Benjamin Felix

Odds are all die first, so establishing a relationship now with an advisor we both trust who can be relied on to look out for both spouses' best interests in the event that one of them is gone is a huge benefit to everyone's peace of mind.

The next point is a hedge against decline.

They write, my father-in-law is in the early stages of dementia and we're already seeing how that's having an impact on his finances, having an outside observer who can spot when conditions change and help intervene before costly mistakes are made.

is great insurance.

And I did want to add a note here.

PWL always encourages clients to assign a trusted contact person, which is someone that the client trusts who PWL is pre-authorized to contact if something doesn't seem quite right.

So if someone wants to make a trade or move money to a different country or something like that, if the PWL advisor is like, I don't know if this, if something doesn't seem right here, they can contact the trusted contact person who can then speak with a client or confirm whether everything's okay or whatever the case may be.

There is a paper that found that older people tend to underestimate their own cognitive decline and that those who have experienced a severe cognitive decline but are unaware of it are more likely to suffer wealth losses compared to those who are aware or did not experience a severe decline.

This is a 2024 study.

Are older people aware of their cognitive decline, misperception, and financial decision-making?

And the paper examines data from the Health and Retirement Study, a representative panel of the US population age 50 plus, to study the relationships between self-ratings of memory changes, assessed changes in memory performance, and wealth changes across waves of the survey.

The results are pretty crazy.

They suggest that there is a causal role of unawareness of cognitive decline for wealth losses and that wealth losses among unaware respondents mainly reflect a decrease in the value of their riskier assets, their investments, their stock portfolio.

The authors also find that wealth losses are concentrated in the highest wealth quartiles.

Pretty crazy data.

Very relevant study to that point about a hedge against

decline.

The authors of the paper interpret their findings as the effects of overconfidence where people who have experienced cognitive decline, but do not realize it end up making poor financial decisions that can be very costly.

Now we're back to this person's post explaining their decision to hire PWL.

The next point is core competency.