Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Managing Alone

Losing a spouse is a devastating event that hurls difficult changes into the surviving spouse’s life, not the least of which are the financial changes. Financial advisors Jennifer Black and Janet Baccarani wrote the book Managing Alone to explore these financial challenges. The book’s style is to illustrate financial planning concepts related to the death of a spouse using detailed real-life stories.

Peeking in on the lives of several couples makes this short book easy to read in a single sitting. Each story illustrates different aspects of coping financially with losing a spouse. The authors take a subject that is ordinarily quite boring and turn it into a page-turner.

A common theme in the stories is the great help people get from working with a financial advisor. This shouldn’t be too surprising because the authors are financial advisors. No doubt working with a good financial advisor would be of great help at a difficult time. But working with a bad advisor would likely be painful and expensive.

Overall, I recommend this book as an easy-to-read introduction to some of the steps people can take to ease the financial difficulties that can come with losing a spouse.

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