2024 July Update

We hope you’re having a fantastic summer, or making plans to do so. Since it’s so sunny, bright, and warm out, we thought now might be a great time to talk about … really hard stuff.

Why? We figured it might be a lot easier to look at darkness from a state of light. If you’re not there right now, even if the northern hemisphere is, that’s okay. You can save this for later.

But if you have some room to let a little bit of hard stuff in, we wanted to share with you something we’ve been thinking about, thanks to the work we get to do with you.

The most fun part of what we do is helping you think about and design your best possible life. We love talking through and thinking about all the things that will make you so happy if you got to experience them, and then figuring out how to make the money work in the same direction.

Less fun, but really, really important, is talking about the stuff that makes us sad. Losing people we love, losing the ability to do the things we love, losing our health… these are things that are harder to talk about. Often, we don’t want to plan for them, because maybe that would ensure they don’t happen.

At Spring, we believe that Murphy’s Law is a Real Thing. If anything can go wrong, it will. Using that twisted piece of logic, maybe if we plan for the worst things, they won’t happen? Maybe, if we spend all that time and money developing strategies for loss of health, cognition, and life, we will actually remain vital, and incredibly witty… forever. It’s worth a shot, right?

We have been lucky enough to help create a lot of these kinds of plans. Plans that are hopeful, and plans that are realistic. It’s hard to hold two competing ideas in our minds at the same time. It’s uncomfortable; but it’s important. It’s the most important work we do.

In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of these plans implemented. Plans for memory care. Plans for hospice care. Plans for death. We’ve been honoured to be there for the families who have relied on us for the good times, and supported them in hard times.

Families who were able to have that one last big trip to somewhere special, together. Family members who clearly stated the kind of fun they expected their people to have after they were gone – and families who knew what that was, who it was for, and had the infrastructure in place to make sure it happens.

Families who were able to be together in memory care, health care, and palliative care, knowing the only things they needed to talk about were love, because everything else was handled.

Families who stayed together even after the person who had always been their emotional “glue” was gone, because a plan was created for that, too. Families who have professional support in processing their grief, because – again – a plan was created.

We’ve told you before that the most loving thing you can do for the people you care about is to make it easy for them during the hardest times. We’ve seen it go the other way, in our own lives, and that’s been heartbreaking. In recent years we’ve been able to experience what it’s like to have it go the right way, with the wonderful people we are lucky enough to support.

We’ve helped people through financial decisions at times when their brains didn’t have the capacity for those kinds of things, because we had already done the work of discussing with you what matters, and what’s really important. The technical stuff? Don’t worry, we’ve got you.

We’ve helped people feel financially secure in paying for some big expenses that matter to make life more comfortable for those they love – including the caregivers. Those caregivers knew they could choose to take care of themselves, as well, because we’d talked about it, and continued talking.

We’ve helped ensure that transitions of things didn’t cause more headache than necessary. We know that grief can create strife, and that poorly planned transitions can send the wrong message at just the wrong time. We’ve worked together with families to ensure that the message received was love.

We’ve helped people who have lost that very important person who shared their life for 20, 30, 40, 50, or 60 years, learn to figure out what the next stage of their lives might look like, so they can start to breathe again.

If you haven’t spent time thinking about those things just yet, but would like to know that all this is possible for you and your loved ones, we’ve shared a few different articles in this month’s update that might help you with that thinking.

Additionally, we’re sharing a video with Julia and our friend Ian Macnaughton about the impacts of intergenerational financial trauma. The impacts this has on how we deal with our own day-to-day finances can be profound, and understanding it can help improve our agency in our own finances.

We wish you a beautiful summer, with enough light in it that you have the ability to reflect on some of the tough stuff. We hope it helps build your resilience. We hope you know that we’re here to help.

Your Spring Planning Team

Practice Notes:

Your Spring Planning team is taking some holidays this summer. We’ll be locking up at the end of the day Friday July 26 and back on Tuesday August 13, trying to remember what it is we do here. We hope you are taking some time for rest and rejuvenation. Summer is precious in Canada – make the most of it!

Spring in the News:

Julia spoke with Rob Carrick on the Globe & Mail’s Stress Test podcast. This episode was all about inheritances, both during and after lifetimes, as well as whether assuming a big windfall makes sense for personal financial plans. We bet you can guess what Julia said, but just in case, listen here.

Please check out our media page here for videos, podcasts, interviews and more.

Planning News Digest:

• Financial Trauma and the impact on your relationship with money: Julia and Ian Macnaughton discuss the impact of financial trauma on money. In this insightful conversation, they explore how past experiences can shape feelings about finances and influence future financial decisions. Watch the full video here.
• What to do when your parents haven’t planned: Are your parents in good financial shape? If they’re not retired, do they know what they need to do next? If they are, do they have enough to manage for potential pitfalls? Have they planned their estate so that you and your siblings don’t end up fighting while you’re crying? What don’t they know that you think they should? Read the full article here.
• Safety and Security: Achieving your life, well spent is incredibly important to you. We also know that putting the work towards that achievement can be zero fun. That’s why what may be perfectly good financial plans end up on a shelf somewhere in a dark closet, collecting dust, rather than driving you towards your pretty fantastic future. Check out the full article here.

Feature from the Archives:

Design Thinking: Estate Planning – Planning for your eventual departure is truly one of the most loving and thoughtful things you can do for your family and friends. Estate planning is often a lot more difficult than it needs to be, and without a roadmap of where all the things are and what you wanted done with them, your people are going to be even more frustrated than the loss of you has already made them.

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