Stop Hating On Aging

Aging isn’t a crisis—it’s a transition we can prepare for. With the right conversations and financial clarity, growing older can be empowering. Here’s how my mom—and my clients—taught me that.

“Stop hating on aging.” That’s what a colleague suggested for the title of the talk I just gave at a conference about my area of expertise, which is financial life planning for age-related transitions. It is something that we need to learn—or maybe it’s something to unlearn—how to anticipate without dread.

Where does this passion to change the conversation about aging come from? Where did I develop the belief that it is in expanding imagination and making thoughtful choices that we increase the chance of getting what we want and avoiding putting ourselves and our loved ones in crisis and chaos?

From my mom, I realized this Mother’s Day, when asked what words come to mind when I think of my mom and money.

Born to a minister and a teacher, I grew up with four siblings in a home abundant in love and—as you can imagine with all those people and two helping-profession-minded adults—not much money.

It was a different time and most everyone we knew did what we did: entertained at home with simple meals, took car trips (where the car often broke down) and camped, and made our clothes and gifts for one another at Christmas. However, as my dad transitioned to business consulting we met folks of means, and I grew curious. They seemed to know something we didn’t about how to use this powerful force rather than be squashed by it.

It’s a different story about how the road I traveled went from a degree in finance to mothering to teaching back around to this encore career at midlife in financial planning. But the beginning is important to know when it comes to my parents, money and positive aging.

I became my parents’ money manager at 20 when my dad’s travel schedule demanded someone else do it and my mom didn’t want to. For years I paid bills and kept track. When my dad got sick, we began to pay more attention to investments and eventually I took that over. He was rewarded with career success as his life forces were overcome by cancer treatments, and he left my mom materially comfortable if forever heart broken.

For the first decade of her widow life my work was mostly to monitor and assist: how much could she spend monthly, how much could she give away, what part of her living expenses in a continuous care retirement community (CCRC) could she write off as medical expenses.

Chronic and pesky aches and pains slowly eroded how active she was. During these years she wrote the most extensive advance directive anyone at the hospital had ever seen (7 pages plus). Then came her stroke, which left her unable to drive and she needed a walker, but she eventually returned to her independent living apartment.

Nearly simultaneously with all this I was ending my teaching career and starting my Certified Financial Planner coursework. I experienced how much it mattered to my mom at this phase of her life that she knew how much money she had, how it was invested and why, and what she could live on and still meet her charitable and legacy goals. I wanted to do that for other people as a focus of my financial planning.

I decided to enter the certificate program for End of Life Care and Support at Portland Community College. An unanticipated blessing of that program was the opportunity to fulfill homework assignments by interviewing my mom and her friends.

This clinched it. Most of the folks were in their late 70s to early 90s and they generously opened up about who they had been, what they thought they would be like as old people and what surprises they’d been given.

And I learned my mom’s experience was not unique. Resilience came from confidence and confidence came from knowledge: how much, invested why, what it allows me to do and where the limits are. I discovered too that most were very willing to discuss questions about end-of-life but found their families often weren’t: how they hoped to die, what else they wanted to do before then, how they wanted to be remembered.

Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” It was a privilege to help my mom shift her gaze and look with new eyes, and I am grateful that I have found a way to continue the work with my clients.