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What happens when a financial columnist and CFP® professional suddenly becomes her mother’s caregiver? Beth Pinsker discovered that her expertise couldn’t prepare her for the relentless tenacity required to navigate Medicare mazes, fight for proper care, and manage the details of her mother’s financial life. In My Mother’s Money , a comprehensive practical and detailed resource, she shares the street-smart lessons that only come from boots-on-the-ground caregiving experience.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

• Why financial caregiving requires perseverance to advocate effectively for your loved ones
• The critical difference between big-picture finances and knowing the granular details that matter
• How Medicare decisions made at age 65 can create enormous consequences for caregivers years later
• Why humanizing your loved one to healthcare providers changes the quality of care they recei
• Why “stuff” is such a complicated issue and how to prepare your own estate realistically

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Bio

Beth Pinsker is a financial-planning columnist at MarketWatch and has been a  Certified Financial Planner™ since 2018.

She won a SABEW Best in Business award in 2023 for commentary for a series of columns about caring for her mother. She turned those into a book, “My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving” (Crown Currency, November 2025).

Beth was previously the launch Money Editor for Buy Side from WSJ, providing advice and service on anything having to do with how people handle their money. Prior to that, she was a personal finance columnist and editor at Reuters for eight years. She covered all aspects of financial planning and decision-making, such as retirement strategies, selecting employee benefits, and saving money. In 2018, she was part of a team that won a Front Page award for Live Online Video from the Newswomen’s Club of New York.

Beth worked at Fidelity during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, where she was an Editorial Director handling coverage of taxes and wealth strategies. She also was the editor of Walletpop.com, a personal finance website owned by AOL that launched in 2008 in the midst of the Great Recession and focused on frugality, budgeting and finding the best deals.

Beth spent the first part of her career as a film critic and entertainment business reporter, writing for many publications, such as Entertainment Weekly, The Dallas Morning News, The Independent Film & Video Monthly, Variety and the New York Times. She had brief stints at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and was an intern for “Late Night with David Letterman.”

Beth has a B.A. in English from Harvard University. She is the mother of two humans and one dog and lives in Brooklyn.

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For More on Beth Pinsker

My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving

Website

MarketWatch columns

Podcast Conversations You May Like

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Retirement brings so many tough questions.

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or send me an email at joec@retirementwisdom.com

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There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial motives, that cover the money side of the street. This podcast is different. You’ll get smarter about the investment decisions you’ll make about the most important asset you’ll have in retirement: your time.

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Schedule a call today to discuss how the Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one — on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host

Joe Casey is an executive coach who helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a 26-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking.

Joe has earned Master’s degrees from the University of Southern California in Gerontology (at age 60), the University of Pennsylvania, and Middlesex University (UK), a BA in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his coaching certification from Columbia University.

In addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, ranked in the top 1% globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.6 million downloads. Business Insider recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

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Wise Quotes

On Becoming a Financial Caregiver

“I think what really matters when you’re trying to be a financial caregiver is that you pay attention to the details. Some people, most people in fact, never have the conversation with anybody that they’re caring for, their parents, aunt, uncle, whatever. Nobody knows how much money anybody has. Nobody knows what they’re spending their money on. Everybody keeps that information private. But even if you do step into the conversation, like my Mom and I stepped into it a little bit – big picture stuff. Can you afford two houses? No, we’re going to sell one. So you can’t have a summer place anymore kind of thing. When should Dad stop driving? Big picture stuff. But nobody ever gets down to the little stuff that you have to do when you fully take over for somebody. Like when I had to step in and take care of my Mom’s bills, it got down to such nitty gritty like, do you pay your electric bill on an automated schedule? Or how do you pay it otherwise? Do you mail in a check? Like nobody talks about that kind of stuff. But that is absolutely essential when you are a financial caregiver.”

On Advocacy

“One of the biggest things I did with my Mom and any care setting she was in was try to humanize her for the caregivers. They needed to see her as a person who was functional.  Now, because they all they saw was a little frail old lady who was out of it most of the time, they just assumed she had cognitive decline or dementia and they weren’t trying to get her back to any sort of baseline. And so what I did was primarily showed them like, Oh, isn’t this funny? I saw this video I took two weeks ago on my phone of my Mom playing Scrabble with us. You know my Mom was fine. And then she wasn’t and they just thought that she was always like she was in the hospital. And so to fight for services and fight for what you what you need out of them with an with a person who’s sick and aging is to constantly humanize them so that people in the medical industry want to help them.”

On What To Do First

“You need to make sure that you have the proper documents to help somebody. We are all legal adults and nobody can help us with certain things unless they have the proper authorization.  That’s a durable power of attorney, a healthcare proxy and some kind of will or trust for after the person dies plus beneficiary designations. You need to secure the person’s phone because so much today is run,  through our phones and if you don’t have the passcode, you’re going to hit a brick wall of no – and the brick wall of no is unmovable. So you need to secure that phone. You need two factor authentication. You need to know what banking apps, and you need to just know what’s in a person’s phone. Those are the two main important things. But the last thing is even more consequential. You need to know what the person wants. Their wishes matter. Having a conversation about what they want and what you’re able to do is absolutely essential both for your mental health, your wellbeing and for how much money you can spend on any particular thing. You just have to know what page everybody’s on.”