Author and educator Kathleen Rehl discusses widowhood, estate planning, and finding purpose in later life.
Our guest on the podcast today is Kathleen Rehl. Kathleen is an author, educator, speaker, and certified financial planner dedicated to empowering widows financially and guiding the professionals who support them. She operated her own planning firm for 18 years before shifting her focus to writing, teaching, and research. After her husband died, she transformed her personal grief into a mission, helping others navigate widowhood, legacy planning, and purposeful aging. She is the author of Moving Forward on Your Own: A Financial Guidebook for Widows.
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Amy Arnott: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I’m Amy Arnott, portfolio strategist for Morningstar.
Christine Benz: And I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.
Arnott: Our guest on the podcast today is Kathleen Rehl. Kathleen is an author, educator, speaker, and certified financial planner dedicated to empowering widows financially and guiding the professionals who support them. She operated her own planning firm for 18 years before shifting her focus to writing, teaching, and research. After her husband died, she transformed her personal grief into a mission, helping others navigate widowhood, legacy planning, and purposeful aging. She is the author of Moving Forward on Your Own: A Financial Guidebook for Widows.
Kathleen, welcome to The Long View.
Kathleen Rehl: I am excited about being here. Since way back decades ago, I followed Morningstar and Christine’s work, and so I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Arnott: Well, thank you so much for joining us. To start out, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you first got involved in working on financial planning issues for women who have lost a spouse?
Rehl: Sure. And my work really began in a very, very personal place, as I was a financial advisor for many years, but after my husband died and I experienced widowhood from the inside, it was different. And I knew all the technical issues, yet that emotional fog and the fatigue and the vulnerability that comes with loss when I experienced that. I literally, I thought I was going crazy. And here, I’d helped widows in the past, but when it happened to me, it was different. But that experience changed how I practiced and ultimately led me to focus on helping widows and advisors who served them. And before his death, I was mainly working with philanthropy and clergy clients. Those were my niche areas. But after becoming widowed, I knew that there are a whole lot more women that need help.
Benz: Why is this issue so prevalent for women later in life?
Rehl: Because a lot of them are going to experience widowhood. It’s just—to throw out a couple of little statistics: 80% of all men at their death, when they die, they die married. 80% of all women at their death are solo. Either they’re widowed, divorced, or they’re never married. So it’s 80%. And when you look at all wives, there’s about 70% that are going to experience widowhood during their lifetime because they’re living longer than the guys.
Arnott: Is your work also relevant for widowers, understanding that this issue is less common, or are the issues that they are facing different if there’s a male person who loses a spouse?
Rehl: There are a lot of similar things like the grief and decision fatigue. They’re dealing in some cases with cash flow changes and housing questions, and they need support. But women also, on top of that, including they’ve got the longer longevity and the lower lifetime earnings, in many cases, in our research, we found that a lot of widows experience problems with financial decisions and lack of confidence that a lot of the guys don’t. And then there’s social issues kinds of things. A lot of widowers have a harder time connecting compared to widows.
Benz: Kathleen, we want to switch over and delve into the financial-planning dimension, retirement-planning dimension of widowhood. Many retirement plans implicitly assume that there’ll be two decision-makers if it’s a married couple. Can you talk about what breaks down financially and behaviorally when one spouse is gone?
Rehl: Yes. When there are two of us together, we can talk through decisions, and we can decide what’s best. Many of the widowed clients that I worked with who came to me after experiencing widowhood, they had talked through some of the things, but it was their husband that took the lead in it. And oftentimes he took the lead in implementing the kinds of things. She was more aware of the household day-to-day kind of financial things, and he was the one that really knew where the assets were, custodied, why they’d picked the assets that they did, what the scenario looked like for their retirement, all those kinds of things.
So she’s dropping in confidence, and there’s also irreversible decisions that may come into the picture. So the math changes, but the big thing that changes is decision-making capacity.
Benz: What are some of those irreversible decisions?
