It’s our mission and top priority: Partnering with families during their working years, through retirement, and on to the next generation. We’re successful when you are successful in achieving your financial goals.

Eventually, our relationships with individuals transition at a client’s death, but that doesn’t mean our work as your family’s trusted advisor is done. When generational transitions inevitably happen, we see families going through a complex and emotional time, often made worse by an overwhelming amount of paperwork and deadlines. It is our goal to be the firm families can trust to help them make the upcoming decisions easier to understand and execute.

To learn more about what this really means, we reached out to Senior Financial Consultant, Laura Dealy, of our Western New York Wealth Management team, to talk through a recent example of how we helped a family through one of these transitions.

A Guidebook to Help Continue the Discussion

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Helping Through Difficult Times

“Helping our clients get to and beyond retirement is something we pride ourselves on,” remarked Laura Dealy. “We feel obligated to step up and be most helpful when a client passes away.”

“My Western New York team recently went through this exact situation with a client’s family. The long-time client was very engaged and enjoyed being involved with the investment accounts. When he passed away, the surviving spouse and children were not as investment-savvy and were unsure how to move forward.

While it’s second-nature for us to lay out the next steps for all the various aspects of a client’s financial plan, it’s a higher level of service when we handle the moving pieces of an estate for a family, especially during what are emotionally difficult and exhausting times.”

The Bank Didn’t Exist

For Laura and team, this meant balancing short-term and long-term changes to spending and withdrawal needs, investment portfolio adjustments, understanding estate and trust statutes and rules, and ensuring that the family was well prepared for the next phase of their financial journey.

Laura continued, “These transitions are never easy for so many reasons, and something unexpected always seems to pop up. In this case, the family had a trust document drafted years ago, in which the named trustee was a bank that no longer existed.

As their Financial Consultant, I brought in experts from our in-house Advisory Services team to study the trust documents to determine next steps. Ultimately, we were able to resolve the issue for the family. In my opinion, few wealth managers would be willing to go to such lengths or have the skills necessary to help this family.”

Turning Up the Dial

A death in the family may also mean significant changes for the investment portfolio. For many families, this can mean recalibrating portfolios from stability and income generation, to a more growth-oriented approach. For Laura, this was a welcome conversation.

“We tailor portfolios for each client’s goals and objectives, but when those change, we have the investment expertise and breadth of offerings to quickly adapt to new goals,” explained Laura. For this family, the next generation had a very different set of financial goals. The children were looking to build on the family legacy they were inheriting.

Laura added, “We discussed our recommendation for why we believed it made sense for the kids to have a different solution altogether, focusing the investments from a more conservative positioning toward the pursuit of long-term growth. I think the children were pleasantly surprised by the breadth and sophistication of the entirety of our investment suite.”

Total Understanding of You

Managing investments, your financial plan, trusts, and ultimately, an estate are all part of a truly holistic wealth management solution. We believe the advice we give, and our ability to execute on all these areas, can really make a difference during difficult times.

Laura concluded by saying, “We want our clients to know that we are there for them during difficult times.”

Please consult with an attorney or a tax or financial advisor regarding your specific legal, tax, estate planning, or financial situation. The information in this article is not intended as legal or tax advice.