Dad died nearly a year ago: I'm still grappling with his personal finances

This is an audio transcript of the Money Clinic podcast episode: ‘Dad died nearly a year ago — I’m still grappling with his personal finances’

Claer Barrett
(Knocking) Hefty door knocker.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I’ve travelled over to west London this morning to visit the home of my FT colleague, Miranda Green. You’ll probably recognise her voice from our Political Fix podcast. But the reason I’ve come here is because there’s a big financial problem in Miranda’s life right now. It’s taking up a lot of room inside her house, and she’d like me to see it.

(Door opening) Hello. How are you?

Miranda Green
Hi. Come in here . . . Not too bad . . . Yeah. Yeah. Please come in . . . Don’t look down. There’s stuff everywhere. Would you like a cup of tea guys?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Claer Barrett
So armed with a cuppa, we decided to settle ourselves down in Miranda’s sitting room.

Miranda Green
So do you want to see the bag? The famous Tesco bag full of terrible, terrible admin.

Claer Barrett
Yeah. I would really like to see.

Miranda Green
This is my dad. Look. So this is my lovely daddy, and my mum and me in Texas in 1982.

Claer Barrett
I was gonna say, in fancy dress. I was trying to work out how old it was.

Miranda Green
You know, you can go into these Wild West places, and they have the old Victorian cameras, and you dress up. So there’s my dad, look, pretending to be like a fierce guy or something. So anyway, look at my mum. My God, the woman said, lady, I think we discovered the real you. (Laughter)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Claer Barrett
Welcome to Money Clinic, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times about personal finance and investing. I’m Claer Barrett, the FT’s consumer editor.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When a beloved family member dies, the grief is overwhelming. But what you perhaps don’t expect is a massive layer of added stress when it comes to sorting out the finances of the person you’ve lost. There’s even a word for it — “sadmin”. The bureaucracy you have to wave through when a loved one dies, and more often than not, I’m afraid, it’s torturous. This episode and the next will be packed with advice on how to get through this and the conversations we should be having with our loved ones about money while we’re still alive. Plus, we’re going to find out what the banking and finance industry is doing to make things better for bereaved families. But first, let’s go back to Miranda and the task that confronted her after her father died. She’d obtained copies of her dad’s death certificate and was named as the executor on her parent’s will. But even armed with these crucial documents, things turned out to be more complicated than Miranda thought.

Miranda Green
(Rummaging noise) This pile, this pile here is the main stuff I’m trying to deal with at the moment.

Claer Barrett
And this is eight months on?

Miranda Green
This is eight months, yes, eight months on. He died in December, mid-December 2022.

Claer Barrett
So that’s about six inches-high stacks in a Tesco bag on a box file.

Miranda Green
Yeah, at my mum’s flat, there’s obviously another two, three drawers full of stuff which I haven’t yet been able to go through. But this is sort of me extracting the most urgent things and the things which it seemed to me were key to get on top of.

Claer Barrett
When you started doing this, did you for a moment think that you would still be doing it a year later?

Miranda Green
I didn’t think I would be doing it for this long because I knew that my mum and dad didn’t have complicated financial affairs, right? So I’d heard warnings from others saying, oh God, probate, that can take, you know, a year, two years, three years. But I knew there was nothing weird about my mum’s and dad’s set-up.

Claer Barrett
Yeah. They’re not fantastically wealthy?

Miranda Green
They’re not fantastically wealthy.

Claer Barrett
And were there any things that your dad had, like shares or any other accounts that you were surprised to learn about?

Miranda Green
There is nothing weird about my dad’s affairs. It was an incredibly sort of vanilla financial existence, you know. Like many people of their generation, they had one main asset, their flat. They downsized already. All of the money they’d made on selling their house, the family house, went on care fees because my dad had to have care three times a day for his dementia. Two people who’ve been married for 62 years — you know, where would the complication come in? But it turns out that was really, really rash assumption.

Claer Barrett
And you took this on because your mum just couldn’t face dealing with it because of the grief or . . . tell me about that.

Miranda Green
So my mum’s 89. My father had dementia, and then he had a stroke. So he was in a really bad way for the last four years of his life.

Claer Barrett
And she bore the brunt of that.

Miranda Green
Absolutely. My dad was in a hospital bed in the front room for four years, right. So my mum’s been around-the-clock care for him. When he died, she just needed to recover herself. And she and I were joint executors of the will. I’m an only child. There wasn’t anyone else in London, you know, so it becomes a sort of . . . it becomes a sort of solo crusade at that point.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Claer Barrett
Miranda found herself immersed in “sadmin”, or as she prefers to call it, “dadmin”. She says her dad would have appreciated the gallows humour.

