In this Episode of the Secure Your Retirement Podcast, Radon Stancil and Murs Tariq discuss the difficult but essential topic of what happens financially when a spouse passes away. From understanding Social Security survivor benefits and the widow penalty to navigating Medicare changes, tax planning, and inherited IRA decisions, this conversation highlights why proactive financial planning and estate planning are so important for every surviving spouse. The death of a spouse can create emotional stress and financial confusion, especially when retirement income planning, account access, and beneficiary updates have not been organized ahead of time. 

Listen in to learn about the most important steps couples should take before tragedy strikes, including creating a financial checklist, organizing documents, simplifying advisors, and preparing a letter to heirs. Radon and Murs explain how a proper retirement checklist and planning retirement strategy can help families avoid unnecessary stress while protecting the surviving spouse financially. If you want to plan for retirement, retire comfortably, and secure your retirement, this episode offers practical guidance for what to do when a spouse dies and how to prepare for life’s most difficult transitions. 

In this episode, find out: 

• How Social Security survivor benefits work when a spouse passes away  

• Why the widow penalty can increase taxes and Medicare costs for a surviving spouse  

• The importance of beneficiary reviews, inherited IRA options, and estate planning  

• How a letter to heirs and financial checklist can simplify the transition process  

• Why retirement income planning and organizing financial accounts are critical for a surviving spouse  

Tweetable Quotes: 

“The last thing you want is for the event to happen, and then you’ve got someone trying to figure it all out through files and folders during one of the hardest moments of their life.” – Murs Tariq 

“Both spouses don’t have to be the financial gurus, but they both need to see the roadmap.” – Radon Stancil 

Resources: 

If you are in or nearing retirement and you want to gain clarity on what questions you should be asking, learn what the biggest retirement myths are, and identify what you can do to achieve peace of mind for your retirement, get started today by requesting our complimentary video course, Four Steps to Secure Your Retirement! 

To access the course, simply visit POMWealth.net/podcast. 

Here’s the full transcript:

Welcome 

everyone to Secure Your Retirement podcast. We’re certainly happy to have you here with us today. 

We are going to be talking about a topic that on the surface obviously sounds kind of like one of 

those sad times of life, but in the reality, it’s one of those things that we do have to think 

about, we have to deal with. But the topic is, what do we do whenever we lose a spouse in death? 

And that is something that we don’t love spending a lot of time thinking about ahead of time, 

but it is unfortunately one of those things that we, in our practice, deal with every single year. 

sometimes the number of times. And so, we wanted to talk through kind of some of those things that 

we run into and things that you might want to think about because if we think about these things 

ahead of time and we think about them and we maybe have some documentation and some things in 

place, it can take what… would have been an extremely stressful scenario. 

It’s already stressful, but we add on layers of stress if we don’t have things in mind ahead of 

time. And I know, Murs, you have had to deal with this here even recently. 

And I just thought maybe it would be nice for us to kind of, first of all, let’s talk about some of 

the realities that we see because this is just how we operate. I mean, I know in my marriage, There 

are things I do. There are things she does. There are things she runs. There are things I run. And 

quite honestly, if I had to go in there and tell you exactly where everything’s at and what things 

she takes care of right now; I couldn’t do it because we haven’t really talked it through. Now, 

what we do try to talk about a lot is our financial situation, where documents are and those kind 

of things. But what are some of those real-life scenarios that you run into when you’re talking to 

somebody dealing with these kinds of things? Yeah, and I would say in my marriage as well, it’s a 

similar scenario where we kind of just become specialists to make the marriage. you know, be as 

efficient as possible. And we see that quite often in what we do for financial planning, 

where you’ve got one spouse that is really the financial guru of the household, 

kind of manages the investment side or the saving or the budgeting. And you may have another spouse 

is involved in the finances, maybe even a different section of the finances, like making sure the 

bills are paid. and, you know, balancing the checkbook and things like that, 

but they’re not really talking to each other all the time. Or you’ve got the extreme version, which 

I don’t think we see as often as we did maybe 10 years ago, where there’s one that’s completely 

disconnected from the financial side and one that’s kind of running everything. That still happens, 

but it’s not as often. And so, but there’s that that element of if that one spouse, 

that key spouse that has that key role in the financial side of things is the first to pass away. 