Rehl: Housing. Sometimes widows will say, “I just can’t live in this place anymore. I walk into the living room, and there’s that big blue chair where Bob used to fall asleep every night, and I know he’s never going to be there, and so I’m just going to go. ”
And sometimes that’s a situation where an adult child says, “Oh, Mom, move in with us. We don’t want you to be alone.” Even though the son lives halfway across the country, and she doesn’t have any friends there, she doesn’t have any connections with her medical providers, she doesn’t have her church connection, all those kinds of things, and she may lose a lot if she just makes the jump.
I had one case where the widow was planning on moving in, and I said,” I thought you didn’t get along so well with your daughter-in-law.” And she said, “Well, they’ve talked, and it’s going to be all right.” And I don’t know if it would have been all right. We slowed the process down. She decided to wait, to not go right away, and her son wound up taking a job like six months later in Silicon Valley. So she would have had a double move to compound the grief. So housing is a big one.
Oftentimes, there’s an insurance settlement that comes in, and so it’s a question of what do I do with this money? And without carefully thinking about what are my needs right now, are there outstanding bills that have to get paid? Maybe there’s some maintenance that has to be done on the house, whatever, but she may just feel like, “Well, I’ve got to do something with this money so it’s invested in something she doesn’t really understand, or she sold something.
Some widows treat this like I call it “blood money.” They got it because their husband died, and so they want to get rid of it as fast as possible because it represents his death, and so they engage in retail therapy, and they just spend foolishly, or they give it away to their adult kids because it’s like to make up for their dad being gone, and so the money gets frittered away without really planning carefully what should happen with that. So those were two of the biggest kinds of things.
Investments, some of the investments were very appropriate for them as a couple, but they’re not right for her as an individual. I had one gal that came to me, and she said, “I never really knew what he did.” He was a day trader, basically, her husband, after he retired, and he watched it constantly hours and hours, and he was pretty good at it.
She said, “I have no interest in doing that.” And she said, “Would you look at the portfolio?” We discovered that it was basically foreign, small company stocks, individual stocks. So it took a process to unwrap that and get out of it over several months, and then get into something that was more appropriate for her, that she understood. And that was before the great crash sometime ago. And she came into my office one time, she said,” Can we look at those stocks and see what they’re doing?” And many of them had just gone belly-up. She said,” Oh my gosh, I’m so glad that we got out of it.”
Arnott: Are there best practices for how individuals and advisors can stress-test their plan specifically for a surviving spouse scenario?
Rehl: Doing it beforehand, before crisis happens, and that’s where I would see some widows had the plan that they had done with their advisor, but it was for them as a couple, going down the road as a couple, and they didn’t do the stress-testing. They didn’t run the numbers, like what happens to the pension that the husband was getting? Oh my gosh, it’s not going to continue 100% because, when he signed up for it, he just signed up for an option of 50%. That’s going to drop. Or you’ve got a vacation home, and George has done a lot of maintenance on this cabin, but how is that going to be taken care of if George is not here? What about where you are living right now? Is that going to be appropriate as you continue to age?
To have these conversations ahead of time, and if it’s put in terms of we want to provide care for the surviving spouse, be it the man or the woman, it’s a loving act that we’re doing. So it’s not such a scary thing to talk about the mortality that is going to happen because we’re all guaranteed we’re going to die, and it’s going to be one or the other. And so it’s running those scenarios.
Arnott: Yeah. I’m wondering if maybe sometimes couples—it’s just too painful to think about the other person dying, so maybe they would kind of avoid talking about that situation even though it is inevitable that one of them will pass away.
Rehl: In some of the training sessions that I’ve done, I’ve had advisors say that they don’t want to bring that up because it’s such a touchy subject, and it’s a sad subject, and they’re uncomfortable in talking and raising the question. So if an advisor can normalize this conversation and say, “We typically work with married couples, and they’re looking to that time ahead when there will be only one of them, and we’d like to share what we’ve learned and talk with you about that.” So normalizing it. This is what we do with all of our clients, so they’re not feeling like, “Oh, this is weird.”
