A Financial Roadmap for the Non-Financial Spouse
- Adam Bartsch
- Jan 1
- 1 min read
It is frequently the case for couples that one spouse handles all the financial matters and the other spouse has at best a vague idea of how bills get paid, how to access financial accounts, how and for what reasons money transfers between accounts, etc. If the spouse who manages the family finances is the first to die, it often takes an adult child or outsider to come in and make sense of the family finances. Where the finances are structured rationally, deciphering how everything fits together can be easy. But often, how we have organized our finances, and how our finances have evolved, is less than rational. We often have accounts opened years ago that once had a specific purpose, but now it’s unclear if they are needed. There can be numerous retirement accounts that might or might not be able to be consolidated. And usually there are monthly transfers of funds between accounts that make sense to the financial spouse, but not intuitive to anyone else.
The result is that if the spouse who manages the family finances dies first, the surviving spouse can have difficulty figuring out such basic matters as how monthly bills get paid. And we all know that when a monthly payment is missed, problems can snowball quickly.
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