Dealing with Change and Chaos resulting from the Pandemic
12th Oct 2021......
“What do I do? My husband looked after all the financial decisions. I don’t even know how many bank accounts or assets we have and right now I don’t know how to pay his hospital bills.”
We received this desperate call from a lady who recently lost her husband to Covid-19. Her husband had been a successful professional and was an integral part of the senior management of a global business. Now, she was struggling to pay the bills because he had never shared the bank details. She called us because she was searching for a way out of this sudden monetary chaos in her life while grieving for her husband. Her call was not alone, it was one of the many we received during the height of the pandemic. Families struggled to access bank accounts of the deceased as the bank accounts were singly held and did not even have a nomination! The pandemic made these situations worse because families that suffered the loss of an elder or of the sole-decision maker did not lose just their loved ones, they found themselves incapacitated without proper planning of the family’s personal and financial affairs.
“THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE.”
In the day of multiple bank/insurance and other financial accounts it is important to incorporate changes at all touch points. Other changes include revoking any Power of Attorney in favour of your spouse or his/her relative, changing nominations across the spectrum and asset reallocation.
Whilst making these changes in your will and assets, you must also remember to update family members or people you trust of the changes and probably keep a copy with them too.
As estate planners, we saw more than the normal share of cases where families faced difficulties due to
- Inability to access bank accounts to pay bills
- Lack of legal authority to write a check for hospital stay
- Lack of authority to make medical decisions on behalf of family members suffering from Covid-19
- Long, stressful court hearings to get the legal authority to make a financial and medical decision on behalf of incapacitated family members
If the only constant is change, then the only way to deal with it is to plan for every improbability.
Death and its aftermath are the most probable improbabilities that most of us are reluctant to deal with. What has Covid-19 taught us on ways to deal with this change?
- Inform your loved ones : We spend our lives finding ways to earn money and build our assets. Usually, these assets are bought with the idea of sharing them or their benefits with the people we love or care for. Let’s tell them about it!
- Document and share : Create shared documents detailing assets, details of the nominees and mobile and email passwords. Often family members get clues to the assets by finding out mobile and email passwords. That’s just how that lady found a solution to her problem. It is a tedious process and involves going through tons of emails and messages but in world gone dark, it is a sliver of hope.
For people who don’t like documenting their assets, we would still suggest two very important documents. The first is to specify the legal guardians of your minor children and the second is to create a power of attorney for an emergency, like hospitalization. These documents can easily be created and stored in advance and will provide a support to your family in a crisis.
- Don’t just worry, Act now : Hearing about how people’s lives have been upended by Covid -19 and seeing friends and neighbors dealing with the aftermath makes us all anxious. It’s human to worry and one of the ways to deal with this worry is to act in the right manner. Start planning for emergencies
- Create an emergency fund
- Ensure you have adequate medical insurance (read all exclusions of your medical policy, esp the fine print)
- Think about and plan for times when you could be hospitalized/incapacitated (do you have a Power of Attorney or nominees for singly held accounts?).
Covid has shown us that we don’t need to think about these aspects only when we are above 70.
- Careers are not always linear : The idea that careers and jobs progress linearly from the day we started working to the day we retire has been taking a beating for some time but when the pandemic enmeshed the whole world in a work-from-home culture, it turned into a revelation moment for many. Dubbed as ‘The Great Resignation’ because in August alone 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs[1] (the highest number on record since the government began collecting data 20 years ago), people are re-looking at their careers and often choosing to leave well-established jobs in favour of working as solopreneurs and entrepreneurs or choosing less frantic and more inclusive places to work. The realisation that is seeping in is that time we spend on earth amongst our family is important and we should spend it doing something we love or that inspires us.
- Forgive and forget : One of the most inspiring lines of my favourite Bollywood classic are “jo mil gaya usi ko muqadar samajh liya, jo kho gaya main usko bhulata chala gaya…main zindagi ka saath nibhata chala gaya” (I precieved what all I received as my destiny and kept forgetting what all I lost… I kept walking with life). It’s a beautiful thought but applying it is difficult. Can we really forget what we wanted and forgive those who have knowingly hurt us?
Medically its proven that by following this simple principle, you are likely to enjoy lower blood pressure, a stronger immune system, and a drop in the stress hormones circulating in your blood. Back pain, stomach problems, and headaches may disappear. And you’ll reduce the anger, bitterness, resentment, depression, and other negative emotions that accompany the failure to forgive. These are the medical benefits and the emotional ones are far greater. So let’s end the chaos in our head and start by forgiving and forgetting and if even some of us can do it, the world will become a more forgiving place.
The world was always in chaos, but the pandemic has made us all more conscious of that and hopefully it will also make us take steps to address its improbabilities. The key here is know what all can go wrong and see how best you can prevent it or deal with it.