Yeah, I think my youngest siblings, they went less entrepreneurial, more. More medicine. So they. I don’t know what that. But it is very interesting. I think it is a great question to just say, look, how did you grow up? And you talk about money in that journey of growing up, and it really does tell, it informs us what our kind of our money anchors are and how we really think about it. So. And then give me an example of overcoming something.

Wes Moss [00:15:02]:
Is it mostly overcoming over conservatism where somebody says, oh, I just, I don’t want to invest in the stocks are too risky? What do you think it is?

Christine Moriarty [00:15:12]:
It’s not always about investing. It’s adjusting to what they have if they have money or adjusting to what they don’t have if they don’t have money. So that’s where I merge the two, because I don’t have a lot of psychology background, but I have a lot of people skills from doing that. And I would say, instead of saying, someone in debt, oh, you have to save $500 a month or you’re going to never be able to retire, I would say, hey, it looks like you’re spending $500 a month on your credit card. Why don’t we try 300 for a month and back that down? So if they’re overspenders, it isn’t about pointing the finger. It’s knowing their background, emotional state that they feel like they have the money to spend when we know they don’t and vice versa. I had a client that they were actually two siblings operating totally differently. One was very similar to that.

Christine Moriarty [00:16:15]:
The other one, they had both inherited money from their mother. The other one would not spend a penny. That was money was going to be for retirement. There was nothing that she could possibly do. She was working a full time job. She had enough to retire, but she was working full time. And I actually made her go out and spend $20 a week on something foolish until she met me again.

Wes Moss [00:16:42]:
That’s kind of fun.

Christine Moriarty [00:16:43]:
It was really a fun assignment, but it shows how individual people are.

Wes Moss [00:16:48]:
By the way, what happened? Did it work or what happened?

Christine Moriarty [00:16:51]:
The first time, she was like, oh, I didn’t do it. We had met two weeks. The next time she came, she had bought a pretty scarf and she had bought some food she wouldn’t have bought. So I was like, good. It’s just practice. That’s all any of us, we need practice. It’s a human skill, is money. And merging these two is so important to me.

Christine Moriarty [00:17:16]:
And that’s why I love doing the speaking to other planners, because I can give them tips and tools and say, here’s the actual steps to make it work, rather than just the psychology big overview, which is important, but we need to know how to apply it.

Wes Moss [00:17:33]:
So one, go out and spend something foolish that’s kind of interesting. How have you seen, have you had the core, I’m sure you have, over your career course correct. Somebody who was, let’s maybe think about how they think about investing, either overly conservative or overly aggressive. Have you been able to course correct that?

Christine Moriarty [00:17:55]:
Well, one, if you could go back to remembering this, after 2000, when the stock market went down drastically, I had a rush of clients because they were all invested too aggressively. So when the market went down, they went way down. But they thought the market was going to last forever at 20% a year.

Wes Moss [00:18:20]:
Yeah.

Christine Moriarty [00:18:20]:
So those kind of course corrections are very easy, as you know, because they’re learning from them, their mistakes, and they were probably doing it independently. If someone’s too conservative, it’s more of making sure they have enough cash and probably too much cash by some people and then say, now the rest of this is long term.

Wes Moss [00:18:43]:
Yeah. And really trying to get them to understand that it’s okay as long as you have, let’s call it your dry powder. You’ve got a year, two, five years, whatever it might be that we know has a high degree of safety. Now let’s really focus on building wealth with this remaining amount.

Christine Moriarty [00:19:01]:
And you get it, Wes. This is the important thing to say. This is for the long term. In the long term, people think they’re going to retire, and I love the idea of retiring sooner, but they think it, they’re going to retire when they turn 58 and need all their money. So we need to really talk about with them adjusting their expectation that you’re going to need that money for 30, 40 years after that.

Wes Moss [00:19:30]:
If you’ve ever done a Jane Fonda workout, or if you remember as a kid rocky running the steps, and if Michael keaton is still Mister mom to you, and guess what? It’s officially time to do some retirement planning. It’s Wes Moss. Weren’t those the good old days? Well, with a little bit of retirement planning, there are plenty of good days ahead. Schedule an appointment with our team today@yourwealth.com. dot that’s y o u. Ryourwealth.com dot. How about the fear? I feel like I talk about this a lot with families that I work with. I’m thinking of a family I just talked to this week.