Well, then there is a lot of stress that is going to come on the surviving spouse that may not know 

everything about the finances and where to go and who to talk to. And, you know, and then and then 

that’s where it all starts to. kind of unwind as to how much they don’t know and where all 

the things are at like one easy example is um that we’ve come across a lot is just kind of 

understanding how to log into all the different accounts that have all the answers, right? The bank 

accounts and the investment accounts, the Schwab’s, the Fidelities. Once you’re able to get into 

those places, you can start getting a lot of the access, which then creates a lot of the answers 

that you’re looking for. But just getting the access is the hardest part. Whether it’s kind of 

saved and locked down in a computer that the deceased spouse was managing and you don’t even have 

the password to that computer itself. So, it leads to a lot of overwhelmed feelings of I just can’t 

do it. And what we end up seeing a lot of times is kind of this paralysis that does happen if we’re 

not properly prepared. Another big one is all around income sources and where is actually the money 

coming from? If you’re working and paychecks are coming in. well, and they just stop, 

you know where they’re stopping from. But if you’re fully retired and you’ve got money coming in 

from different investment sources at different periods of time, and you’ve got these required 

minimum distributions that come in, you’ve got annuity payments, you’ve got dividends that you may 

be living off of, whatever it is, it’s a little bit different than just a standard paycheck every 

other week. So, kind of sifting through all of that becomes a big thing too. 

And that’s I feel like just the tip of the surface. But what else do you see there, Raiden? 

Yeah, I think, you know, sometimes as we just start thinking through, I guess, from that before and 

then like things that we want to think about ahead of time, because these are some things that are 

going to get affected when this occurs. And if we had these things ahead, we’re not going to have 

any surprises. So, let’s just talk through a few of these things that are going to have to be 

updated. So, if I’m already at Social Security age. Well, 

there’s going to be an adjustment. Many times, though, in our scenario, what we’re doing is we’re 

talking to people ahead of time, and we can show them through our financial planning software that 

we can say, hey, this is what it’s going to look like if one spouse passes away, and we talk it 

through. What we know is that the surviving spouse is going to get to keep the largest. 

source of social security between the two, but the other one’s going to drop off. So, I’m going to 

go from two social securities to one. I get to keep the largest of the, of the, of the two, but 

that’s something I need to think about. And if I didn’t know that, or I wasn’t planning for that, 

that could be very, very stressful. The other thing that’s going to change is I have, 

you know, if I’ve been always used to from a number of years filing my tax return as a married 

filing jointly, I have a little bit of a reprieve time in there that I don’t have to immediately 

go, but I am going to get to a point where I’m going to be now filing as single. And that’s going 

to change my tax bracket a little bit. If my income is anywhere close, you’re going to see my taxes 

go up. So, there are some things there that we need to think about. I think one of the biggest 

things that we talk about a lot and that people just, you know, it feels cumbersome, but I know 

we’ve helped people through it quite a bit is If I’ve got, let’s say I’ve got two IRAs myself, 

my spouse has two IRAs. Well, we got to get that IRA that’s in my name. If I’m the one who’s 

deceased, they got to get mine out of my name and get them into my wife’s name. And that sometimes 

feels a little bit overwhelming. I think on that particular topic too, there are some choices that 

people may not know about. You don’t have to put it in your name. You could keep it as an inherited 

IRA. There are reasons why to do that. We’re not going to go down that whole path today. But I 

think another one, we actually just did an episode on this, is beneficiary mistakes. What are some 

things that we want to think about there, especially when it comes to beneficiaries, to a spouse, 

and making sure that I think through the idea of spouse as well as… and grandchildren and those 

kinds of things just so that I have the most options. Yeah. Yeah. We did an episode here recently 

around different ways to set up your beneficiaries and things you want to be thinking about, but 

sometimes that gets overlooked too. And the last thing you want is that big surprise that, you 

know, the husband or wife forgot. Maybe you guys talked about it, but maybe there was. 

lack of follow through on actually filling out the beneficiary forms and the money’s going 

somewhere that it shouldn’t be going or that was not what the goal was. We’ve seen this before, 

you know, accounts oftentimes get kind of spread out. at various custodians or maybe an old 401k 

and you think you’ve updated everything, and you haven’t and you have to leave your money to you 

know maybe not your spouse maybe in in some of the crazier scenarios we’ve seen to uh you know 

we’ve heard and seen about to an ex-spouse because we never updated the beneficiary even though 

the will says something completely different, So the beneficiary designations are incredibly, 

incredibly important to be reviewing. And if at least those are the way that you want them to be, 

at least we know the money is going to transfer the way that we want it to go. And that doesn’t 

become a headache on top of all the other things that we’ve already just mentioned figuring out. 

