Money Box Live: The 'Sadmin' of Bereavement

Money Box

BBC

Business

4.2 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Earlier this spring the Financial Conduct Authority warned that some banks and firms lack empathy when dealing with bereaved customers and called for them to do more.

Money Box Live received a huge response from our listeners when we covered the story, with emails from listeners about how they coped with their grief while managing finances following the death of a loved one.

Felicity Hannah is joined by lawyer Gary Rycroft and Sarah Middlemiss, from the end of life charity Marie Curie, to answer those questions and hear those experiences.

Presenter: Felicity Hannah Producer: Catherine Lund and Sarah Rogers Editor: Jess Quayle

(This episode was first broadcast at 3pm on Radio 4 on the 14th of May 2025)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:04.9	Hello, in today's Moneybox Live podcast, we're talking about how the death of a loved one can have a huge impact on your emotions, on your routines, but also on your finances.
0:15.8	On top of the wave of grief, they can feel like a tsunami of admin, urgent tasks that need completing,
0:22.7	even when all you want to do is come to terms with your loss. And it doesn't help if the
0:27.2	companies you're dealing with are difficult. It's always that question of, can I speak to the
0:33.3	billholder? I can't talk to you. I need to talk to them. I'm like, but he's dead.
0:39.1	We'll hear more from Karen in just a moment. But earlier this spring, the Financial Conduct
0:43.8	Authority warned that some banks and building societies lack empathy when dealing with
0:49.2	bereaved customers, and it called for them to do more. Now, when Moneybox covered that,
0:53.8	it led to an outpouring of emails and messages from our listeners about their experiences sorting out the financial side of their loss. So we're dedicating today's podcast to looking at the finances of a bereavement and how to navigate those difficult areas during a difficult time.
1:14.7	There's lots to talk about, but we're going to start the program hearing from Karen.
1:18.9	Her husband, Ben, died just a few weeks before his 40th birthday,
1:22.6	leaving her with two young children, then aged one and four.
1:27.7	I just want to flag that some people might find this quite a difficult story to listen to,
1:30.2	but we felt it was really important. Here she is.
1:35.2	And we had this amazing life. It wasn't, I'm going to say, easy in inverted commas.
1:36.8	It wasn't like, you know what I mean, perfect.
1:41.0	But we had each other and that was what mattered to us. And you had one young child and one on the way when you found out that he was ill?
1:45.8	Yes. He was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer when I was six months pregnant with our youngest.
1:54.1	It was quite a traumatic, well, 18 months, two years from diagnosis to when he unfortunately died.
2:03.4	His death wasn't just very young. When it actually came, it was very sudden. Can you tell me what happened?
2:09.3	He was 39 when he died. It was just three weeks before his 40th birthday.
	...

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