Financial Planning for people with cancer
Editors note: This is a guest post from George Emsden, the Cancer IFA. Follow him on Twitter at @cancerIFA
My own experiences with throat cancer two years ago (thankfully caught early and treated only with RT), and a couple of critical illness claims together with a terminally ill client, have resulted in me rebranding as The Cancer IFA and proving perhaps that sometimes opportunity or maybe destiny finds you, rather than the opposite.
One word which defines my approach to people who have cancer or any terminal illness is ‘listening’.
It is highly unlikely that they will be in a position to buy any additional financial products so it is a question of keeping things simple and helping them make the best of what they already have in place. This is an exercise in three parts, so let’s pretend that you have a terminal illness and have come to see me:
1 – How Much do you have? Add up everything you own including pension funds, policies less of course, any liabilities.
2 – How long have you got? The doctors have already given you that information.
3 – How? Which? When? What are you going to do now? The ball is back in your court and planning your life for the last twelve months or whatever, is a bit like coaching – but on steroids. This is the bit that scares most people.
A more detailed version is available here and as a podcast. If it is all too much for you on your own, then involving a friend or family member might help. The blog and podcast are about doing something practical and giving you back some control of your life, at least for a while.
What scares people about getting old, getting seriously ill, even losing their job is basically loss of control.
If you think about it, maintaining control is the basic philosophy of Financial Planning; maintaining control while you are healthy, maintaining control when you are ill with the best financial protection you can get, maintaining control when you don’t work any more. Getting cancer or terminal illness means losing control of your life at some point – much sooner than you once thought.
The diagnosis can make you feel that you have been hit by a train, creating anger, resentment (“why me?”) and in this state you are probably not going to make any rational decisions, so we come back to listening again. What helped me cope with my own illness was the courage and dignity of my parents who had had cancer, not to mention several family members including two cousins who died of it at age 48 – the same age my mother died. Seeing this courage gave me a little voice in the back of my head telling me not to let the side down, if my turn came.
People I meet with cancer can be very brave but quite often are keeping up appearances when you talk to them at least in public – they will open up privately, if they trust you. If you visit the MacMillan Cancer Support website (you will have to register) there are many stories there where people bare everything e.g. my dad/mum isn’t coping, what do I do? how do I get benefits, care etc? The above blog, for example, was posted on the Macmillan Cancer Support website and last time I looked, had been viewed by over 500 people. One reader was kind enough to mention that it would have been useful to have seen it before her husband died.
The first reaction on my own diagnosis was to keep it quiet (who cares?) but a couple of friends suggested the opposite, and is has been quite cathartic for me. Perhaps it isn’t strange that I have ended up with Financial Planning for People with Cancer as a niche, when one of my former colleagues once asked me why I was doing mortgages? “You care about people”, he said. Get involved with inheritance tax planning and long term care; but I didn’t do much business there.
The most memorable case where I helped a client who got cancer was when I was able to get all his pension funds in cash. This started out as a divorce case for which I arranged a mortgage, but then he disappeared for a while. The financial questionnaire showed that he had a lot of money tied up in some old paid up pension plans but no response to letters or phone messages. I called his office in the City who said he had not been in for months. I called him again at home and he picked up the phone. Twenty five seconds into the conversation he blurts out that he has terminal brain cancer. We better have a meeting, I suggest, and though I offered to visit him at home, he turns up next day at my office.
It all started with a headache, he says. One day at work he “loses it” and is told to go home and rest. His GP suggests some headache pills but a sibling is not happy and nags doctor for a more thorough check. A scan reveals a tumour inside his head the size of an egg. This has now been removed and he has a horseshoe-shaped scar on the side of his head. He tells me that with this type of tumour, it is difficult to remove all of it – it often grows back. Crunch time. “I need to ask you a question, but you don’t have to answer…. how long have you got?” Without blinking, he tells me that 50% of people with his condition are dead in 12-18 months.
With this answer, annuities and tax-free cash are ridiculous, so it is a question of getting all the pension funds paid out in cash which can be done if life expectancy is two years or less. We agree a fee for my time and request the paperwork but after many weeks, nothing has happened. Eventually, I take the file back from my administrator and finally talk to the relevant person at his pension company, after a 25 minute phone call involving four transfers. Turns out he has other pensions he didn’t tell me about so the work involved is much more than I quoted for, but don’t have the heart to send another invoice. The funds are paid to his bank account after a few weeks and sibling e-mails me three months later that her brother died in a hospice.
Why else do I do this? They are very vulnerable, desperately need someone to talk to and their decisions here may be the last big ones they ever make.
George Emsden is an Independent Financial Adviser for in2 Consulting Limited. Known as The Cancer IFA, he specialises in Financial Planning for people with cancer and terminal illness.
