Episode 80: How to Prepare for Retirement Without Panic
Episode 80
Host: Jill Mastroianni
Guest: Blair Coffman Martin, Financial Advisor at Robert W. Baird and Co. Incorporated
How to Prepare for Retirement Without Panic
Jill Mastroianni is joined by her close friend and financial advisor, Blair Coffman Martin, to discuss how to approach retirement planning, long-term care, and helping adult children without feeling overwhelmed. Blair emphasizes that financial planning isn’t about having all the answers upfront; it’s about starting with what you know, organizing your spending, and creating a flexible plan for the future. They also cover required minimum distributions (RMDs), consolidating accounts, and strategies to involve adult children responsibly in financial decisions.
Key Takeaways
Retirement readiness is a spectrum, not a single “finish line.” Start by understanding your current spending habits rather than just your savings.
Track spending effectively:
Review statements from checking accounts or credit cards.
Use December statements for a full year or multiply one month by 12 as a baseline.
Perfection isn’t necessary; a rough estimate is enough to begin.
Financial advisors can help do the heavy lifting: They can consolidate statements, analyze tax returns, and build an initial plan collaboratively.
Plan for “tent pole” expenses: Big, irregular expenses (roof repairs, new cars, house renovations) should be accounted for in long-term financial planning.
Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs):
Start at age 73 (current IRS rule).
Aggregating accounts makes it easier to calculate and avoid penalties.
Consolidating accounts simplifies management: Having accounts spread across multiple institutions adds complexity and risk; consolidation helps both clients and advisors.
Including adult children in the conversation:
Use full trading authorizations or powers of attorney for financial decision-making without transferring ownership.
Planning discussions can include adult children while protecting parents’ financial independence.
Long-term care planning: Incorporate potential future healthcare needs into financial plans early, even for those not yet in retirement, to reduce uncertainty later.
Financial planning is dynamic: Plans should evolve over time to accommodate changing priorities, unexpected events, or new goals.
It’s okay to feel unprepared: No one is expected to know all the answers before meeting with a financial advisor. Initial conversations often help clarify next steps and provide peace of mind.
Resources & Links
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JsqlbeG8SCk
Learn more about Blair Coffman Martin and the team at Robert W. Baird and Co. Incorporated: https://lexingtondt.bairdwealth.com/team/blair-c-martin
Blair’s email: bcmartin@rwbaird.com
Blair’s phone #: 859-514-0183
Connect with Jill:
· Website: DeathReadiness.com
· Email: jill@deathreadiness.com
· Learn more about Jill’s solutions
· Subscribe to the Death Readiness Dispatch!
· Ask a question for Tuesday Triage
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Jill Mastroianni: Am I going to be okay? Underneath all the retirement accounts, investments, and financial decisions, that's really the question a lot of us are asking. This week, I'm joined by financial advisor Blair Coffman Martin for a conversation about retirement, helping adult children, long-term care, and why you don't have to have everything figured out before asking for help. If finances have ever felt overwhelming, intimidating, or like something everyone else understands better than you do,this episode is for you.
Welcome to The Death Readiness Podcast. This is not your dad’s estate planning podcast. I’m Jill Mastroianni — estate planning attorney, death readiness guide, and your translator for wills, trusts, probate, and the conversations most families avoid. If you’ve been wondering things like, ‘Can a trust protect what I leave to my children?’ ‘What happens if I give someone power of attorney over me?’ and ‘How can I help my parents while respecting their independence?’ You’re in the right place.
I haven't had a guest on the podcast in a while, but today's guest feels like exactly what we need. Today, I'm joined by Blair Coffman Martin, a financial advisor with Robert W. Baird and Co. Incorporated. But introducing Blair as a financial advisor feels a little incomplete. Blair is one of my closest friends.
She's also my financial advisor. Blair is the kind of person who shows up. Back in 2009, she climbed into a Penske truck with me and my dog and drove from Manhattan to Nashville, then helped me move into an apartment in 100 degree heat. When my mom died in New York in 2012, Blair was living in California. She called and asked if she could meet me in New York and fly back to Nashville with me so I wouldn't have to make that trip home alone.
