E49: The Financial Domain of Grief

We're back with the 7 Domains of Grieving, and we're going to talk about finances. This is not the first of the "7 Domains" in the grieving podcasts. So if you are clicking on this right now and want to go to the start, our first podcast would be on the physical domain and there's an introduction.

But now we're going to talk about the financial part because it's an important domain, the financial domain, and dealing with the loss of a loved one can be hard.

My little story is that my mom, with whom I had a complicated relationship, I never really appreciated how incredibly organized she was. But when it came time for us to move her out of her home and into a nursing home . . . She, many years before, had given me power of attorney, and it was written down. So I didn't have to do any legal work. When I went to move her into a nursing home, all that work, I had it right in my hand.

And then I found that she had everything tucked in. Her files and her finances were completely organized. She had a will that was quite direct. She had made me a financial power of attorney years before she needed me to be, and she even had her cremation already paid for. So she had paid $200, which was what it was back then, to have anywhere in the country that she might die, she could be cremated, and she already paid for that.

I realized what a gift that was. And believe me, I have not created that gift for my son yet. But there are big financial worries for the people who are left behind.

So with me today to think about being left behind, I'm going to be the leaver probably before my son goes, and Chloé, who is my wonderful producer, as a young woman could be the leavee, meaning her parents might go before she.

Dr. Jones: We're going to talk about how we prepare for this, me as the leaver and her as the leavee. So welcome to the 7 Domains of Grieving, the financial domain, Chloé. I asked you, do you have a will?

Chloé: You know what? I don't.

Dr. Jones: But do you have any stuff?

Chloé: I have lots of stuff, but I don't think about that at this age. Maybe I should.

Dr. Jones: Well, you have a dependent, don't you?

Chloé: I have a dog.

Dr. Jones: Yes, but you have a dependent. I made a will when I was 32 after we had our son. I guess I was 34. Oh my gosh, I have to do some arithmetic here. But I had to have a will because if something happened to me and my husband when we were off on an adventure, we had to leave our kid to someone. So who are you going to leave your doggy to?

Chloé: At the moment, my parents live with me. So if some tragic accident happened and I'd leave first, my dog would probably be with my parents.

Dr. Jones: Do they love your dog?

Chloé: Oh, they adore him. So I would not worry about him.

Dr. Jones: Have you talked about this with them?

Chloé: I haven't. But I think it's just kind of like an unspoken agreement because they babysit him for me. They dog-sit him for me.

Dr. Jones: Well, you hope that it's unspoken. But you can't read other people's minds.

Well, there are reasons to have a will and there are reasons to try to keep something. Your parents are still young. They're not even old-old. They're just sort of barely old. But something could happen to them. Are you ready? Are you the person that might be responsible, or is there some other sibling that you have that might pick up the pieces?

Chloé: I think it's me. I have a younger sibling. I have a younger brother, but between the two of us, I think my parents trust me more to be responsible when it comes.

My parents are both 70, and so like you said, they're old, but they're not old-old. But I do think about when they leave. I mean, at first, I think about, "Oh my gosh. It's going to happen so soon." But then I think about, "Okay. Well, where does that leave me after?"

Dr. Jones: Right. Well, that's ordinary. You can start even pre-grieving when they could be living another 20 years. But getting some kind of financial ducks in a row, or at least things . . . Some people have very strong feelings about certain things going to certain people, and the time that people make bad decisions about who gets what is when they're grieving.

Chloé: My mom has really been very open about saying, "Hey, I'm getting older. There's money, there are assets, there are bills, there are all this sort of stuff financially. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about kind of what my funeral looks like. Let's talk about what happens after." She's very open about that. My dad, though, he's very superstitious in that if you talk about death, death is going to happen.

Dr. Jones: Oh, that's common in many cultures.

Chloé: Whenever I try to bring it up, he's like, "No, it's not going to happen yet. Why would you bring that up?" For him, I have a harder time trying to get him to discuss making a will or even just talking to me about kind of what he wants when that time comes, what his funeral looks like. It's very hard for me to talk about that with him because he closes off quite often when that topic and that subject comes up.

Dr. Jones: Right. Some people aren't scared, but culturally you just don't talk about death. I think in some Native American cultures, particularly I think of Navajo, words have so much power. You don't say the word cancer and you don't say the word death. You don't even mention that. I don't know what happens within that particular cultural group when someone dies. I mean, do people just not have a will?

