Karen Altfest: Advising Women, Widows and 9/11 Families

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Hello and welcome to Barron's The Way Forward. I'm Greg Bartalis, and my guest today is Karen Altfest, Principal Advisor at Altfest Personal Wealth Management. Today we'll discuss helping women clients and widows. Karen, welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for joining us. Let's begin first with a little background on you, and your firm, who it serves, etc.? [Speaker:KATHY KAPUTA] Oh, sure.

Well, my husband started this firm in 1983, and I joined, and actually my son Andrew Alt-Fuss is now the president of the firm. And so we've been in New York City a long time with the firm, and we think of ourselves as a New York firm, and we help every kind of New Yorkers. I often feel so lucky to have met so many interesting people. You know, we have some opera singers, we have a lot of writers, We have a lot of people I just don't know that I would've come across other ways. But since the pandemic, we have expanded into other areas. We've looked for opportunities and some just happened to come in our direction. I think it's because people used to want to be able to meet with their advisors or say, my advisor's in this building in my town. But if they have to Zoom with their advisor And they're in Ohio, they may as well Zoom with somebody in New York. And I think that's truly how they're feeling. And we've used this period of opportunity to change the way we do things a little bit.

Tell me first, was it premeditated? Was there always a vision to cater to women clients and widows, or was that more a byproduct of a natural evolution?

Well, for me, my great interest is helping other women. And that's something that I find very meaningful. The firm as a whole, has several niches, not only women.

Tell me about the Financially Savvy Woman program.

Oh, we have quite a few programs. We have newsletters for women. We have what we call our Women's Financial Spa every November, and every March, which is Women's History Month, we have our Women's Financial Salon. We also have meetings for widows, that are smaller so that it could be very interactive and not scare anybody. We want people to discuss their situations and we do things all year long.

Tell me more broadly, what are you hearing from clients? What are their concerns?

I think they're pretty much what we're all thinking about, inflation and the economy and the markets and why is my account not up as high as I'd like it to be? And will I have enough money to be able to retire one day? And how will I take care of my children? And things, and sometimes it's encouraging your clients to have a little less control. I'm not one of those people who's very much in favor of surprising everybody on the day you die. This is what was in the will. We've always involved our family in every step of the way.

[Speaker:RUBENSTEIN] And tell me now, for widows, if you, for any advisor listening, they have a client who might be widowed or, you know, could happen, What should be top of mind for them, or maybe something that you recommend that is not conventional wisdom?

[Speaker:KATHY] So I think that a lot of widows wait too long to get involved in the family finances. And I think it's very loving when a husband wants to help the wife get involved. And they come to me and they say, "I've tried everything. My wife isn't interested. What can I do?" And to me, it's really quite simple. You can't say to her, "I've been doing this my whole life and now you do this." But "What are you interested in?" would make much more sense. "What part would you like to play? Would you like to plan the family vacation to start? Would you like to see how much we should be spending on dinners out and how often?" Or, you know, something to do with fixing up the house or the bathroom. "Can we afford that? Would you like to speak to a few vendors and involve them?" And once somebody's involved, they are likely to get a little more involved and a little more involved. And that'll help everybody. And some people, particularly widows, wait much too long until they can no longer ask the primary financial person in the family how to proceed.

And for those who are maybe a little bit reluctant to get involved, how do you try to nudge them? And are there any tactics or things that work? Do you just appeal to self-interest? Or what do you—

Well, I think by giving a lot of these women's events, That's a very major one because when we have a mixed group, men and women events, it's the men who ask all the questions and the women wait till the very end and they sort of half raise their hand and say, "This is silly, but..." And when we have just women events, they ask as many questions and they're as good questions and they're all from women.

[Speaker:TREVOR_BURRUS] And let me ask you, I read a fascinating story, a CNN article from 11 years ago, talking about how your work with 9/11 widows, I mean, it was very powerful, but just tell me a little about it and then I have some follow-up questions.

[Speaker:ELIZABETH] Right, so I did work with many people in many ways. Some called us and came to us as clients. Many more were victims who I was working, teaching part-time or leading the financial programs at the New School in New York City. And I prevailed upon them to pay for rooms so that we could all meet together to help me get lawyers or whoever could help these people. And we conducted class after class. We did a few, a couple of years of these and certainly several semesters. And people at the end were able to say, you know, you really helped me with this. And it was just a pleasure to work with these families who were so caring. And in many cases did not want the money. And in some cases did want the money. And actually we helped by preparing what their expenses were, what they'd have to pay for to raise their children over the years to get them the most money possible if they were interested in that.