Wes Moss [00:20:10]:
That is, the wife has been saying she’s going to retire since she was 64. And she was like, this is the year I’m done. She works at a big one of these giant us, let’s call it a telecom company. And didn’t really like the work. They already had enough money to retire, so then it was like, well, maybe I’m not going to do it this year. I’m going to do it next year. I’m on a project, so next year. So she went a whole nother year, and then here we were.

Wes Moss [00:20:37]:
Now she’s 66 going into 67. This is the year she’s going to retire. And still didn’t pull the trigger. It’s not literally until this week that she is now 70, and she now is taking. Now she’s just Social Security starting literally this coming month for her because she kind of has. She has to take it at this point. She’s waited this long and has finally pried herself away from, by the way, a job that she didn’t really even like all that much. Now, she did get some purpose from it.

Wes Moss [00:21:10]:
She liked being a higher level executive or high level manager slash executive, but she just could not, and for a variety of reasons, could not stop. And her husband, for years, literally five, six years, was kind of persuading her and asking me to help persuade her, hey, she knows she can, let’s go through the numbers. But she just couldn’t do it. And she will say that beyond the purpose she got from her work and a little bit of interaction, a lot of it is remote, so it’s not like that much social interaction, which I think is important to hang on to. But really just the fear of not having a paycheck, that just seems to be a very real, that’s a very real hurdle for almost everybody I talk to. Kind of no matter how much money.

Christine Moriarty [00:21:58]:
They have, no matter how much money they have or what career they’re in, because I had a doctor who just replaced the situation. He was a doctor, the same issue. I had another client who had inherited money and could retire. And she, for her, I’m sure you’ve had conversations with these people, because often I try and pull out, who do you know who has retired? Who can you talk to? What was your parents retirement like? So there’s something underlying that fear of lack of paycheck, and who are you hanging around with? Because sometimes some people are more like, oh, I can’t retire, and, um, because I won’t have a paycheck or I won’t have insurance. But the one I really am most proud of is a client who was a nurse. So she was on her feet all week long, and she had money to retire and just didn’t want to retire. She just was like, I can’t. And so I said, hey, you know, you talk about your grandchildren a lot.

Christine Moriarty [00:22:59]:
Let’s take. I think it was, like, $200 a month out of your retirement, and some of it wasn’t a trust. Where it came from is irrelevant, but it was her retirement money to treat your grandchildren once a month. So first we did $200. Then I said, hey, I bet you could work four days a week. She said, oh, yeah, I could. I said, how about if we took $1,000 out and replaced that paycheck until we kind of got her down to three, two days a week, and she got used to taking the money out. It was also a matter of not only no paycheck, but, like, that money’s gonna go down.

Christine Moriarty [00:23:40]:
But when she saw how the system worked, she eased into it, and she was, you know, within a couple of years, she was dancing out of her job.

Wes Moss [00:23:49]:
Wow. So it was a weaning off of work.

Christine Moriarty [00:23:53]:
That’s well said. I think that needs to be an article for me to write.

Wes Moss [00:23:57]:
So thank weaning off of work. And this is actually one of the worst, I would say. It’s not a well named phase. I’ve written about this, but there’s this, again, the kind of the prevailing thought, if you’re not thinking much, we just think Americans think of retirement as kind of black and white. It’s like you work and then you stop. And, yes, that obviously happens for a lot of people, but the reality is there is this weaning process. There is this landing the plane. You can think of it that way.

Wes Moss [00:24:29]:
Or I came up with this, what I call the retirement gray zone, where it’s not black or white. And if, for a variety of reasons, you do want to work for a couple of days a week, or maybe you do need. You don’t need your full amount. You’re making 200,000 a year, and it’s. Okay. Well, you know, really would help this overall plan if you made 40 or 50, and that. And that would delay you having to take Social Security. So your Social Security goes up, and it would still.

Wes Moss [00:24:55]:
It would really make this plan work a lot better if you did a year or two or three of the kind of this retirement gray zone. So I think that’s what we’re talking about. I just never. I never loved the name of the retirement gray zone. Cause it just sounds, like, dark and dingy.

