Women's Money Wisdom

Episode: 292: Financial Caregiving 101 with Journalist & Author Beth Pinsker

• Melissa Joy, CFP® • Season 4 • Episode 292

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What if planning now could be the greatest act of care?

Journalist and MarketWatch columnist Beth Pinsker joins Melissa Joy, CFP® for a compassionate, practical conversation on financial caregiving—the real work we do for the people we love (and our future selves). Beth opens up about the whirlwind that followed her mom’s surgery: hospital stays, paperwork marathons, and a long-term care scare that nearly derailed benefits. Through her new book, My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving, she lays out a simple roadmap—documents to have before a crisis, a one-page medical “cheat sheet,” and why simplifying accounts and beneficiaries might be the most loving step you take this year.

Together, Beth and Melissa unpack how to connect the legal, medical, and financial lanes so caregivers can act quickly (and confidently). From the $100 POA that can save $18,000+ and a year of guardianship hassles, to making sure trusted contacts and online access are current, this episode turns overwhelm into a plan.

This is your nudge: fear and uncertainty are inevitable—but you can still take control of the plan.

💡 Key Themes Covered

  • How a simple medical + contacts cheat sheet can save precious time in emergencies
  • The “$100 vs. $18,000” reality: POA/healthcare proxy/HIPAA before a crisis vs. guardianship later
  • Why women often shoulder caregiving—and how to prepare even if you’re not the household “money person”
  • Long-term care pitfalls (missed paperwork, past-due notices) and how to prevent coverage lapses
  • Simplify to protect: consolidate old 401(k)s, confirm beneficiaries/TODs, set legacy/phone access
  • The caregiver wallet: cash-flowing expenses, reimbursement timelines, and organizing receipts
  • Conversation starters with parents, partners, and siblings to align on roles and next steps

Connect with Beth Pinsker

🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bpinsker

🌐 Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/bethpinsker.bsky.social

📸 Instagram: @bethpinsker_ny


The previous presentation by PEARL PLANNING was intended for general information purposes only. No portion of the presentation serves as the receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment advice from PEARL PLANNING or any other investment professional of your choosing. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and it should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy, or any non-investment related or planning services, discussion or content, will be profitable, be suitable for your portfolio or individual situation, or prove successful. Neither PEARL PLANNING’s investment adviser registration status, nor any amount of prior experience or success, should be construed that a certain level of results or satisfaction will be achieved if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. PEARL PLANNING is neither a law firm nor accounting firm, and no portion of its services should be construed as legal or accounting advice. No portion of the video content should be construed by a client or prospective client as a guarantee that he/she will experience a certain level of results if PEARL PLANNING is engaged, or continues to be engaged, to provide investment advisory services. A copy of PEARL PLANNING’s current written disclosure Brochure discussing our advisory services and fees is available upon request or at https:...

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. I'm Melissa Joy, a certified financial planner and the founder of Girl Planning. My goal is to help you streamline and organize your finances, navigate big money decisions with confidence, and be strategic in order to grow your wealth. As a woman, you work hard for your money, and I'm here to help you make the most of it. Now let's get into the show. I'm so pleased to have journalist and author Beth Pensker. She's a market watch columnist, but she is also the author of a new book, My Mother's Money, A Guide to Financial Caregiving. Beth, welcome to the podcast. Hi, nice to have uh beyond. Yeah, we're so thrilled to have you. And like I said, I feel like this topic is contemporary. It's speaking to me, but I'd love to hear from you. I mean, it's right in the title, I guess. Um, you're writing a book about your experiences caregiving for your mother.

SPEAKER_01:

Is that right? Absolutely. Um, the book starts with me getting a phone call from my mom. Um, she was about to have a big major spine surgery, and she said, Can you come down here? I lived in Brooklyn and she lived in Florida. She said, Can you come down here and help me? You know, I don't know how long I'll be incapacitated with this surgery. I need you to take care of a few things for me. Um, and it started there, and um, you know, everybody gets a phone call like that at some point in their life, you know, um, where time stops and you have to put everything aside to take care of somebody. Uh, somebody has a heart attack, somebody falls, somebody has a car accident. You never know when it's coming or where it's coming from, but it it it's coming for all of us at some point, unfortunately. And when it happened to me, we had a lot of planning in place. And, you know, I'm a financial expert. I do this every day for a living. Um, but there was so much that I didn't know how to handle. And I had just started my job at Market Watch when this was all going down. And I remember being at my mom's bedside right after the surgery and having a column due. And I thought, my brain isn't functioning. Like, my brain is all in on caregiving, and I like I'm overloaded. This is all I can think about. And then I thought, well, you know, duh, I'm a retirement columnist. This is what everybody is going through. This is part of you know what happens as you age. And I'm gonna write about this being hard. And the first column I wrote was about this um cheat sheet that my mother had given me before her surgery. She had um all of her demographic information, uh all of her medications, all the dosages, all the um surgeries she had, like all the medical information you would want to have if you went with somebody to the hospital in emergency. You know, you see those um scenes in the movies where somebody's rushing to the hospital and they grab all the medication bottles from the medicine cabinet because they don't know what the person's taking. Like I didn't have to do that because my mom had this like sheet of paper. It listed all her doctors, it listed her Medicare supplement information and all of her insurance information. And I didn't have to think about it. I had this piece of paper. And so I wrote about that uh the importance of having that sort of medical information uh and what my mom had provided for me. And it struck such a chord with people. You know, there was like a huge response to that story. And I then, you know, two weeks later, I was still there, um, still going through it. And I'm like, you know, I hit another obstacle, and I'm like, I'm just gonna keep writing about this. And everything I wrote about as I went through it just really hit home with people. And I thought, um, you know, I'll uh this is a book. This is the people need to know this information in one place, you know. You go to the internet uh when you have a problem and you search, you know, power of attorney or guardianship. Um, but people don't put two and two together. They don't know how it all fits together. They don't understand why you have to do it. And this book was my way of telling my story so that people could understand the why of it all. Like you'll read this book and you'll go, oh, that's why we have to do all this stuff. You know, oh, that's why we need a will. That's why I need a trust or a power of attorney or a healthcare proxy. That's why I need to talk to my mom and have a conversation about uh where her money is or what Medicare supplement plan she's on. Like all of this makes sense to me now because I see how the pieces fit together. And if I don't know this information, I'm gonna be caught short at some point in the future. And it's better to do it now than to do it later. And that's what I'm hoping for. That, you know, you're like a person who is worried about their parents will read this book and say, I need to get on some of this stuff. I don't know how to talk to my parents about it. And then they'll give the book to their parents and then say, read chapter five and let's talk about it. Um, and then they'll have a conversation.

SPEAKER_02:

I love that. I think that a lot of people know some good ideas. You know, we're told in separate conversations, hey, make sure you have medical directives. Maybe it's like tell the kids where like my dad has a binder with my stepmom and I know where that is. Or my mom has given a safe deposit key to me and a sibling. But um connecting the dots.

SPEAKER_01:

You have the safe deposit key. Do you have the legal authority to get in it? A key won't do you anything.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes, we we do. She has done that paperwork. Um, but that's exactly what you're talking about. First of all, there's a lot of lanes you're dealing with, um, potentially medical, legal, and financial, um, just to name a few. And all of them have particular rules that are often there to protect the people that are they're caring for the primary person, the person being cared for. But those rules do not make anything easy. They make it um very difficult to be a navigator. And and oftentimes, and you're just talking about how your brain was triaging on a very important big obstacle right in that moment. Um, they are not built to be integrated. You know, you're you're going from one place to another, and everything feels difficult and and and very challenging to get through, make progress. So, um, and you know, as a Gen X woman whose um peers and contemporaries are many of my clients, I know we're all going through it. Oftentimes the female is the caregiver.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I find the dichotomy dichotomy um interesting because the fem the the women get uh stuck with the caregiving duties so often. It's just expected of us. We're we're the ones always on call. You know, if if you're uh a daughter, you know, you're just expected to sort of do this stuff. But women also are not the ones that are the go-to a lot of times for financial stuff. And especially with in older, you know, heterosexual couples, the old, you know, couples who got married in the 50s and the even the 60s, there's still like traditional gender roles going on there. And if you are a an a wife taking care of a husband, um, they might have been the ones taking care of all the bills. I'm helping a uh a family with this now. And you know, the husband always took care of stuff, but he he needs help right now, and she doesn't know anything about anything, you know, she doesn't know how the bank accounts are structured, she doesn't know where any of the money is, she's never looked at a tax return. Um, a lot of people are still in that situation, even in in same-sex couples. Like there's always one person who takes care of that stuff and one person who doesn't pay any attention to it. But if that person ends up the caregiver, then that person has to take on the financial tasks too, because the bills aren't gonna get paid if the person who usually pays them has any sort of cognitive problem or any sort of decline. And um, that's just not gonna happen. And so there has to be some sort of map of some sort to how things work in each household, and somebody has to be able to follow that map.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I I know often one of the cohorts of people that I'm most concerned about are actually a really financially savvy cohort of people who were loved personal finance, managed their own assets, did a really good job of accumulating assets, did a great job of retiring and having enough money to pay for everything, but they did it all on their own. And the 1-800 line for you know, Schwab or Vanguard is not going to be knocking on your door saying you need a required distribution. And they are everything is more and more um digitally native, and technology um, in some cases, requires you to use an email, which is sometimes something that goes more quickly than other areas of competency or capability. And um, you know, I've had over the years some couples where whether it was the husband or wife who was kind of the investing person, um, they came in and said, Hey, if something happens to me, my wife knows to call you. But oftentimes that's too late because, you know, there's this, you think that you'll be able to put up your hand and be like, okay, I'm ready to hand off the keys. Decision making gets delayed as competency or capabilities are diminished. Um, you don't often acknowledge it. And sometimes you're trying to cover up and hide for diminished capacity. And so, you know, a best-laid plan of like, hey, I've thought about this on the day that, you know, I can't make full decisions. Um, he or she will call Melissa or whoever. Um, it just leaves me with a pause for concern that that is too late in many cases. And yeah, and oftentimes things have been missed that um aren't irreparable but are very challenging and and can make things more difficult to navigate.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I talk about one of these situations in the book that we faced. Um, when my mom first had her surgery, we thought she was going to be just like back up and and on her feet. She wasn't in any sort of decline that we knew about. But when I um when she was in the hospital, she started to have complications. And, you know, what was supposed to be a week in the hospital and a week in rehab turned into, you know, multiple weeks. And I figured out that, you know, bills needed to be paid. She wasn't home and and wasn't on these things. And so, you know, by week three, uh, you know, week three to week four, I had to start going through her desk. And I found past due notices for the long-term care insurance, which was her life blood.

SPEAKER_02:

Her heartbeat. Yeah. Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_01:

One thing with those, with that particular account, like she had a trusted contact name. So, you know, my brother had gotten a letter from them saying, you know, uh, your mom, you're the trusted contact for your mom. Um, her premium is past due on her long-term care insurance. You don't want to be past due on your long-term care insurance when you're in the middle of a care situation. My blood pressure is spiking as you're mentioning this.

SPEAKER_02:

Yes. Absolutely not.

SPEAKER_01:

It didn't make any sense to me because my mom was in an active claim. And so she shouldn't have been paying a premium. If when you're in an active claim, you don't pay the premium. Um, you're getting money from them, you're not giving them money. So, like the whole thing didn't make sense to me. And I'm, you know, then I have to start going through the paperwork because she was too sick then to talk to me. Like at that particular moment, she wasn't accessible to me. And, you know, so I start going through this paperwork and I realized that my mom hadn't been feeling well before the surgery, but hadn't told any of us. And she had lapsed on her claim paperwork. And it had been 90 days since she had filed any of the long-term care insurance paperwork for reimbursement. And so she had fallen out of claim, and therefore they wanted a premium again. And it's it's, you know,$6,000. It's not some small amount of money that has to change hands. And in so instead of getting$6,000, now we owe them$6,000. And, you know, I had to get them on the phone. But of course, you can't just get them on the phone. I'm not, I wasn't registered as her power of attorney with them. So then we got to exchange paperwork before I can even talk to them. And then so we do that, you know, like now we're three days into this, right? And she's got to pass due premium. And they tell me I have to FedEx them a check for$6,000 and then sort out her paperwork and re-certify the claim. Uh, and it's just all this paperwork. I have to get timesheets for the last 90 days from all the caregivers. I have to get all new W9s and tax paperwork from and and ID from the caregivers. I have to get the doctor to recertify that she is uh sick enough to need long-term care insurance. She's in the hospital and she can't talk and she can't move, right? Like I didn't think that was gonna be a problem, but it was. Um, so I had to do all this paperwork in the middle of caring for my mom and get and also take$6,000 out of my money and mail it to them. Uh and then, you know, months go by and the the claim gets recertified, and then they give the$6,000 back, but they don't send it uh Federal Express at that point. Um that comes regular, that comes back regular mail. Um, so I'm like, you know, caregivers are constantly out of pocket for sums of money like that. Um, and then you know, you float money, you you know, and you get it back, and you know, like it goes just in and out of accounts. And it's just, you know, mind-boggling all the the rigmarole that you have to go through. But like if she hadn't um, you know, gotten if she had if I hadn't gone to her desk, um, my brother would have gotten that notice and we would have, you know, seen the situation and and and done something about it. But if she had got if she had just stopped paying, she would have lost her insurance.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, and that insurance was probably yeah, that insurance was probably sold to her decades ago. And if you think about the logistics of keeping that trusted contacts, contact information, for example, up to date, that is a major challenge. And there's a lot of um moments in time across or down the road where you could have missed that. Let's say what someone steps in to care for um a relative who isn't their parent or their parent hasn't disclosed as much about their financial condition, because that's certainly every family has a different culture of sharing and how much they share. And we can talk about the risks of both, right? Um, sometimes, you know, it's like, oh, here's here's um all these things that are super valuable in the house, and everybody's like, you know, guard like clamoring for access to the super cool painting or lamp. And other times they have no idea there's a long-term care policy to begin with. Um, and so, you know, you really, as you're describing that moment in time, I know that you're probably dealing with eight, ten other things that are, you know, legal, getting your name as power of attorney onto accounts, medical, trying to get your mother into better condition, which in a perfect world would be the only thing you had to focus on. Um, financial, getting the ability to write the checks, reimburse yourself, keeping track of everything, going through the indignities of a process that makes it very, very difficult for you to take action quickly. The fatigue, exhaustion, anxiety, and stress have to have been mounting as you're tackling these moments in time. And telling your readers about it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. And the one, you know, at that point, right, all of that stuff is really hard. And we did all the right stuff. Um, because we had the power of attorney document. It was a legal, up-to-date, you know, valid power of attorney document. I had the healthcare proxy, I had the HIPAA um authorization, I had all the documents I needed. If I didn't have those documents to start with, when we when my mom called me and said, you know, I'm having surgery, I need help. We would have had to go to court before we could do any of that. I wouldn't have been able to help her at all. And the equation I like to present to people is um you can get that power of attorney pretty easily. You can download one from the internet. Um, they have free options, there are paid options, there are customized options, you can go to a lawyer. Uh just a power of attorney is gonna cost you, you know, a hundred bucks or less. Um, a hundred bucks to like free, you know. So um, if you don't have that document and you need it, it's eighteen thousand dollars in a year of your life.

SPEAKER_02:

Um, so you know, when people say you're going to court in Florida, you're not going to court in Brooklyn, you know, like this is this is not a process that you can just be like, sorry, I'm, you know, just hanging out here. You need to hire an attorney to appear on your behalf. You're it's not gonna be the first court date that you get the power of attorney.

SPEAKER_01:

Like it is a long period of time. It is a long period of time and it's hard, and you're gonna have to lay out all your own money in the meantime. But you know, this is what I'm trying to explain to people with by telling this the story of what you have to go through in these situations. Because if you realize that it's like, oh, it's on my to-do list, I'll get to it, you know, it's not really that important right now, nothing bad's gonna happen. Um, I don't have that much that I need to worry about. Nobody in the family has any money, it doesn't matter. Um, you know, if you read my story, you'll be like, oh, now I get it. You know, now I get that like if I take five minutes right now and take care of this, I am protected against things happening that I'm gonna have to struggle with down the road. And so it's not about estate planning, it's not about money. Uh, the reason I don't use estate planning anywhere in my title or in any of the things is because this is about caregiving. This is about taking care of the people that you love and about them, somebody someday being able to take care of you. And we're all connected to other people somehow. Like there are very, very few people in this universe who have nobody at all. Um and there, you know, there are lots of people in my world that I love and um and who love me. And I don't want them to have to struggle to take care of me, and I don't want to have to struggle to take care of them. And so this is the the stuff we do for each other. And it's hard, and you know, there's tasks that you have to complete that you'd rather not do, but like we we love people, and so we do them, and it's important stuff, and like it's stuff that people need to to think about deeply and get on top of, really. Like, it's just it's it's basic like life adulting for you know people who are connected to other people.

