Ron Lieber is a personal finance columnist with The New York Times. He writes about his personal story about his father.
“There are few things in life more fraught than conversations about illness, death and money.
I know this. I’ve written about it before.
But I really understood it only after my father’s amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was diagnosed in 2015. It was tempting to curse the gods, rant and rave, and lose myself in anticipated grief. That wouldn’t have been all that practical, though.
Thankfully, I wasn’t managing things alone. My two siblings absorbed the news in their own way, but one thing we were certain of was that we needed a lot of help, and fast. Sure, my brother is a lawyer, my sister runs a nonprofit that helps cancer patients, and I tell all of you what to do with your financial lives. But this was a case for a specialist, who could do what we couldn’t.
Luckily, I knew just whom to call: a medical doctor and certified financial planner with a passion for hard-luck cases. And the last five-plus years have been so much better than they might have been had she not turned up in our lives.
During my dad’s illness, I experienced firsthand what had, until then, just been book learning: Financial planners are often at their best when your life is at its worst.”
See the story here