Christine Moriarty [00:25:11]:
You know? What I like to call it is staging. Retirement staging. So it’s like a three act play. Retirement isn’t a deadline that everything stops. And it’s really important for a lot of people to continue to work because it gives them purpose and it’s their passion and whatever. That’s a different issue than some people who just are afraid not to have a paycheck. But it’s that transition time in there because there’s an assignment I gave a lot of my clients before they retired, go practice retirement. And they’d look at me and go, what? I go, when’s the last time you took a two or three week vacation? Or have you gone and lived somewhere for a month where you think you might want to live in retirement?

Wes Moss [00:26:03]:
Practice retirement. Now that’s another good article title. You probably. Have you written that?

Christine Moriarty [00:26:09]:
I have written about it, for sure, but I did.

Wes Moss [00:26:12]:
You need to write that article? Yeah. I think it’s time to re up practice retirement. I’d love for somebody to tell me to go on a three week vacation.

Christine Moriarty [00:26:20]:
I love that. Really. People don’t know what to do with themselves if they’ve been on a different routine and they have to practice it. The other big one, Wes, and you’ve probably seen it. People tell me they want to travel in retirement, and I ask where? And they say, oh, we want to go to Europe, and we’re thinking of China. And I’m like, oh, so where have you been in the past ten years? Oh, well, we rent a house on the shore for two weeks. I’m like, go travel somewhere right now because you might not even like it. Not to mention, the older you get, the harder it gets.

Christine Moriarty [00:26:59]:
But go check it out. Don’t say that’s what you’re going to do. And never having done it, I think.

Wes Moss [00:27:04]:
That does happen a lot, because there’s this mystique that travel is great. And then you go to Italy and you think, well, Italy is perfect. It’s gorgeous. It’s amazing. And then you end up in Rome, and there are 17 million people in the piazza, which are the square. That’s supposed to be romantic, but that’s jam packed like a stadium, and it’s 96 degrees and you can’t get gelato. And you’re like, I would just rather be on the shore, as you said it, in Rhode island than be here in this magical lollapalooza.

Christine Moriarty [00:27:39]:
You don’t really know. This gets back to creating money piece. The name of my business is you don’t really know what your values and what really where you want your money to go unless you’ve tried different things.

Wes Moss [00:27:50]:
All right, what is the ultimate? Before we talk about the sandwich generation, which I know you speak on, a lot about what’s the ultimate money piece.

Christine Moriarty [00:27:57]:
To you is when you know what your values are and you feel good about spending money where you’re spending money, because we all have to spend money. So it’s not just about investing and saving. You want to be investing in what you believe in. But if you can every day say, hey, I spent that $200 on that and it feels good, or I went out of my way and went to a wedding in England or Colorado or wherever, and it was a really important thing for me to be there. So glad I did it then. It’s not about, oh my gosh, I’d have more in savings for this or I’d have lesson savings for that. It’s really key to just practice what you feel is important.

Wes Moss [00:28:46]:
Yeah, kind of practicing your money purpose. You know, the mission of our, we have this on the wall outside of the studio. I’m here in the office doing this podcast with you. But our mission is helping families find happiness in retirement. That is our mission. And hopefully we’re getting better. And this is not a switch that was flipped. It’s really more of this gradual.

Wes Moss [00:29:11]:
We’re trying to improve. This is to try to figure out how to really get people to define their money purpose and or their overall purpose. And so we have come up with our own questionnaires and we’ve come up with our own tools because I’ve written a lot about it in these books, what the happiest retirees know, et cetera. But did you use any software, any tools to do this? Or was this the software of Christine Wariardi, that human AI of you that would sit down and pull this out?

Christine Moriarty [00:29:41]:
Thank you. I love that expression, the human AI of me. I did use mostly my own software in my head because I thought it was very important to look people in the eye and talk to them about it. I did have forms to have people fill out. That was emerging of a lot of personal growth work I have done over the years to create this business and create my life that I live in Vermont, where I want to live. I do what I want to do, that I had to go through steps, and so I applied them to individuals.

Wes Moss [00:30:18]:
By the way, I feel like I’m almost talking to someone from another country. Because you’re from Vermont. There’s only like a few people that live in Vermont. Well, what is it like? What is Vermont like? What do you all do up there? Do you live in the woods?

