Serving the Newly Widowed

Being widowed is one of life’s most traumatic experiences. The newly widowed (statistically more often a woman) is confronted with a slew of details to attend to at a most difficult time. In this adapted excerpt from What Retirees Want: A Holistic View of Life’s Third Age, by Ken Dychtwald, PhD, and Robert Morison (Wiley, 2020), we describe how innovative organizations serve widows and what widows want from their financial advisors.

Organizations that recognize widowhood as a distinct and important lifestage are developing innovatively pragmatic services. For example, Peacefully is a service that takes care of the “loose ends” of life, so that surviving loved ones can focus on what matters. It helps people deal with tasks including notifying Social Security, dealing with social media, and transferring bank accounts. The start-up was inspired by a Millennial entrepreneur’s experience watching her family struggle with all the immediate burdens after they lost her grandmother.

Created in 2001, Everest describes itself as “a funeral concierge service rolled up into a life insurance plan.” When help is needed, Everest advisors are ready to personalize the funeral plan, compare and negotiate prices on funeral homes and products, and work with life insurance companies to get monies to the beneficiary quickly. Everest can be purchased directly, obtained as an add-on to a life insurance policy, or sometimes accessed as an employee benefit. More than 25 million people in the United States and Canada are covered by Everest.

Undertaking LA brings the funeral director to the home of the deceased and walks family members through the death rituals, such as washing and dressing the body and holding an in-home wake. The entrepreneurial pioneer of this enterprise is Caitlin Doughty. In addition to her years as a mortician, she has taken on our modern discomfort with death and travels the world speaking on the history of death, including its culture, rituals, and the funeral industry. In 2011, Caitlin founded the Order of the Good Death, a death acceptance collective that has been featured everywhere from NPR to the BBC to the LA Times. She produces a web series, “Ask a Mortician,” and wrote a book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory, which was a New York Times bestseller.

Financial services firms try to ease the complexity of widowhood with services specifically designed for when a loved one passes away. For example, specialists on the Survivor Relations Team at USAA create a “dashboard” overview of the steps necessary to manage and settle accounts, including how to submit required documents electronically. A variety of other resources provide guidance, and USAA offers survivorship consultation with specially trained financial advisors.

When a spouse passes away, money and other assets go in motion to the widow and also to children or other family members in many cases. That makes it a delicate time for financial services firms because many widows change banks and almost half of widowed women change their advisors. Sometimes they switch under the influence of family or friends. Kathleen Rehl, financial planner, author, and widow, points to another cause: “In that early stage of widowhood, it is critical to have someone that you can think things through with – not tell you what to do. That’s why many widows leave the advisors because the advisors try to tell you what to do.” Rehl is a faculty member of the Financial Transitionist Institute, where they teach advisors to establish “decision free zones?” by helping clients understand what decisions can be placed on hold while they’re grieving and where an immediate decision is really needed.

The widows we surveyed offer good advice to the financial professionals trying to serve them (figure), starting with turning down the pressure to make decisions.

Advice from Widows to Financial Professionals

Source: Age Wave / Merrill Lynch, Widowhood and Money: Resiliency, Responsibility and Empowerment

Of course, the best way to protect the customer relationship is to have been serving the couple all along, including helping them prepare for the eventuality of one of them dying. That includes the seemingly mundane details of making sure that accounts are in both names, key documents are accessible, and cash can be available. Couples need that basic help: more than half of widows say that they and their spouses did not have a plan for what happens when one of them passes away, and three-quarters of married retirees say they would not be financially prepared if their spouse died.

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What Retirees Want: A Holistic View of Life’s Third Age is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org (which benefits independent bookstores) or direct from your?favorite book store.