When Life Changes, Your Financial Story Matters More Than Ever

by Erin Hadary, Partner, MBA, CFP®, CAP®, CeFT®

Major life changes have a way of bringing financial questions to the surface. A career change, inheritance, divorce, loss, relocation, or even the realization that you want something different from the next chapter of your life can suddenly make decisions that once felt straightforward much more complicated.

This is especially true in midlife, when financial decisions are rarely isolated from everything else going on in your life. You may be thinking about aging parents, adult children, career satisfaction, family wealth, retirement, philanthropy, or the legacy you hope to leave. The numbers matter, of course, but understanding what you can afford is only part of the work. You also have to understand what you want your money to make possible.

Your Financial History Comes With You

We begin developing ideas about money long before most of us know anything about investing or financial planning. We watch how our families spend, save, talk about money, and respond when there isn’t enough. Those experiences become part of our financial vocabulary, whether we’re conscious of them or not.

My grandmother had an enormous influence on mine. She was a military wife, and she knew how to stretch a dollar. I watched her use coupons, shop carefully, and make beautiful meals with what she had. I also remember going to bingo with her at McDonald’s and seeing how genuinely excited she was when she won toilet paper.

What stayed with me was her ability to be resourceful without allowing money to determine whether she enjoyed her life. As I’ve gotten older and traveled more, I’ve seen versions of that lesson again and again. People can have significant wealth or relatively little and still have very different relationships with happiness, security, and enough.

Those early experiences matter because the financial beliefs we develop when we’re young don’t automatically disappear when our circumstances change. Someone who grew up worried about money may still find spending uncomfortable after becoming financially secure. A person who inherits substantial wealth may feel responsible for preserving it because of what that money represented to a parent or grandparent.

During a major transition, those old beliefs can become particularly influential.

Financial Literacy Isn’t Something Everyone Was Given

There’s another part of our financial histories that deserves more attention: what we were actually taught.

Many intelligent, accomplished people reach their 40s, 50s, or 60s without feeling comfortable with the language of finance. That doesn’t surprise me. We don’t do a particularly good job of teaching financial literacy, yet people are often expected to understand investing, taxes, estate planning, and retirement simply because they’ve reached a certain age or accumulated wealth.

I understand that experience because I had to learn the language myself.

I didn’t grow up planning to become a financial advisor. I loved math and science, but finance wasn’t a career I had been encouraged to consider. An unexpected job offer brought me into the industry, and I had a great deal to learn. I eventually pursued an MBA, became a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional, and continued building my education from there.

Having once been the person learning this vocabulary affects the way I work with clients today. I don’t assume someone should already know the terminology, and I don’t think asking a basic question says anything about a person’s intelligence or ability to make good decisions.

I’m much more interested in understanding where someone is starting from.

One of the questions I often ask is how they were raised with money and how they think that experience has shaped them. Sometimes that conversation brings up a belief they’ve carried for decades without ever stopping to examine whether it still fits their life.

More Money Can Create a Different Kind of Decision

This becomes particularly important when someone’s financial circumstances change significantly.

I work with people who are inheriting wealth, sometimes more money than they’ve ever managed themselves. For some, the inheritance changes what is financially possible almost overnight. They may be able to stop working, take a sabbatical, give more generously, change careers, or reconsider how they want to spend their time.

That freedom can be exciting. It can also be surprisingly complicated.

If you no longer have to work, for example, leaving your job may be financially possible. The more interesting question may be what you want your life to contain once work is no longer making that decision for you.

I’ve also worked with families thinking carefully about whether their investments reflect their values. In one conversation, a family’s wealth had come from oil and gas, and they didn’t want to continue holding those investments in their portfolio. That choice opened a larger discussion about expected risk and return, their relationship with their family wealth, and the legacy they hoped to create.

There isn’t a universal answer to a decision like that. My responsibility is to help clients understand the financial implications, consider the tradeoffs, and give the decision enough room to become their own.

Sometimes I’ll even ask a client a question and tell them I don’t want an answer yet. Important financial decisions don’t always benefit from an immediate response.

A Plan Gives You Something to Work From When Life Changes

One of the reasons I care so much about financial planning is that life is remarkably good at changing the plan.

I’ve worked with a family preparing to move to Canada when the possibility hadn’t even been on their radar a year earlier. Because they already had a financial plan, we could run different scenarios and explore the implications of the move. They had information they could use to decide whether taking that leap made sense for them.

A financial plan couldn’t have predicted that opportunity. What it could do was give them a foundation for evaluating it.

That’s an important distinction. Planning isn’t valuable because it makes life predictable. It’s valuable because when something unexpected happens, you have a better understanding of your resources, your choices, and the consequences of the different paths available to you.

Financial Planning Is Ultimately About the Life Behind the Numbers

Technical competence matters in this profession. Clients deserve thoughtful analysis and a clear understanding of the financial implications of their decisions. But doing the math is only one part of helping someone make a good decision.

I need to understand the person making it.

I want to know what shaped your relationship with money, what you’re responsible for, what you’re worried about, and what you hope this next stage of life will give you. I want to understand whether the decision in front of you reflects what matters to you now or an expectation you’ve been carrying for years.

That context becomes particularly important during life’s plot twists, when the old answers may no longer fit and the new ones haven’t quite taken shape.

You don’t have to rush those moments. Sometimes the most useful place to begin is simply understanding your financial story well enough to decide what you want the next chapter to say.

Continue the Conversation

In the inaugural episode of Money, Meaning and Midlife Plot Twists, I share more about my own financial story, the experiences that shaped my approach to planning, and why I believe understanding where you’ve come from can be so important when deciding where you want to go next.

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