Christine Moriarty [00:30:31]:
That’s.

Wes Moss [00:30:31]:
I literally picture you in the woods. There’s nobody else around. You see people in the little town once in a while and you eat Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. And that’s what I hear. Think of as wonderful.

Christine Moriarty [00:30:43]:
We go to the general store. That’s where we see people in our small town.

Wes Moss [00:30:48]:
Is that for real?

Christine Moriarty [00:30:49]:
Yeah. My town has about 1600 people, maybe less. I. You can live on. There’s people who live on 40 acres here. We live on five acres. So I do go for a walk and see neighbors, but I live on a dirt road, so my car is always dirty. I am.

Christine Moriarty [00:31:06]:
I have two windows in my office in two different directions. I see trees.

Wes Moss [00:31:11]:
Do you have a subaru?

Christine Moriarty [00:31:12]:
No, not at the moment. But I have all wheel drive. And then there’s a river in our backyard. So what do we do? We go hiking. We go ski. I am closer to skiing than to any population center.

Wes Moss [00:31:29]:
So I go like, is it Killington? Right?

Christine Moriarty [00:31:31]:
Oh, Killington’s in the south. And I live in central Vermont on the edge of the green mountains. So I can walk to the green mountains in 3 miles. I can go to Mad River Glen and I’m there. It’s only 12 miles away.

Wes Moss [00:31:45]:
And what about. Aren’t the White Mountains also in Vermont?

Christine Moriarty [00:31:48]:
The White Mountains? I’m happy you asked the question so I could educate. All your listeners are in New Hampshire. Don’t get lost. You go to the White Mountains in New Hampshire and the Green Mountains in Vermont. And the rural areas of Vermont are quite rural. There’s some small towns, and then there’s the largest town in the state is about 60,000 people of Burlington. And that has a county called Chittenden county, and that’s more similar to a suburb or a city. But the rest of Vermont is rural and green and just beautiful to drive around.

Christine Moriarty [00:32:26]:
The mountains are incredible. The views are incredible. I still am happy driving around here almost 30 years later.

Wes Moss [00:32:34]:
Is it affordable or not? Really. Have property values gone up a ton?

Christine Moriarty [00:32:39]:
Property values have gone up a ton. Thank you, Covid. A lot of people moved in, and there’s also climate escape, people moving in as well from California and different places. When I.

Wes Moss [00:32:52]:
Climate refugees.

Christine Moriarty [00:32:54]:
Yeah, that’s the right word. Then when I moved up from Boston, even though it was 30 years ago, I was like, yay. Car insurance is cheaper. Home insurance is cheaper. And then I got the reality. Electric phone. A lot of the other things were more expensive, so it was not a lot cheaper to live here. Housing might be a little cheaper than a lot of areas.

Christine Moriarty [00:33:18]:
Less expensive to buy a house, but once you need to maintain it, and do all the rest. It’s about the same.

Wes Moss [00:33:25]:
What about state income taxes there?

Christine Moriarty [00:33:27]:
What’s the state, state income tax, since we’re talking retirement? Up until recently, they were taxing Social Security, but the capital gains rate is not as great as you’d get somewhere else. The other thing is, a lot of people move out of state, especially Florida. You can imagine snowbirds, because our estate tax kicks in a lot quicker.

Wes Moss [00:33:50]:
Oh, there’s a state estate tax.

Christine Moriarty [00:33:53]:
Exactly. So there’s a lot of things to think about when you pick a state to live in. And I am not saying don’t live in Vermont. I love it here. It’s just there’s much more to think about than, hey, can I get an inexpensive house? Because there are people who are leaving after being here four or five years and saying, hey, it doesn’t have this or it doesn’t have that. Yeah, it took a long time for us to get a target. We don’t have a whole foods. We do have some smaller great health food stores, but.

Wes Moss [00:34:28]:
All right, well, sorry to detour down to the woods, to the green mountains. I’m just fascinated by.

Christine Moriarty [00:34:33]:
Well, I’m happy. It is like another country.

