5 Tips from a Top Financial Investor – with women in mind!
“No one taught our parents how to grow old,” says top financial advisor Janine Guenther, “but the boomer generation needs to learn new lessons, and quickly.”
Janine Guenther, Portfolio Manager and Investment Advisor for CIBC Wood Gundy, provides a reality check: 60% of women in Canada who are over the age of 60 will be single; one of our top concerns is that we will live longer than our infrastructure can support us; and we boomers are truly a Sandwich Generation – sandwiched between taking care of aging parents and our kids.
Janine will be joining me as a speaker and session leader at Designing Your Third Chapter May 12-14. I am really looking forward to learning from her. I hope you will join me. Click HERE to register.
“My 86-year-old mother was not able to learn how to grow by watching her own mother,” says Janine. “By the time my parents got to me age (47), their parents were dead. With technology and medicine that allows people to live longer, boomers are the first generation who find themselves with both their parents and their kids dependent on them.”
News headlines support this view, such as in a recent series in The Globe and Mail that read, “Cultural shift squeezing retirees’ savings” and went on to say: “Seniors are increasingly running into financial problems. From 2010 to 2014, there was a 20.5 per cent increase in the number of consumer insolvencies among seniors….” The article makes the claim that this was often because of seniors having to help out their adult kids with everything from down payments on houses to taking them – and often grandchildren – back into the family home following divorce, job loss or other life challenges.
“Women bear the brunt of the costs, both financially as well as emotionally,” says Janine, “Statistics show that many women in out age bracket are spending up to 20 hours a week caring for a relative, be it an elderly relative or a grandchild.”
When it comes to planning, Janine says that women are often the ones who control the household budget, but it is frequently the male partner who looks after the investments. If the man dies or is no longer on the scene, women can find themselves at sea with their investment portfolio.
“Eighty per cent of women change financial advisors when there is a death or divorce – exactly the time when they are least emotionally capable of making a great decision. And there are now so many choices – everyone from a financial advisor, a mutual funds advisor to a Certified Divorce Specialist. Quite frankly, there are too many choices.”
So how’s the reality check going so far? I thought I was doing pretty well on managing all of the above, until Janine pointed out that, even if we have prepared ourselves with financial planning, wills, executors, etc, there are some other areas where we can fall down.
One of them is communicating with your loved ones, having those tough family conversations that we all like to avoid.
An example from Janine: “I worked in a family business where the patriarch had decided where the family’s money would go following his death. No one in the family was really happy about his decisions, but no one would bring the matter up. Finally when they started having regular meetings that involved not just the adults but the older teenagers in the family, they all became much more comfortable when they understood the how and why of decisions.”
And what if you get it all right – everything is set up, you think you have money to see yourself into your old age – and then you change your mind? Another story from Janine: “a client of mine retired from the federal government at the age of 61. She had done a lot of work to ensure her CPP, annuities and other financial elements were all in place. However, a few months into retirement, she declared that she was ‘so bored I could stick a needle in my eye’. But it was not as simple as going back to work. She discovered that the manner in which her CPP was set up meant that she couldn’t change her defined benefits. If she went back to work, basically all of the money she earned would go to the Canada Revenue Agency. In the end, it didn’t make sense for her to go back to work and that was a big emotional blow for her.”
What’s a gal to do? Here are Janine’s top tips:
- Become financially literate
- Find a financial advisor who will truly be a partner
- Ask your financial advisor these two questions
- Talk to your family
- Watch out for the “smug factor”
Learn more at Design Your Third Chapter May 12-14. Click HERE to register.
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