Senior advisor reflects on personal experience when dealing with grief-stricken clients
Working with a client who has been widowed requires the ability to ask direct questions with compassion and patience.
Wilkie Kam, vice president and senior investment advisor at BMO Nesbitt Burns, also stressed the importance of having joint accounts and how not having this in place can add to the pain of someone who is in shock and grieving.
Kam said that even the most organized client will typically take at least two meetings to provide all the answers to important questions. There’s a very real danger, he said, that advisors can be too pushy when they should be doing their best to make an emotional client feel at ease.
He said: “What I usually tend to do is to go very straightforward into getting the answers to important questions. Do you have enough to live on? That’s the first thing. I’ve had some experiences where the surviving spouse says, I have no idea and started crying.”
It’s important to calm them down in order to find out their assets and liabilities, and then calculating whether they have the ability to pay bills and mortgages.
Kam will also conduct a full financial plan and warned that clients widowed without a single joint account face extra challenges.
He said: “One of my clients passed away about a year ago – he had most of his accounts, banks, accounts, company accounts in a single name and the widow, apart from dealing with the shock and grief, had to contact the bank to make payments for the hydro and for utility bills, and this added a lot of trouble for the surviving spouse.”
Kam explained that the client had property in Palm Springs but that because there was no joint account, the deceased’s account got frozen, a collection agency started calling and the bank in Palm Springs would not release funds for utility bills.
After a number of trips and the advisor’s help it was resolved but Kam said: “The poor widow couldn’t sleep for a week, worrying about it and fearing that their house down there might get frozen.”
A full financial plan will indicate whether the client has the ability to live in the same way they did before. For someone in their sixties with grown-up kids, that may be easier to sort out than a younger widow who has family obligations such as a mortgage and liabilities.
Kam said: “Start from the basics. What are the assets that you have? Do you own your house or are you renting? Do you have debt or mortgages? Where is your income coming from? Your expenses? Then we’ll get a good financial picture, a good picture of your finances and then we can advise them what to do next.”
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