And of course, you can always just go, die, and then just let the people behind do whatever they think is right. Throw a party or not, or divide stuff up, or just say, "Everybody comes to the house. First come, first serve."

There's a little story of when my father's aunt died. She had a wonderful place and they invited the kids, I think there were maybe four of them, to come by her place and pick out what they wanted. And my father picked out a wonderful roll-top desk, which is now mine. So it's passed down. It's a beautiful desk.

And then he saw a little piece of jewelry. It was a necklace. It was all tarnished and looked like junk. He put it in his hand and he said, "Does anybody want this? If nobody wants it, I'll just give it to my wife." And so they didn't even account that one.

Well, he was a geologist and he knew it was gold. It just needed a little cleaning up. So he pocketed this necklace that was worth a lot of money because it was solid gold, but nobody . . . And it's now too late. That was all 70 years ago or 50 years ago, whatever.

But people would do funny things about stuff when they're grieving. I thought I was promised a set of glasses and my aunt took them. It's like, "I thought those were going to be mine." Well, she was higher up the . . . shall I put it as the blood food chain?

Chloé: The blood food chain.

Dr. Jones: The blood food chain, yeah. So she was a daughter. I was just a granddaughter. So people kind of get angry. If you are in charge, it's important to know you might need some help and you might need an attorney if someone dies without a will.

So there is something called a holographic will in our state, Utah, and in many states, meaning if you just write down what you want in your own handwriting and you sign it, that suffices. That would be a legal document.

Now, if you have complicated stuff or you have joint tenancy with a lot of properties and things, then it gets to be much more complicated. But you might need some help.

Chloé: Yeah. So I'm Vietnamese and so it's just kind of what your parents tell you.

Dr. Jones: But what happens if they have eight kids, and they didn't tell them all the same thing?

Chloé: I have a story. So I'm lucky that both my parents are still with me, and so I haven't had to deal with that personally. But my parents have had to deal with it with their parents and I've been around for that.

My mom grew up in a big family. She is the middle child of seven kids. And my grandfather never had a will. It was always the son is going to get everything. That sounds bad, but that's how it is. And I don't know if that's how he planned it.

Dr. Jones: The first son.

Chloé: Yeah, the first son. For her family, for my mom, the siblings were all daughters. So the first son was the only son. And so he got the house. He got a majority of the land. That's pretty much what it is, is the house and the land.

Dr. Jones: Well, in cultures where there isn't a tradition of wills and there isn't a tradition of writing things down, then our work with the cultural norms is that the first child or the first son gets everything.

Chloé: Yeah. That's kind of how it is with how they did it. And so my uncle essentially got the house. There are responsibilities that come with that too, though. In a lot of Asian cultures, your parents live with you. But my uncle, he's the youngest and he's also kind of the least reliable . . .

Dr. Jones: The ne'er-do-well.

Chloé: . . . of all the siblings, right? Really, it was always the sisters that took care of my grandparents, and so my grandfather took that into consideration. Traditionally, the house, the land would've gone to the son, but, "You didn't take care of us. Your sisters did." And so, therefore, then they divided the land equally and that kind of stuff.

But all of it was still word-of-mouth. None of it was ever written down on paper. I've heard many disagreements and arguments.

Dr. Jones: About what had really been said.

Chloé: Yeah. It's messy without a will.

Dr. Jones: Yeah. Well, there are some steps, and I'm just going to mention a few steps. First of all, for people who might be listening and preparing to grieve, it's important if you think about a few steps. One is you might need help, professional help, and that usually means an attorney.

Because I have been this person who did it, you need to obtain death certificates, and not just one. So you need death certificates every . . . The bank wants one. And when you shut off the credit card, they want one. And so get a bunch of certified death certificates.

Chloé: That sounds awful.

Dr. Jones: I know. It sounds awful.

Chloé: Just to hold in your hand a bunch of death certificates.

Dr. Jones: I'm sorry, but let me tell you, if you're going to take care of stuff and you're feeling sad and you think you want to try to do one, two, three, four, and they say, "We can do this for you, but we need a death certificate," it's like, "Oh, really?"

Chloé: "Prove it to me." Yeah.

Dr. Jones: Prove it to me. Turning off her social security, you need to identify the institutions. So you need to tell the Social Security Administration if the person who just died was over 70, or even over 65 or whatever age they might . . . You need to tell them.