And years later, after we had sold our Nashville house, uprooted our lives, and I unexpectedly lost my job, I was devastated. Blair showed up again, not just as a friend, but as someone who could sit beside me and help me make sense of the financial side of a life that suddenly felt very uncertain. Underneath retirement accounts and investment statements, the question most of us are really asking is something much simpler. Am I going to be okay?
And maybe that's the question a lot of us are asking right now. Blair helps people take control of their finances without shame, without judgment, and without pretending they're already supposed to know all the answers.
Here's my conversation with Blair. Hi Blair, thank you so much for joining me today.
Blair Coffman Martin: Hi Jill, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jill: As you know, we did reach out to listeners in advance of this episode to see if they had any questions for a financial advisor. And we did get a few questions and I kind of grouped them into various categories that I thought would be helpful to talk about. But the overwhelming question that people have is, how do I even know if I can retire? And it seems like a very big question, but people don't know where to begin. So where would you say to start?
Blair: Sure, and this is a personal view for everybody. I think of it less as a finish line and more as a range for most people. And say the first step is understanding where you are currently. What's your spending? Savings matter, of course, but spending is going to be a bigger deal, especially in retirement when you become the bank and you're pulling off of all of your savings that you've accumulated over the years. So a lot of people really have no idea what they're spending on an annual basis.
Jill: How would we figure that out? It feels a little bit overwhelming to come up with that number.
Blair: Sure, that's one of the things that we help people do right away. ⁓ There are a couple of easy ways to do that. So if you run everything through a checking account, like if you pay, if you have credit cards, but you pay those credit cards with your checking account, you can go into your checking account and pull a statement.
Jill: So online, you can do this online.
Blair: Or if you get printed statements, usually the best printed statement to look at is the December statement, because it typically has 12 months or you can get 12 months’ worth of spending. But even if you just have one month, multiplying that by 12 to get your annual spending and just having that as a baseline. And I think perfection is the enemy of good here. You really just want to get a baseline. Are you spending 40,000 or 400,000? And that'll help.
Jill: If someone came to you, because I think almost there's a little bit of friction here between ⁓ knowing that you have to figure out what your spending is and actually figuring out your spending. So if someone is able to pull their statement, for example, is that something that you work with your clients on together? If they give you the statement, can you kind of help them dissect it and figure out what they're spending? Because I know with regards to estate planning, a lot of people think, I know I need to do it, but it's too overwhelming to start. I hate that, you know, the thought of, my God, I have to figure out my spending and I'm not ready to do it yet.
Blair: Yes, and we came across this, we've actually changed our process. We used to ask people to do this themselves, and we've started doing this more for clients, because we came up with that friction we met head on. So when we sit down with clients initially, we don't start with, tell us your spending, we'll start with you. Where are all of your investments? Tell us about your lifestyle, kind of, and we start to build this plan together. There's a little bit of involvement, a lot of involvement from clients on the first part of giving us the information, but then we do the digging on, you know, if people can give us one to 12 months’ worth of statements from their checking accounts or credit cards, we can pull together the spending from kind of a bottoms up analysis. Another way to look at it is from a tax return. So we get tax returns from clients too, and then we can kind of go top down.
But we can build those analysis to start with a financial plan and we might get into that, what a financial plan is later. we take on a lot of the heavy lifting and a lot of advisors take on a lot of the heavy lifting.
Jill: Okay, so it's not so much a matter of someone pulling their statements and their tax return and digging in with an Excel spreadsheet and figuring out on their own. It's just sort of getting that information and bringing it to their financial advisor to help figure that part out.
Blair: Right, and that's, you talked about retirement readiness. There are other things besides spending, you think about longevity of the family, health, lifestyle, what do you want to do in retirement that all are kind of the softer pieces but other goals in retirement. And we want to know that too.