Wes Moss [00:34:36]:
Okay, so let’s switch over to this. So sandwich generation. I’m in it. My parents are in their early seventies, but as I think about my clients, who are 55, the families I work with, and they’re 55, and that means they’re parents are 80, 75, et cetera. I looked this up. This came from the National Library of Medicine. It was a study, the risk of developing dementia, and I wanted to see a bell curve of when people get dementia on average most of the time. And I guess the average age for onset is 83, 84.

Wes Moss [00:35:12]:
But then again, I see this happen so much earlier for so many people or for a fair amount of people, and it’s obviously a huge, huge problem.

Christine Moriarty [00:35:23]:
Oh, it’s huge. Now, the problem is, how are you gonna define dementia? 50% of people over 80 have some kind of memory or cognitive issues. However, with that in mind, there is a study that’s shown that 99% of people with mild cognitive impairment have not been diagnosed by their doctor. Physicians aren’t trained in this. And if you’re not, mild cognitive impairment happens long before dementia.

Wes Moss [00:36:02]:
What does that mean? Is it because it’s just. Is it hard to define? Oh, I’m a little forgetful.

Christine Moriarty [00:36:10]:
There’s some real differences in I’m a little forgetful, or I have some age related. Like, I walk into the room, the big joke. I walk into the room, I forget why I walked in. Like, some of that’s just normal aging. So you have to separate out what’s normal aging from what could be a real issue. And I have some great friends who are doctors. There’s a lot for them to know. But memory stuff is very specific, and you really need someone with you to get it diagnosed.

Christine Moriarty [00:36:44]:
So I was blessed enough to take my mom to mass general, to the memory center, and most large institutions have them, and they would only let you come with someone who filled out all the form. So the other thing about it is memory loss can come from depression. It can come from not drinking enough water. Vitamin B deficiencies. There is a host of reasons why someone’s memory might be off, especially as we age. No one else might be living with them, or it might just be another older person. It could be lack of engagement. So you have to rule out a lot of things before you can actually say there’s dementia, and there has to be a professional involved.

Christine Moriarty [00:37:30]:
But mild cognitive impairment is the start of other dementias, but not all the time. So it could progress, and it might not, depending. Is it the beginning signs of Alzheimer’s? Is it the beginning signs of Lewy body disease or Parkinson’s? Or is it just nothing that we can fix it and treat it? And we always look to the older people and the elderly. However, there is early onset dementia, and there’s early.

Wes Moss [00:38:05]:
Anything but pre 70 is considered early.

Christine Moriarty [00:38:09]:
Yeah, but 35 years old people can get Alzheimer’s and start with early onset Alzheimer’s. Parkinson’s has some dementia components, and we can look at. Michael J. Fox is something we all know who got Parkinson’s young. There isn’t a guarantee if someone has some kind of memory loss that it’s going to progress. However, we have to be attuned to it. And there’s all sorts of symptoms of memory loss that people don’t pick up unless you’re with them on a regular basis.

Wes Moss [00:38:47]:
Okay, so what happens most, let’s say, where you have either husband and wife are living in a house and their kids are far away and they don’t catch it, and nobody wants to say, hey, I think I’ve got memory loss.

Christine Moriarty [00:39:00]:
Right.

Wes Moss [00:39:00]:
Then there are the. Let’s say you’ve got adult kids that are checking in a lot and they’re maybe a little more on top of it. Hey, mom or dad, you’re starting to. I’m starting to really see some signs if, let’s say, mom and or dad are agreeable to go to a memory center. Before we do even do that, or let’s say, in coinciding with that, what do we need to do financially to prepare ourselves?

Christine Moriarty [00:39:28]:
Well, I think long before that, the financial preparation is something we already tell clients is make sure your legal documents are up to speed. So that’s a number one, because then someone can handle it. And more and more professionals and lawyers are recommending that you get guardianship as part of those documents because it saves time going to court. And it is a different issue if there is severe memory loss.

Wes Moss [00:40:00]:
Explain to our listeners what guardianship really means.

Christine Moriarty [00:40:03]:
Guardianship is a tool of the state that can only happen typically in court when the judge says so and so is the guardian for physical, mental, financial, all their needs. And then one person is typically in charge of taking care of that person.

