Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Hi and welcome to the Longview. I'm Amy Arnott, portfolio strategist for Morning Star.

And I'm Ben Johnson, head of client solutions with Morning Star.

Our guest on the podcast today is Sally Balch Hermie.

Sally is the author of Checklists for My Family,

a guide to my history, financial plans, and final wishes, as well as several other books. She worked

at AARP for 23 years and has written more than 20 law review articles on topics related to

elder law. She has also served on the

boards of the National Guardianship Association and the Center for Guardianship Certification,

where she helped develop standards for guardians and reform guardianship policies and procedures.

Before moving to AARP, she was a partner in a private law firm and held several other legal roles.

She also served as an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Law School teaching elder law for eight years.

She received her BA from Tulane University and her J.D. Cum Laude from the Washington College of

Law at American University. Sally, welcome to the Longview. I'm glad to be here. Well, thank you so

much for joining us. We wanted to focus mainly on your book, Checklist for My Family, A Guide to My History, Financial Plans, and Final Wishes.

But before we get into that, we wanted to start out with some background on the work you've done and how you first started getting interested in this area.

Can you give us a quick overview of your career and how you first started getting interested in this area. Can you give us a quick overview of your career

and how you first became interested in working on elder issues as an attorney and legal advocate?

And how did that kind of transition into writing a series of these checklist books for the American Bar Association and AARP?

Well, I've been practicing elder law for almost 50 years now, and you might consider me somewhat of a pioneer because there were not a lot of women

lawyers back then, and the practice of elder law was really in its infancy. My advocacy really has

evolved over time. It began with being a legal services attorney and then working for the American Bar Association

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