And then you, again, need to gather whatever financial documents. If you're lucky, like I was, my mom was completely organized. Everything was easy to find. If you're not lucky, like many people are, there's stuff all over the place and you're grieving, you don't feel good, you're not thinking well, you're not sleeping, and you're trying to arrange a funeral. But you're going to have to get some things together. So you need to gather financial documents and that's going to be important.

You need to settle all debts. Hopefully there's nothing more than a credit card and that's the only thing you've got. But there might be mortgages and all those things. And so there are debts to settle.

And all that is going to take . . . usually they give you a while. Many will give six months to a year if they know that someone has died.

Planning ahead is always good, nudging the people who you are going to be responsible for to try to get a few things done, or "Gee, Mom, where are your documents?" or, "Do you have a list of where your resources are?" or, "What's your social security number? What bank do you have?" All those things are important.

And this is in American culture. In Vietnam, maybe people have a little bit of stuff, but not a whole lot of stuff.

Chloé: We have lands. We have a lot of lands.

Dr. Jones: Well, then you have to . . . if someone dies, then that land has to be . . .

Chloé: Divide up the land.

Dr. Jones: Well, that's fine, but that's all a legal process. You can't just go walk on the land and say, "Now divide it up. Here's my line." "Well, that's my line." So it's going to have to be legal with a surveyor and la-la-la.

So the process of dividing stuff up and actually having some kind of a ceremony is quite variable. In our own culture, there might be the great big funeral with a really expensive casket and $1 billion worth of flowers. And then there's all the food if you cater it or everybody brings food. So there are some rituals that are financially expensive.

Do you have any rituals in your culture of origin?

Chloé: I think so. I've seen them. Like I mentioned, I grew up most of my life here. I've been here since I was 2, and so I don't really . . . I haven't seen it firsthand, but I know of them.

There's this traditional funeral and you bury them or you cremate them. Obviously, that costs us money. And I know there's the celebration of their life afterwards. And we don't burn real money, but there is the tradition, the ritual of burning money, but it's, let's just say, fake money so that they can take with them when they leave as well. And I'm sure all that costs us real money.

Dr. Jones: Well, going back, part of what we understand as culture or as civilization is what's left behind. And often what is a cue is not just a dead body in the field with an arrow stuck in its chest. It's people who've been buried and what they're buried with.

Even Neanderthals were buried with flowers. And people who had more stuff who were higher on the economic food chain, the financial chain, or the status chain in their tribe were buried with more stuff. And all that stuff may be stuff that they had or it cost stuff.

Of course, we remember the great tombs in Egypt where the stuff was incredible, and there's a lot of stuff.

So, needless to say, the majority of people on the planet who die don't have a lot of stuff. But what we know about cultures is often the stuff that was left behind in the funerals and the way people are buried.

Chloé: We don't do it now, but funerals, the stuff used to be buried with the people. All of their stuff, their clothes, their beloved stuff all goes with them. I think the reason why they don't do it anymore is because that stuff costs money, clothes that can be donated or furniture that can be reused and can . . .

Dr. Jones: There are cultures who feel that the dead person is going to need that stuff in the afterlife. They might need money or they might need clothes or they might need their swords or they might need stuff in the afterlife.

I don't think that we bury our people in the United States with too much stuff, but they can be buried in a very elaborate casket with . . . Oh my gosh, it can be a fortune for the casket and the burial. And then you have to find money to find a place to put them, and you have to have a party. It can be a lot of money.

I personally like the concept of the potlatch, which is in North American indigenous people. That includes all the way from Alaska down particularly the Pacific Northwest.

At a birth or any kind of marriage or important celebration, people at the top of the economic food chain for whom this celebration of life is, in the case of death, pull everybody together. It's not always at the time of the death of their loved one. They give stuff away.

And the more stuff they give away, it moves them up the ranks of hierarchy in their village. So they spend a lot of money giving a lot of stuff away at the time of a death, and that sort of solidifies their position in the community.

So giving stuff away, I would think that would be a great thing to do, is have a big party and take all the stuff of your loved one that you don't think you want to keep and put a label on it and give it away. I think that sounds like a wonderful idea. It wouldn't necessarily improve my status in the community.

And people might say, "Oh, I really didn't want that chair," or, "Gosh, that cut glass face is so yesterday." But it's a way of giving stuff away and passing things on.

In terms of settling all debts, so we'll go back to settling the debts, sometimes there are ongoing debts. Maybe you're living with your parents or your parents are living with you, but they assume maybe the taxes or maybe they're assuming the power and the electricity because they share that with you. Are you ready to take responsibility for that?