Wes Moss [00:40:26]:
So is the guardianship then, in your opinion, that supersedes a power of attorney?

Christine Moriarty [00:40:33]:
Yeah, it would. It would.

Wes Moss [00:40:37]:
Look, it’s a more robust version. I know one thing that families that I work with will do is they’ll have a financial power of attorney. And to some extent, that is a legal document, but then it can also be added to, let’s say, a Schwab account, a fidelity account, and then my son can make decisions if some, all of a sudden, I slide into something of an issue. What do you think about that strategy?

Christine Moriarty [00:41:01]:
Power of attorney? Well, that’s part of the original legal documents. The guardianship would be, in addition, if I am cognitively impaired and problematic, because there could be ways around it, you need the medical power of attorney, and you need a financial power of attorney. Across the board. A lot of lawyers are adding the guardianship so that if I need a guardian, power of attorney can act whenever, whether you spring in or do otherwise. So that’s one step. The second step is, and you mentioned your son, is have someone, I don’t want to call it oversea, but see those accounts once a year or more frequently. Is something different happening in Schwab? You know, back in the old days, I was doing this for my parents, and so they didn’t care about being online. So I would just go online, look at their bank accounts every couple of months, make sure nothing was major or an issue.

Christine Moriarty [00:42:02]:
So having another set of eyes on financial things is very helpful for a family. Number three, and it sounds like you’re doing it already with families, is make sure the family knows who the financial person is. And I don’t just mean your investment advisor, I mean your banker, because I have a good friend who manages a bank, and she says, you keep saying that. Financial planners know first about someone’s financial cognitive capabilities going down. We know because if someone has always balanced their checkbook, taking good care, and now they’re bouncing checks, that’s the first sign that something’s going on. So get to know their financial team, and then fill out the forms. Fill out the incapacity forms. I had one for my business, for all my clients.

Christine Moriarty [00:43:00]:
All my clients. I didn’t say, hey, you’re over 70, fill this out. Saying, if I see some changes, who can I talk to? And it’s becoming pretty, just in the past four or five years that Vanguard Schwab fidelity are requiring those. However, I’ve actually seen advisors say, oh, you don’t have to bother with that. You have a power of attorney. It’s a whole different issue. Who can the investment person notify? Because if they can’t necessarily notify the power of attorney, if you haven’t given them permission, or if there’s a medical issue, or if you don’t show up for a meeting or you’re getting lost on the way to a meeting, that you have gone to the same place dozens of times.

Wes Moss [00:43:53]:
So those are all really practical steps. And I think it really starts with having a relationship with some sort of estate planning attorney. Or would you say estate planning or elder care are kind of really both kinds?

Christine Moriarty [00:44:08]:
It depends on the elder care attorney. I think a regular estate planning attorney can do the trick. I think there’s good estate planning attorneys out there that I trust inherently, and there can be some good and bad elder attorneys out there. So depends, really.

Wes Moss [00:44:28]:
You need this backup chain of command is what someone needs.

Christine Moriarty [00:44:31]:
You need the backup chain of command, but you also, whether you’re the financial professional or the family member or the client, you want to have a team that knows each other. It’s not like you have to meet them every single year or six months. It’s just, so if I pick up the phone as a financial planner and call their attorney, their attorney’s like, great, I can talk to you.

Wes Moss [00:44:54]:
You know, do you have any stories, not that we want to scare people, but do you have any, any examples or stories where kind of estate planning power of attorney goes wrong or doesn’t get done? And what can happen?

Christine Moriarty [00:45:09]:
Well, it can go wrong for a couple of reasons, is if a financial institution, and I don’t want to pick on one, but a lot of the financial institutions want their own power of attorney in place. And the uniform power of attorney code allows for a standard power of attorney. This is the financial side that every institution has to accept. There’s a few states that hasn’t passed it, but there’s a standard power of attorney that every institution has to affect. I had a client who had her documents up to speed. Everything was perfect. Her daughter was in charge because her daughter was a numbers person. Her son, who ran into some financial issues and a divorce, was living with her.

Christine Moriarty [00:46:05]:
And one of the financial institutions that shall not be named. Okay, fair sent her a form to fill out for power of attorney. He was there.

Wes Moss [00:46:17]:
Well, hold on, hold on. Even though she already had one.