Jill: Well, I guess in terms of retirement readiness and getting back to the spending, a lot of us have things that we want to do while we're still working, while we're still healthy, whether that's renovating our house, maybe putting a deck on the back of the house, maybe going on a vacation that we've been wanting to go on for a long time. How do you figure these larger expenditures, not your monthly or annually, but how do you figure in those larger expenditures and whether or not you can actually afford to do that over the long term?
Blair: Yeah, it sounds like a simple answer, but we plan for them and we plan for them to repeat and grow in cost over the course of people's lifetimes. So some of the beginning conversations of pulling together, spending, future goals that might be, as you mentioned, house renovation, people forget that they're going to need new cars in retirement. So we plan for those. You know, if you retire at 60, you're probably going to have three, four, five new cars between a couple typically. And if it's not those, there are other tent pole expenses that come up.
Jill: When you say tent pole expense, what do mean?
Blair: That's a good question. So big expenses. So it could be a new roof on your house. It could be a new hot water heater, something that you might not have known you needed or planned for specifically, but those things come up and you have to do them.
Jill: So you're saying that when you work with people on their financial plan or when any advisor is working with someone, they're not just thinking about these are your ordinary annual expenses. You're also building into that plan what you call those tent pole expenses, the expenses that come up that you kind of know are going to come at some point and they end up coming maybe when you don't expect them and they're immediately necessary to fix, like get a new roof.
Blair: Right, yeah, we got a new hot water heater this week. It was not expected, not planned, but.
Jill: But it was planned in a sense because you planned for those expenses, those unexpected expenses.
Blair: Yeah, and there are, so when we build the initial plan with a client, there's what we call like a basic living expense, a retirement basic living expense. That's the monthly spending that I was talking about in the beginning. We inflate that moving forward at a set rate, and then we also call out healthcare separately because that inflates faster. Those are the two required pieces from our perspective of building a financial plan.
And then we build those tent pole expenses, be it car, roof, et cetera, if a client is not giving us specific goals. A lot of clients give us specific goals and we might replace those tent poles with those specific goals.
Jill: Do you ever find that people coming to you for the first time might be feeling a little bit embarrassed that they don't have the answers to all of these questions right off the bat? That maybe they haven't actually been keeping track of their spending? ⁓ How often does that happen and should we be embarrassed if that's what we're doing?
Blair: Everybody is like that. Nobody keeps track of their expenses. Well, I shouldn't say that. There are people who keep track of their expenses, but they are in the minority in my experience. And there's no need to be embarrassed because that's what we're here to help. We're here to help you kind of figure that out. We have the power of seeing patterns among our clients and asking questions that we've seen from other people in similar situations. Definitely don't be embarrassed about it. It's nothing that you should be tracking. That's why we're probably working together.
Jill: Okay, great. And let's say you're already at the point, someone might be coming to you who is already retired. And I think a lot of people are kind of not sure what they can spend on once they're already retired, especially in terms of can they afford to still help their adult children, maybe with grandkids' education expenses, maybe helping a child buy a house. And how does that all fit into their larger retirement structure? Can you speak to that?
Blair: So that also goes back to some planning, so understanding goals of helping adult children or understanding what future needs might be. Many parents want to help, but the real kind of question becomes, how do I help my family without undermining my own security?
Jill: And I think that can be really hard because maybe we see in our investment account, the money is there. My child needs $30,000. I see the money in my account. I could give it to them, but figuring out whether that's a wise thing for your future plans is another question.
Blair: You nailed it. I mean, many things are more emotional decisions first and then financial decisions later. And there's no perfect answer. make a terrible joke sometimes about these trade-offs about I could give you the perfect answer if you'll let me know the date on which you pass away and what the market does every day between now and then. Obviously, there's a lot of uncertainty here. So ⁓ we try to give some numbers behind making different decisions and let the conversations play out, you know, whether they're, whether we're part of the conversation or it's between, you know, among a family.
