In the weeks after you lose your husband or wife, the advice arrives long before you know what to do with it. A neighbor presses her financial advisor's card into your hand. Someone from church knows a guy. The bank leaves a message about the accounts. And within a month or two, often, a very warm stranger calls who is very interested in your retirement savings.1
You do not have to call any of them back yet.
That is the most useful thing anyone can tell you right now. You do not have to choose a financial advisor quickly, and the right one is often among the first to say so. When you are ready, and it is fine if that is many months from now, a few plain things separate the people worth trusting from the people selling something. Here is how to tell them apart.
Almost nothing has to be decided this month
The decisions that feel most urgent, selling the house, moving closer to the kids, paying off the mortgage, buying whatever someone happens to be recommending, are mostly the ones that are hardest to undo. Almost none of them has a real deadline. We wrote about that on its own, because it matters: you are allowed to wait. A good advisor guards that pace instead of pushing on it. Anyone who needs an answer from you this week is telling you something about themselves.1
The few things that genuinely cannot
A short list does deserve attention early, and it is smaller than it feels:
- Order ten or fifteen certified copies of the death certificate. Almost everyone you contact will ask for one.2
- Tell Social Security and ask about survivor benefits, including the one-time $255 death benefit. You generally cannot do any of this online, and the timing of when you claim can matter.3
- Keep the income and the bills flowing, without a gap.
- Retitle the accounts and the house you held jointly, and update the beneficiaries on your own accounts. That last one is easy to forget and quietly important.2
- Note anything with a true deadline, like the final joint tax return.4
A good advisor walks this list with you without rushing, and is careful to tell the few things that are genuinely time-sensitive apart from the many that only feel that way.
What actually matters in an advisor
When you are ready to choose, two questions answer most of the others. Is this person a fiduciary, and how are they paid?
A fiduciary is legally bound to put your interest ahead of their own, in everything they do for you.6 Not everyone who uses the word "advisor" is held to that standard all of the time. It is fair, and telling, to ask someone to confirm in writing that they will be your fiduciary in every part of the relationship.
How they are paid answers most of the rest, because it is where the quiet conflicts live. A fee-only advisor is paid only by you, and earns nothing from selling you a product, so no recommendation pays them more than another.5 That is different from fee-based, a similar-sounding word that can mix your fee with commissions.
Credentials can tell you something too, mainly about how hard someone trained. The one that carries the most weight is the CFA, widely considered the gold standard in finance and the harder to earn; a CFP is the mark of comprehensive planning. Do not read too much into that split, though. A good CFA is trained in planning as well, not investments alone, and an advisor needs only one of the two. Either is a fair sign that someone knows the work, and neither is proof that they will look after you, which is why the two questions above still come first. When you are ready to weigh the letters and the background more closely, we wrote a longer guide to choosing a financial advisor.
The rest you can feel in a first meeting. Whether they have the patience for where you are, or are in a hurry. Whether they will work alongside your accountant and your attorney, or around them. And if a conversation turns quickly to a specific product, especially one that is complex or hard to get out of, take that as information too.
A few questions worth asking
You do not need to be an expert to vet someone. A handful of plain questions does most of the work:7
- Are you a fiduciary one hundred percent of the time, and will you put that in writing?
- Exactly how are you paid? May I see your fee schedule, and your Form ADV brochure, the plain-language document that lays out how a firm works, what it charges, and where its conflicts lie?
- Do you ever earn a commission on anything you would recommend to me?
- What would you tell me not to rush into right now?
- How would you handle the tax questions that come with losing a spouse?
The answers matter, and so does whether the person is comfortable being asked.
What a good advisor brings up before you ask
There is a short list of money problems unique to losing a spouse, and a capable advisor raises them without being prompted.
The widow's penalty, the higher tax you often pay once you file alone.
Survivor Social Security, where you can sometimes take one benefit first and let your own retirement benefit grow until 70 before you switch. Claiming a benefit before your full retirement age reduces it for life, so which order is right depends on your ages and which check is larger.9
When you inherit investments, they are generally valued for taxes at what they were worth the day your spouse died, not what the two of you paid, which for some holdings, like a brokerage account in their name, can wipe out the tax on a lifetime of growth and make them far cheaper to sell than you would fear. It does not apply to a retirement account like an IRA, where what comes out is still taxed.
Whether to move your spouse's IRA into your own or keep it as an inherited account, a choice that gives a spouse more freedom over when to take the money out than other heirs get.10
And the house has a clock: for about two years after the death you can still sell the home and keep the full tax break a couple gets, up to $500,000 of gain, before it drops to $250,000.11
If someone never raises any of this, that silence is worth noticing too.
You can ask for all of this
You do not have to take anyone's word for it. Ask how they are paid, ask them to put their fiduciary commitment in writing, and ask for the Form ADV brochure, the plain-language document of how a firm works, what it charges, and where its conflicts lie.8 A straightforward advisor hands all of it over without flinching. We would want you to ask us exactly what you would ask anyone else.
You are not looking for the best pitch. You are looking for the person who is willing to wait with you until you are ready, and who will tell you the truth about money even when it is not the truth you were hoping for. That person is worth waiting for, and there is no clock on finding them. Not this month, and not until you are ready.
