How to support grieving clients

Sara McCullough was all business when calling a client she’d spoken with two days prior about renewing his GIC.

“I was in transaction mode. I was ready to get this thing done, and his wife answered,” she said. “I asked to speak with him, and she said, ‘Oh Sara, we didn’t think to call you. He passed away last night.”

Stunned, she replied: “But I just talked to him.”

“In hindsight, I was like, ‘That’s the stupidest thing to say,’” said McCullough, a certified financial planner and owner of WD Development in Kitchener, Ont. “But it’s such a human moment. You’re going to possibly say the wrong thing, but so are other people.”

Her advice when dealing with the death of a client or their family member is not to try to say the perfect words in the moment. What that incident did, though, is change how she communicates with clients.

“I prep differently for meetings now, after doing this for 20 years,” she said. “I don’t know what the client is going to say to me. I don’t know what has happened, what losses may have happened, since I last spoke to them.”

Nor should advisors view a death as opportunity to try and retain the business, despite the high risk of losing it. A 2023 survey by Sun Life Global Investments found 80% of widows switch financial advisors after the death of their husband.

“That’s not a time to try and secure the relationship,” McCullough said. “That’s not a time to try and angle for an introduction to the children. It is a time to just honour the fact that somebody who was here is not here anymore, and that they were deeply loved by a lot of people.”

Adam Schacter, financial and investment advisor with Embark Wealth of Designed Securities Ltd. in Ottawa, Ont., takes a “shut up and listen” approach when he gets the news.

“There’s nothing wrong with just saying I’m sorry, and then just shutting up,” he said. Three of his clients, all men, died in the past four months — and he tends not to initiate anything after a death.

“We need a whole bunch of documents, but that’s not the time to ask for things,” he said. “Someone’s just died, someone’s world has been completely uprooted, and the financials and the legal and all those things can wait.”

Instead, he waits for the family to begin calling with financial questions — and the phone always rings, he said.

Attending the funeral

Whether an advisor should attend the funeral is a personal choice, Schacter said. Before the pandemic, he would attend a lot more funerals — even for clients with which he didn’t have a close relationship.

Post-pandemic, funerals tend to be smaller and are often attended only by close family and friends, he said.

“If you don’t attend, people are less offended — unless you are really close,” Schacter said. His advice is to trust your gut. If you had a strong relationship, or if it would be meaningful to the family to be there, then attend.

“You don’t want to be an ambulance chaser in our business,” Schacter said. “If you can take sales away from the equation and assess things not as a financial advisor but as a human being, you come to the appropriate decision.”

For McCullough, if the relationship is more transactional or if she dealt primarily with the person who died and doesn’t know the spouse well, sending a card to acknowledge the loss might be the best choice in the short term.

Gauging readiness to move on

Conversations about finances can’t be put off indefinitely, and McCullough will often reach out if the death means something significant in the short term — such as the sale of a house that is no longer affordable.

“If It’s a situation where the spending [or] lifestyle needs to change, then I think you can say, ‘I want to see you next week. I do want to talk to you about the finances.’ And they can say yes or no,” McCullough said.

Schacter said there’s no magic timeline for having difficult conversations about the future of the estate and the portfolios. When he learns of a death, he takes care of all regulatory requirements — including informing his compliance team and freezing everything in place.

“Then I just leave it alone. There’s no reason to prod,” he said. “It’s a very sensitive thing as far as timelines go, and I wish I had a more concrete answer like ‘X’ number of weeks. But in every scenario, I’ve not been the one to initiate the call. It’s usually the family realizing they need to have this conversation.”

Long-term support

In the months and years that follow, Schacter said the difficult conversations will probably continue. “It’s my responsibility as a planner and an advisor to be able to deliver bad news,” he said.

He doesn’t believe in tiptoeing around issues or avoiding mentioning the person’s name for fear of causing stress or grief.

“I have no problems bringing up the person who’s passed, because I know that person. I know their situation. I don’t even have to think twice about it,” he said, adding that good advisors know a client’s goals, dreams, aspirations and legacy.