So when you're thinking about getting ready to take on responsibility, it helps if you know what the debts are. What actually are the bills that the leavers, the people who are going to die or have died if you're grieving, what financial things are they actually paying for? Because you may not know.

You may not know that they're secretly paying for the educational tuition in some institution for a kid that they emotionally adopted and never told you about. It would be helpful if you knew, if you were going to be responsible for that, what that's going to be.

And are you ready yet? Would you have to sell your house if it turns out you couldn't maintain either the mortgage or the cost of heating or cooling or the taxes?

It's being a little bit prepared so you're not stunned by what really it's going to cost. Would you have to take a second mortgage out so that you could actually live in your house?

Every complicated emotional family unit is going to have its own interesting financial web. If you're going to be responsible, it's knowing what the nodes are in that web, that financial web. Where are the nodes? "Oh, she was paying for this. Oh, she used to send my cousin $50 a month because he was very vulnerable. Will that person assume that $50 a month is going to come from me?"

If you don't know where their money is going, then what are you responsible for? And that could be pretty scary if you live in a tight family unit where everybody's helping everybody else out.

Are you thinking about that, Chloé?

Chloé: I'm definitely thinking about that. As you're talking about it, I'm just nodding along because I kind of find myself in that very same situation.

My parents live with me. I'm Vietnamese-American, and so that's very normal. And I pay the mortgage. But before I paid the mortgage, they paid the mortgage. It's still the same house. And when I was financially stable, we had a talk and my parents were like, "Hey, do you feel comfortable taking on the mortgage and taking on the house?" I said I was, and so that's kind of when that transitioned over.

Dr. Jones: Did it transition over legally? The property is in your name?

Chloé: You know what? Funny, but we actually have been saying for a while, for a couple years now, that we need to get it legally under my name. And we've just never . . . It's not that it hasn't come up. It's just that we say it and then other things happen and then we haven't done it yet. I feel like this episode is a nudge for me to actually get it done.

Dr. Jones: Oh, no.

Chloé: I'll have to kind of eventually sit down with them. If not both of them, then just my mom, because my dad is still kind of afraid of the death word.

Dr. Jones: He's not talking about it. Yeah. Well, there are some significant tax consequences if they just turn it over to your name, if they gift it to you. Oh, yeah, this gets to be complicated. Believe me, I'm thinking about this.

But if something happens to both of them, then you will not get the house because it will divide it according . . . Without a will, it would be divided up equally between you and your brother, even though you've been paying the mortgage.

Chloé: We'll get it done. So that, I'm not too worried about. There is other stuff. I pay for the internet. I pay for Hulu, all that sort of stuff. But I do know that there's some financial stuff that they still help me with. For example, my car insurance has always been under their account. Even though I've grown up, my car insurance is still under their account, so they still pay that.

I know my mom, or both of my parents actually are helping financially some of their family members. And now that you mention it, I wonder when that time comes that my parents are gone and if the people that they help are still around, are they going to expect me to help?

Dr. Jones: Well, that's one of those talk-out-loud things you should know. Does it end with your mom or is the expectation in your extended family now falling to you?

Chloé: That's a great question to ask at the dinner table.

Dr. Jones: "Hey, Mom. When you die, you're helping out Auntie so-and-so. Do I have to help out Auntie so-and-so?"

Okay, listeners, here you have a bright, highly educated person with a pretty good job who's in kind of financial limbo if something happens. So getting prepared in the financial domain ends up being pretty important.

If you're going to be the leaver, meaning you're the one who's the next up in the family chain of moving on to the next world, it's good to have your finances and your wishes be known so that it doesn't make it so hard for the persons who's grieving to figure it out or to fight with siblings or relatives.

If you're the leavee, the person left behind, help your parents or the people that you might be responsible for write little things down, because things that are written down in your own hand called a holographic will are legal. So rather than fighting with the relatives over something, you name what it might be, they can have their choice. They can have their wishes met.

I think that before you're grieving and you're not thinking clearly, having a little bit of a plan written down would be a good thing. If you don't know what your elders are planning, you better kind of figure it out.

If this is the first and only podcast that you've listened to in the 7 Domains of Grieving, go back and check out the 7 Domains of Grieving in the physical domain, our first one, or pick out any one that seems to interest you as you go along.

We are so grateful for you listening to us in this really dreary talk about grieving and money. Two really awful conversations, death and money, death and taxes. Those are two things that are inescapable, death and taxes, and we are talking about them right now on The Scope. Join us for something more cheerful later.