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Hey everyone and welcome to the Big Picture Retirement Show,

where we deliver insight on what you need to know for a meaningful retirement.

If you are planning for or living in retirement, this is the show for you.

Yes, it is.

John?

Howdy.

We get to do listener questions again.

Yep.

Exciting times.

I love these questions.

People send these to us and now we know what they want to know and we're not guessing about what they want to know. And we get to talk directly to them and benefit some other folks at the same time. That's right. Although it's odd because sometimes people will ask a question and what you don't really know is why they're asking the question. The context is missing sometimes. Yeah, the context is missing. And I can understand some of this stuff is probably

pretty personal, kind of like the one that we got here, this first one, from Don. And again,

we're just talking about a one sentence. Right. Just one sentence. Yep. And the one sentence is,

may I disinherit my spouse? Oh, the story's behind that. And so, you know, who knows what the situation is? And I know before we were, as we were kind of getting ready for the episode, you were like, why in the world would anybody disinherit their spouse? And you said, oh, there's lots of reasons. And I said, yeah, sure, there's lots of reasons. And, you know, probably the most common, at least the one that I deal with is,

you know, let's say that Don's wife here has advanced Alzheimer's. So he's her caregiver at this point,

right? Yep. So he's, he's doing everything for her. He also then knows that if he dies before her and leaves her

behind, she has no way of managing her affairs, has no way of managing the money, has no way of

doing any of that. So maybe he's asking, look, can I just leave this to my kids instead of my wife? Yeah. So it may be something like that. Could be. Yeah. No, it could be like one case I had where this man had brain cancer. It was terminal brain cancer. He was going to die. There was really no question about it. They had given him a moment, you know, they didn't know for sure, as they never do, you know, but six months, year, something like that, you know. And he's in his 80s. He's been married for, you know, a long time, 30 or 40 years. It was a second marriage, but it was a 30-year second marriage, you know. Anyway, sits down at the computer one day and his wife had forgotten to close out the email where she and another man were planning a vacation once he died. Oh, man. Oh. So his reason for

wanting to disinherit his wife was significantly different. You know, so there could be perfectly

legitimate reasons. There could be unfortunate reasons. Right. Regardless. But regardless of the underlying reason, the question is, can you do it?

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