Jill: Okay. And then another thing once you're already in retirement that can get really stressful, especially because of the penalties if we mess up and don't do it properly, is taking our required minimum distributions from our retirement accounts and required minimum distributions, also known as RMDs. Could you explain first what that is and how an advisor can help make sure that you don't forget to take them?
Blair: Sure. Required minimum distributions or RMDs are just the government's way of saying, you've had a tax break for a long time, now it's time to start taking money out of the accounts. So the IRS requires you to take out a certain amount. That's why it's called required minimum distribution on an annual basis.
Jill: Okay, every year you need to take out a certain amount. Does that amount change each year?
Blair: Okay. It does. So it's calculated based on the account value. And if you have multiple retirement accounts, all of the different accounts value are grouped together. This is why it's reported on your tax return.
Jill: So when you say if you have multiple accounts, you might have an IRA, 401k. What about a Roth IRA?
Blair: That's different. Great question. No, so this is all pre-tax dollars. So any dollars that went into retirement accounts in what we call traditional IRAs. So if it doesn't say Roth, it is a traditional IRA. If it doesn't say Roth 401k, it's a traditional ⁓ 401k. The Roth type of account came out in the early 90s. So most people who are retirement age now ⁓ have traditional funds, maybe also some Roth funds.
Jill: And so the Roth funds, before we put the money in, we already paid the income taxes.
Blair: That's right, you paid income tax on it and then you put that into retirement.
Jill: Let's go back to the 401Ks and the IRAs and the required minimum distribution. So you talked about aggregating your retirement accounts. So kind of taking your 401K, your IRA, adding that value together. And then what happens once you have that overall value?
Blair: That's right. So the way the IRS calculates your required minimum distribution is on December 31st of a calendar year. The balance is calculated and then based on actuarial tables of your age, it's a factor that is calculated annually and it goes up as you age. So it starts at about 3 % of the account and then increases. By the time you're in your 90s, you're taking out about 50 % of the account.
Jill: So it's based on your life expectancy, how much you have to take out.
Blair: Yes. And that is given to you on an account by account basis, but you don't have to take it out that way. So if you have three traditional IRAs or 401Ks and your required minimum distribution is 15,000 for each one, you could take 45,000 out of one account and satisfy your required minimum distribution.
Jill: We talked about how important it is that you take the required minimum distributions, but we didn't talk about really how you or a financial advisor can help make sure that you do that so it's not just another thing on your list that you have to worry about.
Blair: So taking required minimum distributions right now the age is 73 at which time you have to start taking funds off of your retirement accounts. It increases like Jill for you and I it's age 75 we haven't reached that yet but once you're reaching that required minimum distribution age in the first year so the year you turn 73 is the first year you have to take it.
You do get one break the first year can go into the second year. You can take it up until the time you file taxes or April 15th of the following year, whichever comes first. We rarely see people use that. And the case where we see people use that sort of break is if they are still working and have earned income, but are going to retire in that year. So they might push that first year's required minimum distribution to the next year just to smooth out income.
Jill: So for right now, the first time you're required to take a required minimum distribution, or the absolute latest you can take it, is by April 15th of the year after you turn 73.
Blair: Right. The other reason you might not take it that late is you still have to take one that year, the year you're 74. So you would actually end up taking two if you waited.
Jill: Right, so if you waited and took it in the year that you turned 74, you're going to be taking two that year to catch yourself up. So there is a penalty if you don't take it, right? Because we need to start paying taxes on the money we're withdrawing. So how can you help make sure that people actually first know how much they're supposed to take and actually take it by the deadline?
Blair: So knowing how much to take is on an account by account basis and aggregated together. I talked about that earlier. If we have everybody's assets here at Baird, it's fairly simple for us. We have a calculation and we communicate with our clients about what that is. If assets are spread out, that is a little bit harder to do and that's on the individual to understand what are all the different required minimum distributions needed to take, aggregate that together and make sure that they take it.
Jill: So do you mean if it's, what do you mean by spread out?