SPEAKER_02:

I love the I use the adulting analogy quite a bit, whether it's I need to do business adulting this quarter, um, you know, caregiving adulting, relational adulting is what you're describing in the book. If you take us back to the book, so you left us, there was this acute event where your mother had a planned procedure, but then there were complications. And also as you uncovered layers, got your you know, boots on the ground, you're realizing, oh, there may have been um, you know, more need than your mother was um able or willing to admit um leading up to these moments in time. So then tell us a little bit about your journey because I know you've shared with me the book is chronological and it takes you through your story, but then you're along the way, you're sharing lessons learned that are critical for other people to understand integrating a complicated and complex um narrative. I think it's so valuable. So, so what happened after that? Um, was your mom able to leave the hospital?

SPEAKER_01:

She was able to leave the hospital. She bounced back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And, you know, from the time she had her surgery till the time she died was about, you know, a little less than nine months. And it was it went fast. Like some people are in this. I talked to people in my book who were in a dementia care situation for, you know, 12 years, uh, 10 years. You know, these are all common time frames for dementia. And some people had instant deaths, you know, car accidents, um, heart attacks, strokes, you know, you you don't know what you're in for when you start. Our time taking care of my mom was uh intense um and you know relatively short. And then, you know, so from you know, the time she had surgery to the time I filed her last tax return was like a little over a year. Um, and so I was able to tell that story in a in a manner that that um you know doesn't drag on and on. Like I it would be hard to tell that story um, you know, over the course of 10 years. But because it happened for us in this rather condensed time period, you know, I went through all the things that you would go through over 12 years, I just went through them in you know 14 months. And so, you know, these things are are you can't avoid them, you know, like if your loved one's gonna end up in hospice, they're gonna end up in hospice at some point, you know. So my mom ended up in hospice. Um, it was just eight months after she had surgery. Um, you know, for a friend of mine who I interviewed for the book, you know, her mom had dementia care for 12 years and then went on hospice and then outlived hospice because hospice, you know, you certify for six months and then you have to get recertified. Well, her mom outlasted hospice at the end of all of that. And, you know, they were spending down her money, spending down her money, and her money ran out um one month and one day before she died. Wow. At 90, uh, I think she was 93. Um, I have to go back and check the book. But um, you know, you can't pre like that's that's just you you go with the punches at that point, but you do the best you can to prepare for that. So her mom had a nice amount of money left. They they cared for it uh and were careful with it, and it made it almost to the end. And then at the end, they had to make some decisions about, you know, what are you gonna do? Because there are very few um fortunes of any kind that can last through, you know, 10 plus years of dementia care. Like that's just a really big expense, you know. Uh it was, you know, it's like$15,000 a month to care for somebody in that situation. And a lot of people run out of money at some point along the way. And you know, my book goes into the the choices that you have at that point, you know, how to make the money last as long as possible, how to be careful with it and prudent with it, but then what do you do when you run out of it? And you know, these are all things that real things that real people face from all spectrums of income that you start with, from all spectrums of like your gener, like my generation and our generation um might have a certain level of professional um career success and a certain level of savings, but it doesn't mean our parents had that same level level of savings. And it doesn't mean our children, you know, have that same level of savings. And so, you know, there's we're all headed for the same decisions, no matter what.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, what did you learn that you would do differently or that you changed with your own planning and you remind other people to do after you had this intense, you know, call it a year-long experience that you know, no, you don't wish on anyone, but it's so beautiful that you were able to be there and be a caregiver for your mother.

SPEAKER_01:

I am uh definitely a lot more conscious of the paperwork I generate and the roadmap. I am just a lot more clear about things that only exist in my head. I'm a divorced person. So um as a single adult uh who's not legally um connected to another human being who could easily take over for me at the moment, um, my boyfriend would beg to differ. But but legally, I am a single adult, and that there's a certain responsibility that comes with that to make sure that if something would happen to me, um somebody would be able to to clean up after me when I'm gone. And you know, somebody's got to turn out the lights when you're done. And um, you know, my children are um very close to adulthood, but just barely, you know. And it's not fair, I've realized, to put that on them. But you know, they're my closest living relatives at the moment. And so, you know, when I had to take my mom off of all of my documents, you know, I had to put them on. And hopefully I'm not going anywhere for a while. Um, and I've left an instruction booklet, obviously, with this book. But um, you know, it wouldn't be it wouldn't be fair for them to have to to do any of this stuff at such a young age. So um I've left I've left things, I I keep things as clean as I can with my finances, you know, not accounts all over the place, clearly labeled folders. Um, you know, they know where the estate binder is. Um, they know my phone code. I have a beneficiary uh legacy contact for my phone so they could get into it. Like there are certain things that I've made sure that they they know where they are and how to do.