Benz: And it seems like, as with estate planning, if you start that a little earlier, when the thought of losing a spouse is more of an abstraction, it seems a little more comfortable to ponder, if it’s in the distant future.
Rehl: Yes.
Benz: Kathleen, I wanted to ask, are there any financial tools that are in the toolkit? It sounds like all of these situations are quite different, but when you think of clients as you help them look into the future toward widowhood, potentially, were there any financial decisions that you helped them make that were commonalities across a number of your clients?
Rehl: Housing was a big one. Where would they live if they were on their own? And some of them did say, “Well, I would stay right here.” It depended on her age, too. If she was a widow who was in her 80s, we would talk about what kinds of risks that meant if she was going to stay on her own. How was she going to handle maintenance? How would she handle care needs? And some would say, “Well, my kids will take care of me.” Well, do your kids know that that’s what the plan is, that they will take care of you? Or not?
And I had that conversation, as I mentioned to you before, I’ve remarried. I have three stepchildren, one biological son, and had that conversation and with a son who said, “Well, of course you could move in here with us, Mom, if you needed more care.” His wife wasn’t so sure about that. A stepson said, “Yeah, you could move in with us, but we wouldn’t be very happy about it because it would change our lifestyle a lot.” And he was being honest with me on that.
So I’ve created a matrix, which shows different places where you could live, aging in place at home, or you could live in a rental 55-plus community, or you could live in a continuing-care retirement community, or there’s some other levels, too. And then what dimensions you’d look at—what’s at risk? What’s the upfront cost going to be? What kind of support are you expecting from others? There’s a whole variety of things. I used a software program that put in the activities that you were going to do, and it projected what the money was going to look like. And so we would just pull out if it was going to be the wife who was surviving or the husband, pull out their information so it wasn’t a part of it as of next year, and then what the numbers looked like, if the numbers worked.
So that was just the numbers part, but then there was also other parts like the emotional, the social, what gives you joy, what are your values? Those kinds of things were important, too.
When I was widowed, I closed my practice for several months. When I reopened it, I only accepted widows as new clients, or couples who were looking to that time ahead when there would just be one of them left. And there were several couples that became new clients because of that. I remember interviewing one couple, and he was very astute. He had spreadsheets, and he had all the money and the rest. He knew everything. I said, “Well, I’m really surprised that you want to work with me because you’ve got it all down pat.” He said, “I do, but my wife doesn’t. And she refuses to talk to me about these money issues. She said, ‘It’s boring, and I’d rather do things with my grandkids than pay attention to this.’ So I want our time together in working with you to help educate her about the things that she needs to know.”
And so that’s what we did in that foundation year, and my meetings were always fun, and they were interesting and pulled in what she wanted to know more about. And by the end of that foundation year, then if a couple decided, “Well, no, only one of us is going to come to the meeting,” then it was acceptable. But they both had to come to the meetings in the foundation year to go through it all. And we did holistic comprehensive financial advising. It was not just in investments, far beyond that, but at the end of that year, she wanted to continue on, and indeed, it was five or six years later, he did die.
And I can remember the phone call where she got in touch with me and said, “He’s gone, and I just want to tell you, Kathleen, I’m OK. I feel confident about the money situation. I understand where we’re at. And that was so good that he brought me in on those things.” So that’s the biggest kind of a tool, just awareness, education.
Arnott: A lot of people listening have probably heard the statistic that, I think, it’s something like 70% of widows end up changing financial advisors after their spouse’s death. What are some of the most common ways advisors lose widowed clients, and how can they keep that from happening?
Rehl: I’ll talk about that. I’ll add just a preface to it. There’s an article that came out recently that there’s a group that’s challenging that 70%, and many of us have used that 70% for a long, long time, but it looks like maybe that population that was studied, their financial planner was insurance agents, whose main job was to deliver a check after the death. And so those women didn’t really have any more use for that insurance person, so they dismissed it. If that’s the case, it would be a much lower number than 70%.