Christine Moriarty [00:46:19]:
Oh, yeah. Because they don’t accept. They didn’t want to accept hers. So they’re like, oh, just fill out our power of attorney. And so we know her son lived with her. He, he saw the form, he filled it out with his name on it.

Wes Moss [00:46:37]:
And he became financial power of attorney for that account.

Christine Moriarty [00:46:40]:
Not for everything, but for that account. And so it can go astray if there’s too many hands in the mix. So that’s why I think it’s really important to make sure that advisors, individuals, know about the uniform power of attorney code and that we have one for every family rather than one with every financial institution, because updating them can be problematic.

Wes Moss [00:47:07]:
And what happens, too, and I’ve heard of this happening where, let’s say you do, let’s say somebody who does end up, they have an account at, again, we’ll say XYZ company, and they have an account, and they run into cognitive issues and the institution finds out about it, and whether they have irregular spending patterns or something happens, or they’re on the phone and they’re asking the same question every day for a month or something, that it’s a big red flag. Can’t the institutions then create some next step for that family without them wanting that to happen?

Christine Moriarty [00:47:45]:
Without the client wanting them to happen.

Wes Moss [00:47:47]:
Yeah, let’s just say that you’ve got.

Christine Moriarty [00:47:49]:
Someone who, only if they have an incapacity form filled out, technically they can’t call anyone else. It’s not legal to reveal other people’s financial information.

Wes Moss [00:48:02]:
Can they take that account to the courts, though, and get a conservatorship for someone?

Christine Moriarty [00:48:07]:
I don’t think they. Well, they could request it. So rather than say, let they’re going to get it, they could request it, and that could bring a lot of attention to the family and the friends and everything. That’s why I like the lawyer, the financial people all knowing and talking to each other. Maybe you just have one meeting and it’s good for ten years. Because you know who their team is.

Wes Moss [00:48:30]:
As long as you just know who the team is.

Christine Moriarty [00:48:32]:
Yeah. Because if you know who their child is, even that’s great. You know, I used to have some clients say, oh, your kids are coming in at Christmas time for the holidays. Do you think we could set up a meeting for an hour so I get to meet your kids? And then I had people to reach.

Wes Moss [00:48:51]:
Out to when something happened.

Christine Moriarty [00:48:54]:
When something happens, if you’ve never met them, you don’t have any idea. And even if you have a form, they might not know about the form when you call them.

Wes Moss [00:49:05]:
Yeah, yeah. I think it’s a, I just think it’s such a practical, you know, when you’re in your thirties and you just don’t think about this, it’s too far away. Of course I’m fine. You’re not worried about dementia, but when you now all of a sudden are in your forties and then fifties, then you really have to start worrying about your parents. And the reality here is, I guess my message to our retire sooner audience would be getting a family estate planning attorney. Whether you have a is really just such a great important step because then it kind of breaks, it gets the documents done and it brings the family together. Now, not saying it all goes smoothly and there’s arguments between which who’s the.

Christine Moriarty [00:49:46]:
Responsible one and whose behavior and families and.

Wes Moss [00:49:50]:
But it’s still so much better than not having anything in place.

Christine Moriarty [00:49:53]:
Absolutely.

Wes Moss [00:49:54]:
And it doesn’t cost a fortune. You don’t have to go spend $20,000.

Christine Moriarty [00:49:59]:
And it’s a lot less expensive than going accord.

Wes Moss [00:50:03]:
Yeah, it’s a great point.

Christine Moriarty [00:50:04]:
And the thing is, with a plan in place, you can at least put your wishes down on paper and you have some choice. Sadly, only 45% of the people over 50 have a will, and I think that number needs to be 100% for everyone over 21.

Wes Moss [00:50:28]:
Yeah, it does. It does. Well, with that, we’re going to wrap this up.

Christine Moriarty [00:50:32]:
I could go on about how else to protect your finances from freezing your credit report to.

Wes Moss [00:50:39]:
Give me that. Give me. We’ll do lightning round. Give me your top three or five.

Christine Moriarty [00:50:43]:
Freeze your credit report. Okay. Is something we didn’t talk about already. Probably good for a lot of people. Cancel the direct mail for yourself. For anyone over 80. They love direct mailing older people, whether email, phone calls and asking for money. And then stay involved.

