'It's a Relationship That's Not Going Away,' Advises Female
Financial Expert

If you're a woman, chances are good that in the years ahead, it will be you and you alone who's responsible for managing your money.

That could be a problem: Even among the very affluent, many women admit they know little to nothing about bigger-picture money concerns such as financial planning and investment management, according to a recent survey.

"A lot of women cede those responsibilities to their husbands or partners because they say they don't have the time, interest or opportunity to learn," says Luna Jaffe, Certified Financial Planner™, psychotherapist, and author of the new "Wild Money: A Creative Journey to Financial Wisdom" and its companion workbook, "Wild Money: A Financial Field Guide and Journal," (www.lunajaffe.com).

"Things are changing- more women are choosing not to marry or have been devastated by divorce or death of a loved one.  They recognize they can't ignore money any more, but don't know where to turn or who to trust."

But even women with a net worth of at least $1 million concede they aren't especially knowledgeable about money management. In the Women & Wealth Study sponsored by GenSpring Family Offices, only a third said they know a lot about financial planning, and 30 percent said the same for investment management.

Part of the problem is that financial education is male-oriented, catering to how men's brains are wired and what appeals to them, Jaffe says.

"When we approach it creatively and from a more emotion-based perspective, women are not only drawn to learning about it, they have no trouble getting it," Jaffe says.

She offers these three things every woman should know about their relationship to money:

• Your investment decisions are influenced by your emotional baggage.
We all bring baggage into our relationships, and it's no different with money, Jaffe says. When you're not aware of the baggage operating quietly in the background, you may think you're making smart decisions when you're actually simply reacting to past experiences. And those might not have been even your own experiences! "Whether you or a loved one suffered the consequences of a bad financial investment, it can color your thinking in many ways, from destroying your confidence in your judgment to writing off all similar investments as 'bad.' '' Take time to reflect on the experiences you've had with investing, the decisions you made, and the conclusions you made as a result. What stories do you tell yourself because of these experiences?

•  Understand the emotional response with which you receive money, whether a paycheck, a gift or an inheritance. It's important to receive money with grace - to savor it, to be grateful for it, to be at peace with it. But depending on the circumstances by which it arrives, and lingering emotions from past experiences, we sometimes receive money with anger, guilt, resentment, greed, entitlement or any of a host of other negative emotions. This can lead to self-destructive actions. Jaffe shares a story about receiving a small inheritance from her father at a time when she had no money. She loaned the whole sum to a friend, who promptly vanished. "I was still grieving his death, and I received money that represented his legacy, yet it was only a tiny fraction of his estate - his second wife got everything else. Deep inside, I felt ripped off. Perhaps I thought by loaning my inheritance, I could wash the confusion and grief out of the money making it clean and safe to use. "

• Know your Comfort Zone for risk and stay within it. Investment comes with risks; you can assume a lot for potentially greater returns, or less for lower returns. Understanding your Comfort Zone and staying within it will help you stay committed to your financial plan. Would your best friend describe you as a risk taker? If you got $100,000 with instructions to invest it all in just ONE of these options - stocks, a savings account, a mutual fund portfolio of stocks and bonds, or your best friend's start-up - which would you choose? Knowing whether you're very conservative; happy with a little growth; comfortable with some ups and downs; or in for adventure will help you avoid taking financial advice that makes you uncomfortable.

About Luna Jaffe

Luna Jaffe is a Certified Financial Planner™ and Accredited Asset Management Specialist with more than 10 years of financial advising experience. She holds a master's degree in Depth Psychology and a bachelor's in Bilingual Education. Jaffe is a popular speaker whose creative compassionate approach to financial guidance differs sharply from male-oriented approaches. Securities and advisory services offered through KMS Financial Services, Inc.

Experienced Caregiver Warns Those New to Insurance
Coverage: Speak Up

With 11,000 people becoming eligible for Medicare every day and an estimated 25 million Americans expected to gain health insurance through Obamacare on Jan. 1, access to doctors and hospitals will skyrocket.

And while that's a positive, patient advocate Ruth Fenner Barash warns that the U.S. health care system is not the benevolent safety net many people believe it to be. It can be abusive, incompetent, callous toward patients - and worse.

"Patients and their loved ones cannot blindly turn themselves over to this massive, technology-based system and trust that it will care - or take care of them," says Barash, who shares her health-care experiences in a new book, "For Better or Worse: Lurching from Crisis to Crisis in America's Medical Morass," (http://forbetterorworsebook.com/).  The cautionary tale traces the long death of her husband, Philip, through a medical journey fraught with mismanagement and excess, useless interventions and a sometimes complete disregard for pain - even when there was no hope of healing.