But I did see many women who would come to me after the death of their husband. I remember one, Mary, that wasn’t her real name, but she came in, and she said, “I want to know. Am I going to be OK? Am I going to be all right?” She said they had a financial planner that she and her husband worked together with, and that after her husband died, she got a call that she needed to get into the office, that there was some paperwork to sign. She said she hardly knew where the office was. She said the very first time when they signed up with this advisor years ago, she went to that office, but she said her husband mainly got his hot tips on the golf course, and she really didn’t know what was going on.
She got down there, and the first thing the advisor told her was she should be glad because their account was beating the market. She said he talked about all kinds of things she didn’t understand and didn’t even mention her husband’s name during the meeting, and she started to cry. She just lost it, and he really didn’t know what to do with her. And so he had this paperwork he wanted her to sign. She said, “I didn’t know what it was.” And she said, “I just got up. I just left. And his office called the next day and said we needed to reschedule an appointment, and I just told him I had a hair appointment, that I wasn’t going to go.”
Her friend Betty told her that she was working with Kathleen, who was a widow, and that she should come and see me also. So here she’s coming in my office, and she wants to know, “Am I going to be OK?”
She didn’t respond to the jargon that the fellow was using. He didn’t even mention her husband’s name. He was talking about something that she could care less about: How the investments were doing. She wanted to know, “Can I still help my granddaughter with her college education? Can I still continue to live in my house? Can I still continue to give to my church?” So it just was not a good mix at all. So communication.
Benz: Right. So it sounds like that was an advisor with exceptionally low emotional intelligence. In your writing, you talk about how small gestures from advisors can be really impactful. Can you talk about what that emotional alpha looks like in practice?
Rehl: It’s seeing her and hearing her and taking time to hear her story. I’ve got one advisor friend right now, and she said this six months into working with this widow, and she said, “We get together, and we’re mainly just crying. We’re taking care of the immediate things that have to be done, but we’re not pushing, going at a faster pace, slowing the pace down in working with the widow.”
If you look at the stress scale, 100 top stressors, you’ve got move to a new community, get a new job, get fired from a job, birth of a baby, death of a spouse, death of a child. The number-one stressor is death of a spouse. When that happens, it impacts a lot of things in our brains. Memory can be short, attention span’s weak, and decision-making just next to impossible. I experienced some of that myself when I went into the brain freeze. Some of my widowed clients would call it, “My brain was like jello. I couldn’t make sense of this.”
So in their meetings, if they slow the pace down, rather than go fast, they’re going to have shorter meetings that are going to be more often, and maybe they’ll only cover one or two kinds of things. They’ll write it down, and so she leaves with a road map of what the next steps are. These kinds of things make a meeting go much more smoothly and also figuring out what do we need to do now, right now, immediately, what do we need to do soon, and what can wait until later, especially things that are decisions that might be irreversible in the future.
Benz: In hearing from you, Kathleen, I’m recalling I received an email—I may have shared it with you, Amy—from a person who had read my book, and she said “I liked how comprehensive it was,” etc., but she said it was missing a chapter on widowhood because she was a widow and she said, “This has really been the seminal event of my life, financially and emotionally. It’s changed everything about what I think about my future.”
It was quite a powerful note that she sent, and it did make me think that perhaps we’re underrecognizing the importance of this transition when we talk about financial planning and the emotional aspects of life.
Rehl: That was one of the reasons that I wrote my book. I just came back from a national conference a couple of weeks ago, where I was speaking on this topic of widowhood, and I’m doing more invitations to speak about widowhood. About 10 years ago, there was interest in this. In fact, the book came out in 2010, and it was about three years later I started speaking on this. A major financial firm picked me up and took me around to conferences all over the place, and we did that for several years. Then the interest in widowhood kind of went down, but it’s on the rise again right now because I’ve seen several firms that are writing and speaking about this topic, and I’m glad that they are.
