From the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory, the top 10 most impactful life events are:

1. Death of spouse
2. Divorce
3. Marital Separation from mate
4. Detention in jail or other institution
5. Death of a close family member
6. Major personal injury or illness
7. Marriage
8. Being fired at work
9. Marital reconciliation with mate
10. Retirement from work

You’ll notice, many of those are pretty common, if not year over year, we can expect to encounter multiple of them in a lifetime. And of those, only 1 isn’t something that financial planners would commonly discuss with their clients (imprisonment).

And since women on average live 6 years longer than men, they are more likely to experience the death of their spouse and the loss of other close family members and friends.

When you’ve had one of the major events happen, your brain doesn’t work the same, your body isn’t running the same. If you are in financial meetings, those meetings should be kept shorter, simpler, with as few as one discussion topic in a meeting, and with more repetitions built in across meetings since it’s harder for the brain to absorb information.

Want to know more about what this looks like, from the inside? Check out Susan Bradley’s book, Sudden Money, which in Minnesota you can check out through Interlibrary Loan.

What about you? Do you have someone who would help you with all of these aspects where changes impact your money?