Blair: Sure, so if you have a teacher's pension with the state of Tennessee, you have an IRA at Baird and you have a 401k at a former employer, but you're not working there. So you have three different accounts and you have to take a distribution. We would know about the Baird account. We'd know exactly how much you need to take, but we don't know about the other two. And so we can look at statements and help clients, but that might be a time where we are encouraging clients to aggregate resources and pool everything together.
Jill: So let me just ⁓ make sure we hone in on that because this has been really helpful for someone that we're working with who has ⁓ retirement accounts and just other accounts spread over various different providers. So you might have Vanguard, Charles Schwab. There are lots of players out there and you would need to keep track. And by moving the accounts to one place, in this case, we moved them to Baird, we could put all of the IRAs from all these various places into just one IRA that's at Baird. So it's really aggregating and consolidating the accounts that you have to make it easier to keep track of. And that can be so beneficial, especially when you have adult children, sort of stepping in to help out, to make things easier for everybody to keep track, to make it easier for you as the advisor to keep track.
And that's something that I think a lot of us might not think about, the various accounts that we have in all places, because that's something that my husband was just consolidating with you. And it's really quite a weight off of our shoulders to have everything in one place. So I just wanted to point that out, because it's not something that you might think about as a pain point or causing friction and getting to the next step of your estate plan. But it really is when you kind of feel a bit disorganized and like you have things in all these places.
Blair: It is and consolidating helps simplify your right for the client, for the future heirs of the accounts. If we know about the accounts, we are asking clients, hey, did you take your required minimum distribution from this institution? Are you sure? And then we are noting that in our files, even though we're not responsible for those accounts, we don't want our clients to pay the penalties. And the penalties you've been ask that question, what are the penalties if you don't take a required minimum distribution? And they can be quite high. know, the IRS imposes a 25 % penalty on any distribution not taken.
Jill: That you are required to take.
Blair: That you're required to take, yes. So a 25 % penalty on any distribution that you're required to take that you did not take. It can be reduced to 10 % if you act quickly on it. But again, who wants to pay a 10 % penalty to the IRS? Not me, not any of my clients.
Jill: And so when you were talking about sort of looking at accounts and making sure that clients take theirs, you were talking about take their required minimum distributions. You were talking about accounts that are not with you at Baird. For the ones that are with you at Baird, you actually make sure that that is done.
Blair: Yes, we are asking about that. We're doing them throughout the year. We set them up to be automated if clients like. And beginning October 1st, for anybody who doesn't have them, we start really pushing people to take the distributions. We know they have to come out before the end of the year. And we've actually been at somebody's house at the late 11th hour in December, making sure that we can get a verbal to take the distribution because we just don't want them to take a penalty. Retirement accounts that are not held at Baird, we are asking the question, we cannot advise on those, but we are asking clients to ensure that they are aware that they should be taking their required minimum distributions. And we're just trying to help them do the right thing there.
Jill: Right, that makes sense. If you're not administering it, you can't advise on it, but you kind of know what's out there. So you're just double checking with the client to make sure they know what they need to do with those other accounts. That makes sense. Now, the other sort of concern I think most of us are having as we think about retirement, or even if we're in retirement, is what happens if we have long-term care medical needs? And how do we appropriately plan for that because I think a lot of us have heard that we're here in the United States in a caregiving crisis as we age and sort of don't necessarily anticipate the types of care we might need.
Blair: So most people don't think about future care needs, to be honest. It comes up later in life, but care is usually gradual, not all. Sometimes it's all of a sudden, but not always. I'd go back to the planning. Planning doesn't usually make things worse. It often makes people feel more in control. And we will often run what we call a long-term care scenario with their financial plan. Even at age, you know, 45, 50, 55,
We'll just kind of run it through our typical scenario. And our typical scenario is in the last three years of life, if you need extensive kind of 24-hour around-the-clock care, do you have the assets to do it? That just gives us a sense of some worst-case scenario planning. And, you know, when I mentioned 45, a 45-year-old might not be in a situation when we're planning for them to live until their mid-90s, they have the assets at that point. But that's not something that's concerning at that point. So when planning for long-term care, especially as adult children start to become involved in their parents' financial situations, we are always including that scenario because it's something that families either are talking about or are afraid to talk about. And we hear that all the time. Often, people talk to us before they talk to their families just to understand what should I be talking about? How should I think through this? And we can give them some numbers to help them facilitate their own questions. How much does care cost? Do I want to sell the house if something's happening? Do I have the correct estate docs in place? You know, again, a lot of these are really fluid conversations that are not just about yes or no, I'm okay or I'm not okay.