"We did experience some wonderful health-care professionals - brilliant, compassionate and helpful people - but they were not the rule," says Barash. "I learned a great deal from our experience, and with so many people now gaining access to health care, I want others to benefit from what I've learned. You can navigate the system; you just have to know how."

Barash offers these suggestions for patients and their loved ones, whether it's a trip to the doctor for a checkup or a diagnosis of a catastrophic illness.

• Avoid the emergency room. Emergency rooms were developed with the idea that few people would use them - most people would see their physician. But as health care costs rose, they became a primary care facility for those without insurance or the money to pay for services out of pocket. "Patients and their families were not expected to spend a long  time in the E.R. - presumably, they would be seen quickly and either admitted to the hospital or treated and released - so they're not designed for comfort," Barash says. "They've become very crowded, especially in cities, and patients might wait for hours sitting in hard plastic chairs in the waiting room. For someone who's sick or injured, this can be torture."

Sick people usually are not isolated, so waiting rooms also teem with germs, she notes.

• Be skeptical - question everything. Too often, we take the first thing we're told as gospel, Barash says. "If you have the luxury of time, take some of that time to think things through, to research and get second opinions," she says. Research your physician's connections. When you're referred to a specialist,  ask why that particular person. If you live in an area with a large academic community, ask around about the physicians and health-care providers with the best reputations. Who has the most experience in a particular niche? Who's doing the most promising research? How many times have you performed this procedure and what is your success rate?

• Ask what it costs - no matter who's paying. Our health-care system is absurd in the number of useless consultations, diagnostic procedures and interventions it foists on patients, Barash says. Whether our  hospital bills are fully covered by Medicare, Medicaid or private insurance, or we're paying a portion ourselves, we must all include cost in our discussions with health-care providers. "Part of the blame for having the most expensive health-care system in the world goes to us, the individuals, who don't question purchases or shop for prices as we would for groceries, clothing, or furniture," Barash says.  "If a test or consultation is ordered, understand why. Is it really necessary? You can say no!"

Finally, Barash says, we all must come to terms with the fact that death is a given. "My husband's problem, and the problem many of us may be doomed to face, is the seemingly endless getting there - a dying we don't want."

About Ruth Fenner Barash

Ruth Fenner Barash studied philosophy at City College of New York and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. In 1958, she met and married Philip Barash, a private practice attorney. She went on to work in public relations and real estate, served education and civic organizations at the executive level, and taught art in various media. Her long marriage was a "harmonious adventure" despite the couple's treacherous journey through the health-care system. Her husband died in 2012.

Instead of Another Mobile Device or Video Game, Consider
Something Lasting from the Heart

Kids get their first cell phone by age 12, and more than a third of them have smart phones. Nine out of 10 teens have a computer and 97 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds play video games. More than half the homes in the United States have a fairly new video game console.

"It's great that our kids have access to technology, but I talk to a lot of grandparents who say they simply don't enjoy giving their grandkids tech gifts during the holiday season," says Ted Bernstein, founder of Life Insurance Concepts, Inc. (www.lifeinsuranceconcepts.com). "They want to give something their grandkids will treasure; something they'll remember for a long time."

That has become more challenging as kids, along with the rest of us, come to rely more and more on technology for everything -- from communication to entertainment to telling the time.

Coming from a four-generation family of life insurance specialists, Bernstein has a special interest in family legacies and a long history of innovation. He offers these suggestions for holiday gifts for grandkids that create lasting memories.

• Their own clunker - which you'll restore together. If you have a grandchild who's still a few years from driving age, buy an old pickup truck that the two of you can restore together. You'll have years to complete the project, which guarantees not only lots of one-on-one time together, but also the opportunity to teach valuable skills that will benefit him or her for a lifetime. "Plan it right, and when your grandchild gets a driver's license, he or she will also have wheels," Bernstein says. "And after spending so much time working on that vehicle, they're more likely to drive it carefully!"

• An annual helping hand for years after you've gone. Imagine being able to send your grandchild a holiday gift of $20,000 every year for 20, 30 or 40 years - with a note from you attached. You can do it with the Installment Life Option, a life insurance policy option that pays beneficiaries of a life insurance policy in predetermined amounts of your choice for up to 40 years. Because of the deferred payout, the insurance company can reduce the premiums up to 50 percent. And your grandchild is reminded of your love for him or her throughout his life, particularly during the financially stressful milestones: college tuition, wedding, paying off student loans, down payment for first home, and first child.