So when I wrote the book, the book was really designed as a gift book because most widows are not going to walk into Barnes & Noble or go into Amazon and say, “I think I need to get me a book about money.” But it would be given to them by their financial planner or their CPA or their pastor or hospice or their next door neighbor or their sister and because of this cognitive overload that many are experiencing to keep it very, very simple.
So a lot of the chapters are just a couple of pages long or even one page, and I put beautiful art in it because a woman is beautiful, and so the book should be beautiful, and it’s not supposed to teach them Finance 101, but it’s just to help them develop more confidence in talking about money, and there are several tools in the book—yes, I sent you a copy, so you saw the tools that were in the book—that they could discuss with their financial professional that would be helpful in making their plan go straight.
Arnott: If someone is an advisor working with a widow, what are some of the signs that might indicate the client is not ready to make any major financial decisions?
Rehl: If she says, “I don’t understand. Say that again,” and at that point you’re going to want to say it in a different way. Or oftentimes I would draw a little picture to talk about what it was that we were dealing with. If she’s just continually crying and says, “I just want all this to go away, I want it to go away.” Well, it doesn’t really mean it goes away, but you look at it from a different direction. If she talks about being tired a lot.
Benz: How can advisors help clients avoid double grief, where emotional decisions compound financial stress?
Rehl: One of the biggest things was where you’re going to live, the house, that I saw, and many widows did want to just flee that house, not stay there, without thinking what all the ramifications were if they did that move. And so we would talk through what it amounted to, like the example I just gave you—the client whose son wanted her to move to Texas, and she didn’t know anybody there, and she had some serious medical issues and didn’t have any medical providers there, and we talked about why did she really want to move there? “Well, to be cared for and to feel connected with people.” Well, could we do some more of that in the current house where she lives right now? And she was part of a church group, and she hadn’t really plugged into one of the women’s groups, and she did that, and that was helpful for her, but she delayed making the decision, and then it turned out her son did move again, and so she was very glad that she did not move.
But if you can slow the processes of jumping into an action that she may be thinking was best for her, but it might not necessarily be best.
Arnott: You have talked about some of the issues involved in housing decisions, and I think you personally are currently living in a continuing care retirement community, also known as a life plan community.
Can you talk a little bit about some of the pros and cons of CCRCs as a housing option and how retirees can decide if that would be a good housing option for them?
Rehl: Yes. And when I had my planning practice, this was an issue that I did bring up and discuss with all of my clients: Going forward, where will you be living? And it’s not just picking a pretty place to live, a fancy apartment. It’s really a life care and risk management and family-impact decision in addition to a lifestyle difference.
And so with many of those clients and they arrived at the decision, yes, staying in their own home was not going to be a real viable issue, and some of them identified CCRCs, and we went and visited some of them, and I had developed a checklist of things to look at—everything from the financial stability of the organization to their connectedness with well-care and fitness programs, lifelong learning, the health system, all these sorts of things to look at. So it was about when I turned 75, my husband and I started having conversations along this line about what we were going to do, and he kind of was just going to go down the path, “Well, I’ve had this house forever, forever, and I’ll just go and continue on with this.”
But big impact for us was some friends who are about our age suddenly went into a downward spiral, and they had done no planning whatsoever. And fast-forward to, it’s like three years from the point that it began, and she is in an Alzheimer’s unit and he is in independent living but keeps bouncing in and out of the hospital and is probably going to be in assisted living very soon. They live way far away from family members. It’s been very, very disruptive for that family. And so looking at that close friendship and how that’s impacted their family situation, and it’s not a good situation at all. So at age 75, we started our own thinking and visited several places, picked where we wanted to be, got on the waiting list, and as of six months ago, we are now here, and I love it.
Benz: That’s great to hear. We had a previous guest, Harry Margolis, make the comment that age 75 is a really good time in life to reevaluate housing choices. So it sounds like your experience syncs up with that.
Kathleen, I wanted to ask in the realm of CCRCs, are there any factors that you find people repeatedly underestimate when they’re trying to make a choice about CCRC?