You mentioned tax bracket changes. A lot of you, when you listen, you hear us bring on Taylor. 

Overton on our team, she’s the director of financial planning and tax strategy, and she actually 

calls it the widow’s, what she called the widow’s penalty, where if you pass away, 

going from the joint to the single bracketing ends up feeling like a penalty because the brackets 

are compressed, the deductions get less and things like that. But on top of that, the other one is 

Medicare. We have Shawn in our office who helps people, especially in this scenario, navigate 

Medicare changes. But maybe, you know, it’s definitely a time to reevaluate which plans are going 

to make sense for you going forward, but also Medicare IRMA surcharges, which we’ve done plenty of 

conversations on and around as well. Those brackets change, just like the income tax brackets. And 

so it can be, if we’re not planning properly for some of these big changes that could be coming our 

way, it could be a little bit devastating or just overwhelming. And, you know, all of this kind of 

gets tied back together, I think, with the state documents that we talk about all the time. And, 

you know, we could probably go through several examples there of a will saying one thing and the 

beneficiary is doing something else or someone thinking that the will was going to create a trust 

and it didn’t. And it ended up that the assets went directly to probate. And that created a big 

mess that the surviving spouse. or the surviving partner wasn’t aware of, or the surviving kids 

we’re not aware that it was set up this way. So, I think there’s a lot of financial problems that we 

need to think through, and the time to think through them is not after the passing of the spouse. 

It’s to be thinking about it. So, what’s the best way, Raiden, would you say, from what we’ve seen, 

from what we talk and teach, and how do we prepare so that it doesn’t happen this way? Yeah, 

I think I’m just going to… hit on that very first one first, which is the estate plan. You know, 

sometimes I’ll talk to people, and I’ll say, hey, how old is your estate plan? And they go, oh, you 

know, it’s like whatever, 15 years old. And I’m not saying a 15-year-old plan would not hold up. 

My point is that I try to make with a client, though, is why do we want to stress it? And a lot of 

times I think that people don’t want to go get their plan updated because you got to go sit with 

the attorney. It’s going to cost us a couple thousand bucks. You know, it’s just, it feels 

complicated. And one of the things that we really love about our approach and our system, 

because for our clients, we really help them keep their estate plan documents up to date. 

We’d say that we should do at least a scrub of those documents every five years. 

And what we’re really trying to say is very likely a refresh. And that could just be everything in 

there in that document is the same. but we’ve got a nice fresh date on it. And that just says, 

hey, this is showing that this is my current belief system. Nobody’s going to dispute it. It’s not 

like I said this 15 years ago, and you can say life has changed. And the nice thing in our system 

are our clients don’t pay anything to get those things updated. It’s kind of built into our 

approach. And so, I think that’s a really big one. I think I’m going to go back and we’ll hit on 

another one that I think we’ve been trying to talk a little bit more about with our clients, and 

that is organizing documents. So, you can have an estate plan, and you can have all these things in 

place. But if I expect for my heirs to just take those documents and understand it, 

that’s going to be complicated. And so, if I could come up with an approach like we’ve been talking 

to our clients about with this, what we call a letter to our heirs. What that really means is, 

is that if I have a document that says, hey, this is where the baseline of everything is at. And if 

I don’t, if it says, hey, go to this institution, go to Charles Schwab, I’ve got three accounts 

there. That is huge. You don’t have to have the account numbers. You don’t have to have all the 

different, but hey, I got three accounts there. I got a traditional IRA. I got a Roth IRA and I got 

a brokerage account. Now I’ve got a starting point. And hey, by the way, call this insurance 

company. I’ve got a life insurance policy there. It just, now I’m not like scrambling, 

looking through documents and files, just trying to figure out these. And that kind of goes down 

this idea of like, let’s give our clients some, let’s give our heirs a map. And in that map, 

they’re able to kind of see how that would play out. I think another one is really, and we’re going 

to say this and I’ll let you kind of speak on it, is about. simplifying advisors. I don’t think 

what we’re saying here is just go have one advisor, but how would you describe simplifying your 

advisors? Yeah. You know, I think, I think go back. I don’t know, 

maybe five, 10 years ago, what we were seeing is someone would come in and say, well, I’ve got an 

advisor that does this. I’ve got an advisor that does this. I’ve got an advisor that does this for 

me. And I like kind of diversifying amongst advisors. Well, I think what we’re seeing more and more 

is more of that consolidation of advisors, not because of the investments or poor performance, 

but they’re starting to realize that they are way too spread out. And you can still get plenty of 

diversification amongst a couple or even just one advisor. In strategy, you can get plenty of 

diversification. And if you really trust those advisors, then you know that part of their role is 

to help with this transition process. So, we coach a lot of our clients that, you know, when it 

comes time, when it does happen. we take a very involved role in this transition process. 