Jill: OK, so when you talk about children being involved in their parents' financial situation, what do you mean by that? Because I know that we have a lot of families where maybe the parents do want some more involvement or assistance even from their kids, but maybe feel like it's too much of a burden to ask for that. So how do you, in your role as advisor, kind of bring the adult, the responsible adult children looking out for their parents and the parents together to sort of collaborate on decision making and care?
Blair: Sure. Sometimes the parents have already thought this through and they're bringing their children to the meetings. Yeah. And so in that case, we're planning with the children, the parents are including them already and they've maybe had outside conversations that we weren't part of and we kind of treat everybody as the doors open, we're sharing information. We clear that with our specific clients first.
Sometimes we are helping the parents or grandparents think through bringing on adult children and plan in advance. Some might say, I don't want them to see all these numbers. I want them to be driven and make their own choices and decisions. And there are ways we can talk about percentages and asset flow without giving specific numbers we've done in the past. We can help them role play conversations. We call that family, a family meeting. So, whether or not we're included as part of the family meeting to help facilitate. We've done that several times in the past.
Jill: And then as parents age, let's say they've already had this conversation, multiple conversations involve their adult children, how do you see sort of the crises of aging, whether it's medical situations or ⁓ physical fragility, how do you see the transition for those families who have had the conversation and already brought in some involvement?
Blair: Well, one of the first things, and Jill, from your perspective too, we make sure that the legal documents are in place really at the outset. And if they're not, we encourage everybody to get the right paperwork in place. For us, what we need in order to have a conversation with an adult child who is not our client is a full trading authorization or a power of attorney. Full trading authorization allows us to take direction from an adult child on.
Jill: So it's like a power of attorney?
Blair: Like a power of attorney for financial institutions, it's just a doc, it's a one piece for my organization. It's one piece of paperwork that the client would sign and designate who has full trading authority on accounts. And I work with adult children right now who have this on their parents' accounts and their parents are totally fine and healthy. They just don't want to do their own finances anymore and they want to turn into...
Jill: And just to be clear, that full trading authorization does not give the adult child any ownership of the account. So it's not as if when the parent dies, that account then becomes that child’s. This is simply an authorization to act on the account. So you have this form that's specific to your organization authorizing an individual to act. And then there are also power of attorney documents giving legal authority to act more generally. So am I hearing that either of those is generally okay to give ⁓ authority to act on an account?
Blair: That's right, full trading authority is institutional only. So if you have a full trading authority for Baird, it does not translate to other institutions. So a power of attorney is the better document to get, the better legal document to get, and we always encourage clients to get that. Full trading authority is often easier for us to get to transact quickly with clients before they work with an estate attorney and draft full estate documents.
Jill: Okay, I see, I see that makes sense. We talked about a lot of the things and a lot of the ways that a financial advisor can help, but can you give us sort of more generally how you guys step into the picture and really help individuals and families develop a plan for their financial health?
Blair: At best, financial planning is about helping people organize decisions over time, especially when life gets complex and it's not just savings and investments and spending. It's more complicated than that. The investments are one component, but not the only component. It's often about clarity, providing the background for conversations within their own families and evaluating trade-offs to help understand, what would gifting to my family look like while I'm still living and get to enjoy it with them versus leaving behind an inheritance. What does that look like?