"A lot of the grandparents who do this love the fact that they can continue to help their grandchild long after they're gone," Bernstein says. "They also like the fact that they can choose what date the money is disbursed, whether it's a holiday, a birthday, or a special date significant to the grandparents and grandchild. And they can add a personal note, which can be sent according to the policy holder's instructions."

• The gift of compassion. Sponsor an impoverished child in another country in your grandchild's name. "I like the organizations that allow you to personally connect with the child you sponsor, so your grandchild can write to and receive letters from them, and trade photographs. You can learn about the country together, and pick out gifts for birthday or holiday season," Bernstein says. A grandparent might pay the whole cost of sponsorship or allow the grandchild to pick up a small portion, he adds.

One organization highly rated by independent charity evaluator Charity Navigator is Compassion International. The 61-year-old Christian-based non-profit facilitates 1.2 million sponsorships, providing the children with food, medical care, educational opportunities and more for $38 per month. Sponsors are invited to exchange letters and develop a relationship with the child.

About Ted Bernstein

Ted Bernstein is a third-generation life insurance specialist with decades of speaking out and advocating for changes on behalf of consumers. He was the first to introduce "no-load" life insurance in the mid-1980s and recently developed the Installment Life Option. Bernstein is a nationally recognized expert in alternative distribution strategies and life insurance product development.

Scholar Shares 4 Ways to Get Back on Track
Individually and as a Society

The central branding message of the United States encapsulating freedom, democracy and capitalism is the American Dream, says historian and researcher Merrilyn Richardson.

"Clearly, our country and the world in which it resides have seen better days, but we have a roadmap for getting back on track, and it starts with the individual," says Richardson, author of "You ARE God: The Challenge to Achieve Christ Consciousness in the Modern Era."

"Violence is more than perpetrating physical harm - it can also be mental, emotional and spiritual coercion. The root of the word 'terrorism,' for example, is terror, a mental state. I believe we have been violently coerced, as individuals and as a society, into straying from what is essential to our well-being."

On the individual level, if we are more truthful to ourselves as spiritual beings, we will bring more generosity and kindness into the world every day, she says. On a larger scale, societal obstructions include misguided government policies and agencies at home, dictators abroad, terrorism and deceitful preachers, she says.

Winning back the American Dream starts on the individual level, says Richardson, who provides four ways in which we may be truer to our spiritual nature, and better off as a society:

• Choose to act out of love, not fear. When our true spiritual nature is not dictating our actions, it's readily apparent to any reasonably attuned individual. Various fear-based bad ideas, however, blind individuals and prevent them from connecting cause (fear) and effect (violence, selfishness, etc.) When we make choices that are truly based in love, we are connecting to the good of our souls, which, in turn, connects to the benefit of greater society.

• Use your inner "GPS guidance system" - intuition. Flesh, blood, material possessions and money - these are things you cannot take with you when you die. This should remind us that though money may be necessary in life on Earth, it does not buy happiness, as several studies indicate. Peace and goodwill are the coordinates of our beings that are, sadly, often blocked in today's world. Individuals tend to resist the things they most desire in life - peace and goodwill.

• Embrace suffering as a guide to higher purpose. Often, we are told that suffering is something to be avoided. Pain and suffering on a personal level, however, is an indication that something is wrong. At the same time, there is provided a spiritual healing grace to one's vulnerability. Let this sensation reassure you that there is a pull of purpose within you, and the pain felt can be overcome en route to a life filled with meaning.

• Blend spiritual being-ness with human doing-ness. Euripides, one of Athens' great tragedians from antiquity, wrote, "The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man." Just as our U.S. Constitution includes a system of checks and balances so, too, must each of us establish checks and balances between the spirituality within us and the actions of human beings around us. Living without balance, we risk extremism on the spiritual or worldly level.

About Merrilyn Richardson

Merrilyn Richardson received a degree in journalism from Texas Tech University and was editor of Air Force Bases newspapers. At 89, she has spent decades searching for truth and found that studying spiritual subjects provides a basis for understanding our human condition. Her latest book, "You ARE God: The Challenge to Achieve Christ Consciousness in the Modern Era," is a concise glimpse of American history and other events that have affected individuals worldwide. She is a founding member of the Center for Spiritual Living in Midland, Texas. Her two previous books were "Initiation of the Master"  and "The Master's Quest, an End to Terrorism."