And we’re saying that in front of both spouses, right? And they know that if something was to 

happen, hopefully they have that letters to the heir’s kind of put together, but they know to come 

directly to us. And in fact, we would encourage them to put it in the letters to the heirs to call 

us directly and set up a meeting for this whole transition. So, simplifying advisors just means, 

you know, get it in a place where you can just have one or two people. point of contacts rather 

than having to figure out, well, I’ve got the money over here and I have to talk to this person 

about that. I’ve got the money over here. I got to talk to this other person and their teams and it 

just can, it can get overwhelming. And then not to mention the banks and, you know, all the other 

stuff around there. 

So, simplifying advisors, I think is going to be huge as far as, you know, again, not for the 

investment side of things, but more for just simplicity and transition and efficiency with your 

estate. That becomes rather, rather important. One other thing that we are seeing more and more of 

Brayden is both husband and wife or the spouses are. 

coming to the meetings more often right it used to be uh that only one would come the main person 

the financial leader in the family would come to the meetings but we’re seeing more and more of 

that and we’re encouraging uh that they start involving their kids too to some of these meetings 

especially if the kid is the executor So, you know, and those meetings go a little bit different 

sometimes when you get the kids involved, but it’s kind of just being in a place where you can, 

one, be introduced to us in the event that anything was to happen. And then you start to get some 

comfort around the strategies and how things are being put together so that there is success while 

they’re living, but also there’s success in the transition too. Yeah, I was just going to speak on 

that just really quick. But every now and then, though, we still get this scenario where… will come 

to the meeting and I’ll ask, I’ll say, hey, is your spouse going to be here? 

And they say, they don’t care about this. I don’t care. They don’t care about this. They told me to 

make all the decisions. I’m the one that handles the money. They’re the ones who, they just said 

this is not a part of it. And here’s what I’m going to say. I don’t, 

it’s not like both have to be the financial gurus, but they both need to see the roadmap. 

One of the things that we talk about is like, look, if a person’s not really got the aptitude or 

the desire to learn all of the different intricacies of everything. they still need to know where 

everything’s at. And so, what we will do in those meetings is it will say, here’s the map, here’s 

the roadmap, here’s where the accounts are. And I will tell you that even a disinterested, 

financially interested spouse, once they see the map, they go, oh, I see how this all fits together 

now. And I understand that these accounts are here. I didn’t even know we had those accounts. I 

didn’t know how that worked. I didn’t understand how that was going to connect and give me income 

for the rest of my life. I didn’t understand that that’s what this meant for taxes. At least 

they’ve got the roadmap. So now when something happens, they go, hey, I got that roadmap. It shows 

me where everything’s at. I just think that’s extremely important. And so sometimes we might get 

that little, you know, slant eye where they’re going, hey, why are you saying you need my spouse 

here? And they don’t want to be here. And we’re like, well. Because we’ve said in these meetings 

before with family, because of this situation where we have a spouse that’s passed away, and now 

they don’t know where anything is at, and we’re walking them through A to Z for the very first time 

in their life, and that’s very, very stressful. So, I just think making sure that we have all this 

together and having it coordinated just makes a lot of sense. One of the things that we do have, 

by the way, if you are listening to this and maybe you’re just kind of planning, we do have a 

checklist. It’s basically this idea around a surviving spouse checklist and it can kind of have all 

these different little things you got to think about. So, if you’re listening to this and you think 

you’d like to have that, just call the office, go to the website, go to the contact us page. 

You’ll see. our contact information, call the office, let them know that you’d like the surviving 

spouse checklist, and we’ll send that out to you. As always, if you’d like to have a conversation 

with us, you can also do that on the website as well, where you can schedule a phone call. We’d be 

glad to hop on, talk to you about your individual situation. Anything final here before we go, 

Merce? Nope. I think the last thing you want is for the event to happen, and then you’ve got 

someone trying to figure it all out and going through files and folders and everything like that. 

You know, you’ve worked hard to get to where you are. You’ve worked hard to build up this 

retirement, and let’s make it easy all the way through and into the transition as well. Everyone’s 

going to benefit from it. All right, everyone. Have a great week. We’ll talk to you again next 

Monday.