Rehl: That their health is going to continue forward—but it’s not. It’s just a statistic like I think it’s 70% of all folks who are over age 65, it’s going to be some kind of care facility is needed. Now it might be shorter rather than longer, but they are going to need care. And who’s going to provide it? Because if they are just staying in their own home, it doesn’t mean that the care goes away. Somebody is going to have to take care of it.
A friend of ours, his uncle recently turned 100, and he’s proud he’s still living at home. Well, he has three daughters that all live within a one-mile radius, and they are checking on him every single day. So their health is going to always be great and they’re not going to need any help? Even as they age, they’re not going to want to go up on the roof anymore and do repairs, or at least they shouldn’t. And yeah, it’s being very, very optimistic.
I love the research from that Harvard study, which is that, long-term, what people are happiest, and those are the ones that have got relationships, and CCRCs, they foster relationships here. There’s all kinds of opportunities to get together with committees and learning opportunities and trips, and just out in the hall, and somebody wants to talk about something over a shared meal.
Arnott: We also wanted to talk a bit about the role of purpose in retirement and steps that people can take to make sure that they are still actively engaged and pursuing goals, things that will be fulfilling. Can you talk a little bit more about that? I think you’ve called it “refirement” instead of retirement.
Rehl: It’s refirement, and it’s small letters, but oftentimes I put the capital F in the middle, and that’s because there’s five aspects that start with F in my life that fit refirement. I’ll tell you about that in just a second.
I didn’t make up this term refirement because people said, “Oh, that was really clever. You came up with refirement.” It was a book that was written in the late ’90s. It was about refirement, not retirement. It was written for clergy, and it was to encourage pastors, ministers not to just drop off the end when they retired but to continue doing maybe interim ministry or visitation ministry or some kind of work with nonprofits, of having this purpose in their life.
I loved it. I did refirement work with my clients, helping to figure out what their values were and what would give them meaning. And so I wove it in, but it didn’t catch on in the financial planning industry at all. I think the book is out of print now. It may be available resale or something, but never really went any place. But for me, like the capital F, in fact, I keep it up on my whiteboard because I look at it and say, “OK, am I really doing all these things?” Family; fulfillment; fun; friends; and fitness of body, mind, spirit, and money. So I’ve got this up on my bulletin board and saying, “Oh, yes, we’re planning the family get-together this summer, the big one.” And I’m definitely fulfilled. I got more speaking and writing activities that just keep me going. Plus I’m setting up a legacy society at the CCRC, and everybody’s excited about that.
And friends, oh my gosh, I’ve made so many new friends here at the CCRC, and I’m going back to Saratoga in a couple of days, and I’ll see my friends up there. And then fitness, yes, I work out. I walked for an hour this morning. I’m going to do a yoga class this afternoon. Yesterday I did total body fitness. And my money … And the thing that I have the hardest time making sure that I get in there is fun. Now, people might call a lot of what I do work, but it’s just fun for me to write another article. And I’m working on like the second edition of my book. That’s fun. I’m writing an e-booklet called “Planning Ahead: Staying in Control, a Conversation Guide to Continuing Care Options in Later Life,” which I will give away. I’m speaking at the International Association of CPAs. That’s a new group. I haven’t worked with them before, but they reached out, and they want to talk about housing decisions and how to talk to clients.
So that’s a lot of fun for me, but I really need to schedule time. OK, we’re going to go to the Hippodrome, and we’re going to see this play. We’re going to go visit Micanopy. That’s a little town nearby, and they have all kinds of antique shops. That’s the way I do balance. I encouraged all my clients before they retired to think about what is life going to look like on the other side and how are we getting ready for it?
I think Michael Kay, which you may have interviewed him, he’s written this book for high-functioning executive guys. They’re the ones, some of the ones that have the worst time retiring because they were Mr. Big. That was their identity. And when they retire, it’s a whole different world. And I saw that with a number of clergy who retired. They were a very important person, and all of a sudden, whoop, they’re not anymore.
Benz: Can you talk about what was the legacy project that you mentioned that you’re working on at your CCRC?
