Confronting the Inevitable

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lana and Heshy Goldsmith,* a professional couple in their late fifties, were finally enjoying more time together. Their years of juggling family and career, paying yeshivah and camp tuitions, putting children through college, and supporting young couples were mostly behind them, freeing them to travel and to become more active in their suburban New Jersey community.
When Elana died unexpectedly of a heart attack, Heshy was devastated. Shivah ended, the children gradually returned to their homes, and Heshy struggled with grief and loneliness as he learned to do laundry, prepare meals, and make Shabbos arrangements. He thought he was managing until he returned from work one evening and couldn’t get the heat or lights to turn on. The electrician Heshy called quickly discovered the problem — the electricity had been disconnected because the bill hadn’t been paid. Heshy sheepishly looked at the pile of unopened mail that had been accumulating since Elana’s passing and discovered that many of the bills he’d assumed were paid automatically were seriously overdue. Elana had been the family’s “financial secretary” and Heshy now had to untangle a financial mess without knowing Elana’s passwords for bank accounts and credit cards, or where she kept the extra checkbooks.
It’s hard for adults in the prime of their lives to imagine all of the hardships their families would undergo if they unexpectedly died or became disabled. Many of them think they can plan adequately for this eventuality by buying life insurance, building up savings, and having a joint bank account, but don’t realize that their family also needs information that will enable them to access funds, pay bills, and manage the myriad details of maintaining financial equilibrium. This is especially true where, as in many marriages, one partner is primarily responsible for managing the family’s day-to-day finances.
The Best Laid Plans
Shortly after Akiva Nussbaum* first learned that he was ill, he began to organize information about the four small companies he ran out of his Chicago office, as well as his life insurance policies, retirement funds, bank accounts, and other investments. He listed where company records were located, contact information for lawyers and accountants, and advice about how to operate his businesses in his absence.
Unfortunately, Akiva neglected to tell his wife and children where he put this information, and during the ten months following his death they spent over a hundred hours tracking down his assets. “Akiva set up different companies to receive his income from consulting jobs, and I didn’t remember their names,” Rina Nussbaum recalls. “I kept saying, ‘I know there’s a list somewhere, Akiva told me he made a list.’” The family’s efforts were frustrating and time consuming. One night, Akiva’s youngest son, back in Chicago for his semester break from college, was using his father’s computer and decided to open an unnamed folder to see what it contained. There was the detailed list of assets, bank accounts, and contacts that the family had spent close to a year trying to reconstruct.
“It’s a tremendous chesed to family members to have a list of assets and where they are located right in front of them,” David Singer,* a recent widower, says. His wife, Sima, a geriatric social worker, had often helped her elderly clients put their information in order when they entered assisted living. When Sima realized that she might lose her years-long struggle with cancer, she focused on providing as much information as possible for her husband and young adult children to take over her money-management tasks if she couldn’t do so any longer. She made an Excel spreadsheet listing the couple’s bank accounts, retirement funds, insurance policies, and monthly bills, including account numbers and information as to which bills were paid automatically and when, and e-mailed it to David and their children.
“Sima wrote me instructions about how to transfer rent money each month to our children in college,” David recalls. “She even inventoried the freezer, which was packed with cooked food, so that we’d have an easier time with meal preparation. I thought she was nuts, but when you’re dying, you think about things like that.”
Sima also insisted they pay a visit to their lawyer. David said the couple had written wills when they lived in Toronto and their children were small, but they’d been living in Israel for close to 20 years.
The Singers’ attorney recommended they write new wills that reflected the changes in their family and financial situations and met the legal requirements of their new home country.
One complication was that the Singers still had assets in Canada and wanted a will they could use in both countries. Beit Shemesh attorney Linda Reiss-Wolicki says that while some Israeli probate courts accept a will written in English, when the heirs want to actualize the will, banks and other institutions may request a formal Hebrew translation. She often suggests that olim with assets abroad make an Israeli will in Hebrew for the assets in Israel and another will, in English or another relevant language, for use in the foreign country. That advice may benefit the many non-Israelis who live in the US or other countries and own apartments and bank accounts in Israel.
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