Client experience
Most widows leave their late husband's advisor within a couple of years. The reason given is almost never performance.
A client dies and the surviving spouse becomes your client, often for the first time in any real sense. Industry research has consistently found that a large share of widows leave their late husband's advisor within a couple of years, and the reason given is almost never performance.
It is that they were never the client. They attended meetings. They were spoken about rather than to. And when the person who held the relationship died, there was no relationship left.
The only reliable fix is upstream. Both people in a couple should be able to answer three questions without prompting: what do we have, who do I call, and what happens if you die first.
That means addressing both people in meetings, by name, with eye contact — and noticing when one of them has stopped participating. It means the non-engaged spouse has your direct number and has used it at least once.
Do less than you think. The instinct is to demonstrate value by acting, and this is the period where acting is least useful and most damaging.
What actually needs doing is narrow: make sure there is accessible cash for immediate expenses, establish who is handling the estate, and confirm nothing urgent is about to lapse. Almost every other decision — beneficiary changes, allocation changes, selling the house, giving money to the children — is better made in six months than in six weeks.
Say that out loud. We are not going to make any big decisions for a few months. Here is what we are doing now, and here is what we will look at in the spring. Grieving people are frequently pressured to decide things by everyone around them, and being the person who removes that pressure is worth more than any recommendation you could make.
Death certificates, account retitling, beneficiary claims, Social Security notification, pension and annuity elections, insurance, and the tax year that now has to be handled differently.
The firms that keep these relationships are usually the ones that treat this list as their job rather than as the estate attorney's. It is unglamorous, it is not investment management, and it is the single most memorable thing you will ever do for that person.
Now the planning conversation, and it is a genuinely different plan. One Social Security benefit instead of two. A different tax bracket, often materially different. Different longevity assumptions. Frequently a different attitude to risk, and it deserves to be revisited rather than assumed.
Ask what they want, not what the plan said. The plan was built by two people and one of them is gone.
A firm that loses the surviving spouse loses the relationship at exactly the point when assets are most likely to be consolidated and most likely to move. It also loses the connection to the next generation, who are usually watching how this is handled and drawing conclusions about whether to keep you.
Retention here is not a client-service nicety. It is the difference between a book that compounds and one that leaks at every generational transfer.
Questions this did not answer? Ask them directly — that is what the twenty minutes is for.
Book 20 minutes with Kyle