SPEAKER_02:

I think that's so critical.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. Um I actually I made it my theme for this year when it came to financial advice is simplify wherever you can. Um, because there are moments in time or situations that require complexity. But if you keep as much as possible simple, that gives you space and time for the complex, I hope. Um, and when it comes to um how you manage your accounts, if you have things all over the place, here's the reality is is there's only so many things you can keep most people keep track of unless you make it your hobby. And so, you know, that employer that was the longest ago 401k that you worked at, you may or may not have logged in, you know, this year to that account. Um, you know, keeping things clean, double checking your beneficiary designations, cleaning it up, making sure the ex-husband is off the beneficiary designation. Um, you have backup and successor trustees. If you have a power of attorney and you've named a sibling, and then you say, well, what happens behind there? They're your age. So you, if you experience dementia, they may also be experiencing um aging health impacts. There's just so many considerations, um, just as you're describing, where um simple may be better. I also do not judge people who do not use financial professionals, um, legal professionals, et cetera. Um, there's a right situation for everyone, but um, you know, the financial professional, if not everyone does this, but the right person would help you keep track of things and say, oh, what would happen with that account if something happened to you? You have that inherited stock that's at the transfer agent. Do you have a TOD? So your kids get that and don't have to explain or go to court or, you know, use a will to fund the trust or things like that. So there's so many different little pieces of financial and legal hygiene that can assist um many years in advance of the moment in time that you need it.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. I totally agree with that 100%.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, tell us um how people can follow you, Beth, and um where they can find this book. I am so excited to hear about it. I think it is it create we're recording this episode before the book comes out. So I'll be I'll I've got my order in, but um, where can people um find this book? It I know for some of you, it may be a great. Gift around the holidays. Let's not call it a Christmas gift because it's may come with chores, but I I think it would be great for you know kind of fireside conversations when people get together at the holidays, maybe this Thanksgiving.

SPEAKER_01:

That is my my hope for this. Uh in in the in the vein of keeping things simple, I'm just my name everywhere. Um so Beth Pinsker.com, uh Beth Pinsker on all social media, and I'm easily findable. I've been a journalist for 30 years. Um I'm I'm way out there in the world. Um it's the book, it will be at all major booksellers uh online and in person. And uh, you know, it it it'll be our any it'll be easily found, put it that way.

SPEAKER_02:

I love it. And congratulations on a job well done in such an important topic. This is uh work that I know is going to be helping so many people. And I love the idea of, you know, kind of like, hey mom, can you read this chapter? Um, you know, hey, brother and sister, why don't we all talk about this when we get together? And here's a little reading primer.

SPEAKER_01:

Um I have seen at work in person. Um, we could not uh get a friend of mine's father to uh activate his VA benefits, and he read he his he and his wife read the chapter on the VA benefits in my book, and they went down and they they organized a trip to the VA and they registered for his VA benefits uh just in the nick of time because you know he he needed some care afterwards, and he's now getting a stipend and um home health care. Amazing health paid comes from the VA, and some of his medications are zero copay through the VA. And he was convinced to do it finally after you know many, many years because the they both read the chapter in the book. We're like, here, this explains it to you.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I love that. I know you're not gonna hear every story of how your book helped people, but I hope you get some of that great feedback because um that's gotta make you feel good.

SPEAKER_01:

It does.

SPEAKER_02:

It does. Well, Beth, thank you so much for joining us. Um, it was a pleasure to meet and congrats on the book.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for listening to the Women's Money Wisdom podcast. If you found value in this episode, the best way that you can support the podcast is to forward an episode to a friend or leave a review. Go to ProPlan.com and the podcast link to get all the resources and links mentioned. This presentation by Pro Planning is intended for general information purposes only. No portion of this presentation serves as a receipt of or substitute for personal investment advice from Pro Planning or any other investment professional of your choosing. Copies of Pro Planning's current rent and disclosure brochure and form CRS discussing our advisory services and fees are available upon request or on our website platform at proplan.com. The information that we share is meant to educate and inspire, but not serve as personalized financial advice. Everyone's situation is unique, so be sure to consult with your own financial professional for guidance that fits your life. And just so you know, the opinions shared in this podcast are Melissa's own and those of her guests. They don't necessarily represent any organizations with which Melissa is affiliated. For more important disclosures, please go to our webpage at proplan.com.

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Melissa Joy, CFP

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