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It is not a surprise that the financial industry would happily take 100% responsibility for managing your money. They have done this for decades and many books have been written about the financial advice industry. One of the most famous and historical books about the relationship between financial advisers and their clients is: Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street (click here for reader comments or if you want to purchase this book). I plan on reading this book, many of the comments from people who have read it is that its a fun and humorous read.
What is a surprise by some of my friends is that they are happy to let someone else take that responsibility! Quite frankly, I don’t understand why people would allow this! To have no interest in their money and happily let someone else take 100% responsibility is bizarre.
This is also true for many married couples where one spouse, usually the husband, takes 100% and usually the wife has ZERO interest. In many cases, the surviving spouse is now 100% vulnerable to the financial sharks that are salivating with the commission they can make!
As you will read throughout this series, no one is better equipped and motivated to watch your money than you.
Married Couples–Please Read!
If you are taking 100% of the responsibility for your family’s finances and your spouse is one of those people with absolutely no interest, find a fiduciary advisor, make an appointment and invite your spouse to this meeting. If something happens to you, your spouse will be subjected to God knows what!
You can locate a fiduciary financial adviser at one of these organizations:
Garrett Planning Network: https://garrettplanningnetwork.com/
Association of Personal Financial Advisers: https://www.napfa.org/find-an-advisor
Luckily, to the responsible spouse: You already know about managing your money and can monitor any adviser so that your noninterested spouse can get up to speed. Your spouse is very lucky while you are living. So, your family’s life savings will be protected from now on, if something happens to you!
Steve’s Late Bloomer Wealth BIO
Stephen A. Schullo, Ph.D. (UCLA ’96) taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) for 24 years and UCLA Extension teaching educational technology to student teachers. Steve wrote investment articles for the United Teacher-Los Angeles (UTLA) union newspaper for 13 years. He has been featured and quoted in many mainstream media articles about 403(b) plans, including the Los Angeles Times, NY Times, and U.S. News and World Report. He co-founded an investor self-help group 403bAware for teacher colleagues and wrote 7,500 posts in three investment forums since 1997. He testified at California State legislative hearings and honored with the “Unsung Hero” award by his teacher’s union for his retirement planning advocacy.
For the last 14 years, he serves as a volunteer on LAUSD’s Investment Advisory Committee as a “Member-at-Large” and former co-chair. The committee contains collective bargaining reps from the unions and monitors the district’s tax-deferred retirement plans, 457b/403b, of 55,000 former and current LAUSD employees, worth $2.8 billion in total assets.
He started this blog in 2012 to help all PreK-12 public school educators nationwide, especially his Los Angeles Unified School District colleagues. He belongs to a small national group of 403(b) advocates (mostly teachers) who want to bring closer attention to the 403(b). During the last 25 years, 40 newspaper articles have been published and each one says the same thing, TSAs (Tax Sheltered Annuities) are terrible 403(b) plans and the salesperson gets the benefit from lucrative commissions and high-costs. Nobody in educational leadership reads these articles NOR talk about the proper place for annuity products publically. We come together at 403bwise.com and 403bwise Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/349968819000560/ Come on over if you want to join us so we can help our colleagues avoid these self-conflicted and high-cost Tax-sheltered Annuities (TSAs).
Steve is the author of two books, Late Bloomer Millionaires and Fighting Powerful Interests: Educators Challenge Tax-sheltered Annuities and WIN!, a story of how a handful of LAUSD educators struggled for years to improve the 403(b) to no avail. But we never quit! We were instrumental in LAUSD’s implementation of the new 457(b) plan and earned a very rare, but very precious “Plan Design” award.
For a copy of both books, email Steve at steve.schullo@latebloomerwealth.com and he will happily email you both books, FREE with no obligation except to read them and get informed, in a pdf file format.