Christine Moriarty [00:51:06]:
If you’re a child or a financial person, be willing to say, hey, let’s see what checks you’ve written in the past four months. Because if they are writing the same amount to charity every single month, something’s going on. They might. I had one client who wrote thank. Who would get a thank you note for sending $250 to ABC charity. And then she thought it was a bill and she’d send 250. And that’s how we caught some things. So those are my.

Wes Moss [00:51:36]:
What is this? Canceled direct mail.

Christine Moriarty [00:51:39]:
Oh, you can go to. I got the phone number right here. You can do. Do not call. It’s 188-838-2122 there’s a do not call dot Gov and there’s a do not mail dot gov dot. Okay.

Wes Moss [00:51:57]:
I didn’t know there was a do not mail.

Christine Moriarty [00:51:59]:
Yeah, direct mail. And they know when you’re. Well, trust me, I know. They know when you’re over 60. Cause they keep sending hearing aid marketing to me.

Wes Moss [00:52:09]:
Marketing.

Christine Moriarty [00:52:10]:
Right. So they know if you’re.

Wes Moss [00:52:12]:
Wait, you’re over 60.

Christine Moriarty [00:52:14]:
I shouldn’t have said anything. Thank you. I like you. And then if you’re over 70, they start sending you something. Here was my favorite. I had a neighbor, thank God, who was a friend. They kept sending her Social Security. Social Security is going to run out.

Christine Moriarty [00:52:32]:
They’re going to cancel it unless you send us money.

Wes Moss [00:52:35]:
So scammers too.

Christine Moriarty [00:52:36]:
Scammers. Oh, that’s the direct mail scammers. So get anyone and everyone over 60 on the do not call list. Do not mail list. Cancel that. Less information coming in, the less apt. They’re going to get something I love.

Wes Moss [00:52:56]:
That are top three financial ways to protect yourself while the sky is still blue.

Christine Moriarty [00:53:02]:
Correct. And anyone can do it themselves. They don’t need a professional to do those three.

Wes Moss [00:53:09]:
I knew it was going to be fun talking to you because you’ve been an advisor for, you were an advisor for a couple, several decades now. You speak about this helping advisors in really what’s a tricky situation for more and more and more families and almost everybody, almost everybody at some point in the family will go through this. And that’s why I think it’s so important that we talk to you. So thank you for your insights here today. It’s been really fun to chat.

Christine Moriarty [00:53:34]:
This has been a pleasure, Wes. Thank you so much. And I hope we can do it again sometime. I love your podcast.

Mallory Boggs [00:53:41]:
Hey y’all, this is Mallory with the retire sooner team. Please be sure to rate and subscribe to this podcast and share it with a friend. If you have any questions, you can find us@wesmoss.com. that’s wesmoss.com. you can also follow us on Instagram and YouTube. You’ll find us under the handle Retire Sooner podcast. And now for our show’s disclosure. This information is provided to you as a resource for informational purposes only and is not to be viewed as investment advice or recommendations.

Mallory Boggs [00:54:09]:
Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. There is no guaranteed offer that investment return, yield or performance will be achieved. Stock prices fluctuate, sometimes rapidly and dramatically, due to factors affecting individual companies, particular industries or sectors, or general market conditions for stocks paying dividends. Dividends are not guaranteed and can increase, decrease, or be eliminated without notice. Fixed income securities involve interest rate, credit inflation and reinvestment risks and possible loss of principle. As interest rates rise, the value of fixed income securities falls. Past performance is not indicative of future results. When considering any investment vehicle, this information is being presented without consideration of the investment objectives, risk tolerance, or financial circumstances of any specific investor and might not be suitable for all investors.

Mallory Boggs [00:54:53]:
Investment decisions should not be based solely on information contained here. This information is not intended to and should not form a primary basis for any investment decision that you may make. Always consult your own legal, tax or investment advisor before making any investment tax, estate or financial planning considerations or decisions. The information contained here is strictly an opinion and it is not known whether the strategies will be successful. The views and opinions expressed are for educational purposes only as of the date of production and may change without notice at any time based on numerous factors such as market and other conditions.