Rehl: Yes. Helping them set up a legacy society and educating them about gifts that can be given during lifetime, but more of them are going to be planned gifts that are done after death. So it might be a gift through their will, through their trust, through an insurance program, or it might be a life income gift. And I get really excited about those because it’s like a win-win deal. Things like a testamentary charitable remainder trust that pays income out to children for a certain number of years. And then after that period is freed up to do the work of a nonprofit organization.
The legacy charitable IRA rollover, which is a great deal—the law changed, and it happened at the end of the year, and it was kind of a surprise. It was maybe three or four years ago, and it was $50,000 that you could take from your retirement plan and put into a charitable gift annuity that paid you income for life and was counted as part of your required minimum distribution. So then that lowered your taxable income. It also lowered the number like the IRMAA tax that would come in, and it was just such a win-win. So I did, you can do it only one year, so I did the full 50 that year and then my husband did one the next year. I think right now it’s indexed. It’s up to $55,000.
So there’s a number of very creative things that can benefit the donor as well as the organization. And there are different pots that the principle of a legacy gift could go into depending on what the interests were of the individuals. And they’re very excited about this, and I am, too.
Arnott: You’ve also written about other ways to create a legacy, and one idea would be putting together a legacy letter, also known as an ethical will. What are some of the best ways for people to get started with that if they would like to leave something behind for their loved ones, but if they’re not sure how to get started?
Rehl: I’m going to teach a course in the … It’s the Institute of Living in Retirement. I think that’s what it is. I’m going to teach a one-hour course, and people take the course, and by the time they leave this workshop, they have already got the start of their legacy letter.
But many people can’t come to my workshop because they don’t live near Gainesville. But they can read one of my articles. But they can start small. Just write a story, talk about your first job, or talk about why you married the kid’s mother, or talk about a trip, a family trip, that you went on. Just write a story, just start. And the object is not to be great financial literary work of art, but just to get it down, and then begin sharing these. I started about six years ago. I liked to write poetry and especially haiku.
And I just started collecting my poems. And so this book now has like about 200 poems that I’ve written, and every once in a while I show one son who’s quite interested in it, and he reads it, and he said, “Well, this will be great, Mom, after you’re gone to have all these poems.” Just talk about what’s important to you, what your values are. Maybe write a little thing about three things that life taught you. And there are commercial programs that are out there. There’s more of them that have popped up in the last several years. There’s one where they send you a prompt every week, and you write what they want you to write about. And then at the end of the year, all those 50 some stories are put together, and they publish it and make a book out of it. So there’s commercial ways to do this, but there’s little ways.
If you go to my website, there’s a free download, downloadable book called Lifeprint Legacy, and there are questions to answer, and when you answer those questions and put them all together, then you’ll have a booklet yourself. Everything on my website’s free. People have said, “Yeah, you could charge for this.” No, I don’t. I get psychic income when people send me a note and say, “Oh, that was really great.” Or somebody wrote to me the other day and said, “Thank you so much for writing the book. I gave it to my sister, and it’s really helped her a lot.” So I give everything away except my book, but that’s because Amazon has to print it.
Arnott: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Kathleen. And this conversation has, I think, provided a lot of really helpful ideas both for people who might have lost a spouse as well as advisors working with people in that situation.
Rehl: We talk about our financial plan, and so much of the time that’s about the numbers, but the work that I’m doing is about whether the life works when circumstances change. That’s just as important as the money.
Benz: And you’re obviously very passionate about it.
Rehl: Because it’s fun. Hey, that fits into that fun category, isn’t it? So this is during the interview with you today was fun.
Benz: Thanks, Kathleen.
Arnott: Thank you for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can follow me on social media at Amy Arnott on LinkedIn.
Benz: And at Christine Benz on LinkedIn or at @christine_benz on X.
Arnott: George Castady is our engineer for the podcast. Jessica Bebel produces the show notes each week, and Jennifer Gierat copy edits our transcripts. Finally, we’d love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at thelongview@morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks for joining us.
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