[Speaker:TREVOR_BURRUS] Yeah, I mean, the article talked about a fascinating dynamic whereby on the one hand, a lot of these families were to receive significant amount of money, and of course, that's a good thing. On the other hand, some of them felt a sense of, I don't know, perhaps an element of shame or guilt. So when they spent the money, it was strange, I guess, based on what I read, that you're almost quantifying the value of the loved one's life, which is, well, the number must settle somewhere, right? And clearly, it's not a literal translation. It's a proxy. It's the best that they could come at, but it mentioned that a lot of the money went to spending on the children, that that tended to be where it got redirected as opposed to maybe spending it on themselves. Can you just—

Right, it didn't feel good to take the money. It was to them blood money, money they didn't want in many, many cases. And yes, if you gave them a reason for it, well, your child will be able to go to summer camp or maybe he'll need years of psychiatric care after such a horrible event. And it's something you could do to help, you know, your young children, your grandchildren, gave them a reason to be willing to accept it. I never heard anybody say, I'm going to spend it on myself.

[Speaker:JAD] That's incredible. I mean, it's incredible, but it's also understandable at the same time, clearly. And the article also made a really interesting point, which is basically that a lot of these survivors who arguably have a very good reason to plan make financial plans precisely because of what happened, because of the sudden and unexpected nature of it. It was all the more dissonant, the idea of long-term financial planning, given what just happened to their loved one, right? So on the one hand, it makes sense. On the other hand, that was proof that—

It had a very bitter taste.

Yeah. Like, okay, yes, but— I mean, is there anything you could add to that dynamic?

I think you've said it all. People just wanted to keep away from it. They didn't want to be paid off for the loss of a life of somebody they love very much.

Have clients continued from back then? I assume you have relations.

We have some very long-term clients. I guess it's over 20 years now. And we've been through so much with them, with their children. And we have one woman who kept redecorating her house the way her husband would've wanted it, but he wasn't living in it now. But if he wanted the basement done or the curtains changed, she felt she had to keep that up for many years. But she's gotten past that now.

And are there any other anecdotes like that about how kind of just repercussions that wouldn't make the headlines, but they're real and happening?

We actually have a lot of clients who won't tell people, they won't identify themselves as having been a victim of, of them and their family of this horrific event. And they will never show up on one of those days that celebrates the loss. Well, I don't know if you call it celebrate, memorializes the loss of their loved ones. And they've never gone. And as a matter of fact, one of our clients has always taken her children who are now grown out of town on that day.

Anything else about just 9/11 and 20 years later, because all these people are still living with the wounds and the emotional hurt, but, you know, in the mainstream media, it's really only on 9/11 when you get a bunch of coverage and then suddenly it's back to the ether and forgotten. What are you hearing, like aftershocks long-term?

I believe that they're going to be affected for the rest of their lives, especially if they were the children and they have long lives to go. And so I think they're very affected, but they're all functioning very well. In their new place in life.

Yeah, yeah, it's very, very powerful and just laden with emotion and heaviness, if you will. What else can you tell me about working with widows? What's important that maybe is not understood or that you would recommend?

Yeah, so I'll start with a little story about a client who, Her husband was very elderly and very ill, and every organ in his body was failing. And, you know, his kidney, his liver, and everything. And it just seemed to an outsider—I had never met him—that it wasn't going to be much longer for her. But she would go and sit with him at the hospital every day. And she called me up one day, and I didn't know her at the time, and she said, You know, my husband said, if something happens, go and see the Altfest. So she came dutifully. But then he suddenly— not suddenly, he was very ill, but she wasn't expecting it. He died. And she said, well, now I don't know what to do because he's not here to tell me. And, you know, she did become a client, but she wasn't quite sure for quite a while. So I think, you know, while somebody's alive and hopefully very healthy, it's a nice time to find out who your advisors are, where your money is, how you function as a family. And I think for some people, it does become too late to ask those questions later on.

And I think in addition to the time and quote unquote hassle, there's an element of discomfort sometimes because you have to confront your mortality, right? And some people would just rather kick the can down the road and deal with it later. That's probably true.

Some people don't like to think about those things. Yeah, yeah.

Well, we're almost out of time. I'd like to ask you for an actionable idea for the listeners, if there's anything, be it a book and a piece of wisdom, et cetera.

I have a book that I like very much. It's now several years old, and it was written by a woman who was a reporter when she wrote it, and she's written some books since, and it's called "Saturday Night Widows," and her name is Becky Aikman, A-I-K-M-A-N, And it's really about bonding by women. She was widowed when she was not that old. And she was told to go to this group of elderly women who were widows. And she sort of acted badly, and she was thrown out of the group. And so she formed her own group of people of her age, probably more like 50 than 80. And they would meet Saturday nights to discuss things or to do fun things or to have dinner. And they ended up on a trip to Morocco together. And I once had her come and speak to one of my women's groups. And I looked out at the audience, and I know my clients very well. And there were very few widows there. But these people all wanted to be— to hear about the bonding and the trip and whatever. And so I think women can relate to it very strongly in a good way. And I think she was a good speaker and a good writer. Oh, that's high praise.

Thank you very much for sharing that. Well, again, thank you so much for taking the time. It was a profound pleasure. Thank you very much. My guest was Karen Alt-Fest. For more advisor-specific podcasts, please check out barons.com/podcast. For The Way Forward, I'm Greg Bartlett.

This podcast was brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com.