Jill: So I guess it really depends on the age at which you're coming to a financial advisor. So for younger couples, the concern might be saving for college, for kids, maybe buying a bigger house, those sorts of things. But it sounds like where you provide the most value is kind of teasing out the information from people about what's really important to them and what they want to accomplish in their lives. And then strategizing, creating a plan to make that happen.
Blair: Right, you nailed it. And we're not here really to say you should do this or you shouldn't do this. We're here to say what's important to you and how do we make that happen given the incomes you have, the lifestyle you have, and making sure that we can help you say yes to the things you want to do.
Jill: And maybe saying yes is on a slightly different timeline or structured in a slightly different way, but having a plan to do the things that are really important to you, whether it's helping a kid buy their first house or helping your parents take care of themselves at the end of their life.
Blair: Exactly, and those trade-offs are what happens in life. You know, the financial plan is very stagnant. We update it as lives happen, but I'll have a client who said, my kitchen remodel is not as important. I want a new car. Okay, well, we already planned for the kitchen remodel. How much is the new car? They're about the same. Let's swap that in. Let's push the kitchen remodel out. So we're constantly building and evolving and the first time we go over a financial plan with someone, might remember this, Jill, we don't say, here's your financial plan, we'll see you in 50 years and let us know how it worked out. We will iterate at least annually, but more often as life comes at you and you need to make some decisions.
Jill: Okay, that makes sense. And I do want to stress that, you know, because people who might be a little bit hesitant to come to a financial advisor, it's not as if you're going there to be reprimanded that you shouldn't be doing or spending in ways that you want to. It's sort of developing a plan to make sure that your life can handle, you know, the things that you want it to handle.
Blair: Exactly. And you know, many people assume financial advice is only at a certain income or asset level, but that's not true. Our advice changes based on people's income and asset levels, but it because we're tailoring it to their specific situation. I mean, it's truly personal finance and we want to have conversations with people to understand where they are and then provide information that would be helpful.
Jill: Well, I know another question that people have is, well, how do I know if I even have enough money to go see a financial advisor? Because I don't want to embarrass myself by asking to have a meeting and then have them say, well, you don't have enough money. So how do we know if we even have enough money to take that next step and work with a financial advisor?
Blair: It never hurts to just have the initial conversation. We have discovery meetings with people all the time where we're trying to understand where they are financially and if they'd be a good fit for our practice. And hopefully they're interviewing us as well and thinking if we would be a good advisor for them. And so there should be a give and take and a mutual understanding. And do you want to work with that person?
Jill: Yeah, it's not always black and white. It's not always like, okay, you either have this minimum threshold of money or we're not going to work with you. That there might be other considerations like, you know, career development trajectory. And, know, I guess what you're saying is that if you're interested in getting financial advice, you can ask for it. Generally, those first meetings do not cost anything. And it's really not just the advisor trying to see if you're a good fit, but you're trying to see if the advisor is a good fit for you.
Blair: You characterized that really well.
Jill: Thank you, Blair. This has been so very helpful. Thank you for joining us today.
Blair: Thank you for having me, Jill. It's been a great conversation.
Jill: Thanks to Blair for joining us today. I appreciate her willingness to share her expertise and also her reminder that we do not have to arrive with color-coded spreadsheets and the answers already figured out. If you've been putting off talking to a financial advisor because you feel embarrassed, overwhelmed, or like you're somehow supposed to already know all of this, I hope today's episode helped take some of that pressure off. If you're interested in learning more about Blair Coffman Martin and her team at RW Baird, I'll include their information in the show notes. Thanks for listening today.
This is Death Readiness, real, messy and yours to own. I’m Jill Mastroianni and I’m here to help you sort through it, especially when you don’t know where to start.
Hi, I'm April, Jill's daughter. Thanks for listening to The Death Readiness Podcast. While my mom is an attorney, she’s not your attorney. The Death Readiness Podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. It does not provide legal advice. For legal guidance tailored to your unique situation, consult with a licensed attorney in your state. To learn more about the services my mom offers, visit DeathReadiness.com.
