Planning for Single Retirees — Part 4: Long-Term Care, Incapacity, and Estate Planning
Big Picture Retirement®
Devin Carroll
4.7 • 545 Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2026
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this last episode of our Planning for Single Retirees series, we tackle the part of retirement planning that matters most when you don't have a built-in safety net: what happens if you can't manage life or money on your own.
Today, John is joined by estate planning attorney Lisa Shoalmire to walk through the real-world planning issues facing "senior orphans," including how to set up financial and medical decision-makers, what to do if you don't have a trusted family member, and how bank agency accounts and professional care managers can step in when needed. They also cover how isolation increases the risk of scams and exploitation, why consolidating accounts and simplifying your finances matters more as you age, and the estate planning details single retirees should get right now—from probate choices to charitable bequests and protections against bad actors.
If you're single, widowed, divorced, or simply planning without a spouse you can rely on, this episode is about protecting your independence, your dignity, and your plan—before a crisis forces decisions for you.
Although this show does not provide specific tax, legal, or financial advice, you can engage Devin or John through their individual firms.
📍Contact Devin's team at https://carrolladvisory.co/podcast1
📍Contact John's team at https://www.rossandshoalmire.com/
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Don't miss the Big Picture Retirement Planning Cheat Sheet. We've distilled the essential brackets, thresholds, and rules of retirement into an easy-to-digest, three-page summary. https://www.carrolladvisory.com/pl/2148282517
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Big Picture Retirement Show does not provide tax, legal, or financial advice. |
| 0:04.3 | Listeners are encouraged to seek out their own advisors in these areas. |
| 0:07.3 | Hey, everybody. This is John Ross and welcome to the Big Picture Retirement Show. |
| 0:11.7 | You know, normally, Devin does the intro. |
| 0:13.8 | Devin always does the intro so that he can then pass it over to me for the howdy. |
| 0:19.2 | But we don't get that today because as promised in the first |
| 0:23.0 | segment of this four-part planning for singles, I suggested that I bring on none other than |
| 0:32.3 | Lisa Schulmeyer and she is here in the studio with me. So welcome, Lisa. All right. I think it's my |
| 0:39.3 | inaugural visit to the Big Picture Retirement podcast. It is. And we were just talking about it. It's like |
| 0:47.4 | getting the band back together because you and I did seven years of live talk radio on our local Fox affiliate on aging insight. |
| 1:03.3 | Yes, seven years of showing up at, you know, the old school radio station at noon on Saturdays for an hour-long call-in show on a lot of the same |
| 1:14.6 | topics that you and Devin cover on Big Picture Retirement. |
| 1:18.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:18.6 | Yeah. |
| 1:18.9 | No. |
| 1:19.4 | And of course, we would, that was live call-in. |
| 1:22.6 | And so we would get the, we would get the call-ins. |
| 1:25.7 | And this was not like, there was no screener. Right. We had no |
| 1:29.7 | producer. So luckily in all those seven years, you know, we, we never had a frustrated |
| 1:37.2 | client or anything call and berate us for some failing. I would like to think that's because we had none of those out there. |
| 1:46.0 | Yeah. But occasionally, you certainly would get a very colorful collar, which had amazing |
| 1:52.9 | circumstances. I remember one gentleman's name was Mr. Stonewall Johnson, I believe. |
... |
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