Miranda Green
I mean, if you’re not gonna laugh, you cry, right? You have so many emotions, and there’s so many things to deal with. It’s the bank accounts, the savings accounts, the state pension, the private pension, insurance companies, utilities, charities even, you know. Anything that was in his name or had his name on the account, it becomes a kind of many-headed monster, you know. Somebody warned me, actually, this is quite right, they said, only try and do one thing a day because that one phone call will turn into another three or four phone calls. And before you even know what’s happened, that’s your day gone. So anyone who’s in this situation, I would say, you know, go slowly, make a plan, deal with the most difficult things first. But don’t expect to get easy solutions even to something that seems quite straightforward, like cancelling a bank account. And of course there’s the sort of stress of doing that while you’re grieving and trying to look after the surviving spouse, in my case, my mum. But also, you know, there are little things which I really sympathise to any of our listeners who are going through a similar experience because obviously you’re going through someone’s paperwork, and it’s their handwriting, things like that. It’s quite a strange experience you find yourself. It does hit the buttons. You can go into cool, calm and collected bureaucratic mode for a certain amount of time, and then you’ll find it just hits you again. And so, again, you know, you can be quite efficient sorting some of it out. And then you just have to give yourself a break.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Claer Barrett
As Miranda painstakingly made her way through her to-do list, she found the journey was made harder by the patchy quality of help at the other end of the phone. She had to contact all of the companies that her dad was a financial customer of and inform them that he had died. For products like savings accounts and pensions, any money in these would have to come back into his estate. But for joint accounts, credit cards and other utility bills, the accounts needed to stay open but be transferred into her mum’s name. And as you know, Miranda’s mum is 89. She’s making the massive adjustment to life without her husband. And at the same time, she’s being bombarded with all the “sadmin” Miranda hasn’t managed to intercept. And there’s a limit to what she can do herself online.

Miranda Green
Even the companies like banks, which have a bereavement department — great they have that, that’s progress — but you can have a very different experience if you phone one person on the Monday, and they can’t sort it out for you. You take a deep breath, have several cups of tea, decide to park it. You phone back the next week, you get somebody else, and they find a way to help you. You know, so again, I think it’s partly to do with the training of who they’re recruiting to those departments to make sure that their attitude is, I’ve got a bereaved person on the phone. I need to find a way to help them resolve this issue because I know they’ve got 25 other things on their to-do list.

Claer Barrett
I suppose looking at this callously, these companies that are not investing in systems or staff training to deal with bereaved customers or the bereaved relatives of former customers, there’s no financial incentive for them to invest money in sorting this out because their customer is deceased. This is just sort of tidying up the loose ends. So they’re clearly not making it a priority because it’s not a profit-generating activity. Do you feel that that is the case, given your experiences with all of these different financial companies, utility companies, phone companies?

Miranda Green
I would say there’s a huge difference and variability in the way they respond in, for example, with the bank when I got through to a really nice woman at the bereavement service who finally closed the loop for me, she was fantastic. And you can’t tell whether that’s the training, or she’s just an empathetic and efficient person who was very professional. But some of them, you do feel that you’re talking to a faceless bureaucracy that no longer cares because that person isn’t gonna take their business elsewhere, right? They’re already dead. And I thought that was particularly true, actually, with the private pension provider, who was very keen to inform me that there’d been an overpayment, you know, within minutes of me informing them that I just lost my father. Really . . . 

Claer Barrett
So they were asking you for money back?

Miranda Green
Yeah. Absolutely. Within almost on the initial phone call to notify them that my dad was dead. I mean, really, that person either needs better training or to be in a different role, I would say. But you’re, you are right, Claer. It’s clear that there’s no obvious financial incentive to look after the customers anymore because they’ve died. But it’s pretty bad PR for your company, I would say, if you’re sending so many people away with a bad taste in their mouth, having had to deal with you when they’re very, very vulnerable and feeling emotionally exposed. Some of those companies are not gonna get repeat business from that family again.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Claer Barrett
After several months of phone calls and form filling, Miranda wrote about her experiences in the Financial Times. She called “sadmin” the side hustle that nobody wants. And hundreds of FT readers responded with similar stories, showing just how widespread this problem is. Here’s a taste of what they had to say.

Reader 1
After my dad died and I was dealing with his not very complicated affairs, the institutions I had to interact with behaved as if no one had ever died before. Good luck.

Reader 2
Your article in today’s FT struck a very strong chord with me, as I, too, lost my father just before Christmas. Since then, I’ve been trying to pay back an overpayment of his works pension, the last thing I need to do to be able to finalise his estate. I am now waiting for yet another callback from a bereavement section team leader, which I’m told could come tomorrow, but then again, it could be Wednesday. Ye gods and little fishes, what are you supposed to do? I’m trying to repay money, not demand it with menaces. Thank you for your article. It’s nice to know I am not alone.

Reader 3
Dear Miranda, thank you for your “sadmin”/ “dadmin” piece. My sister and I have been dealing with all of the matters you describe following the death of our dear dad last year. And there is comfort in reading your piece. Hopefully, if enough voices raise this horrible situation, then it will one day be resolved. I hope that the sun comes out for you and your family in 2023, which is, I’m certain, what both of our dads want for us.

Claer Barrett
All the emails were heartfelt, but some went into even more detail about the barriers to getting “sadmin” completed, as Miranda explains.

Miranda Green
Some of the FT readers who got in touch had horrific stories about dealing particularly with the utility companies, because, of course, if you phone up and you’re not the person on the bills, you’re not the registered user of the mobile phone, for example, or even the person who’s on the account for the electricity or the gas, they’re very suspicious because who are you phoning up? And it’s really difficult to actually close down the account or get the name changed on an account if you’re not the user. But of course, it’s ridiculous. I mean, one FT reader said to me that they kept being asked, Well, can you put them on the phone? You know, I mean, of course you can’t put them on the phone. They’re dead. That’s why you’re calling, you know, I mean, you have to see the funny side of some of these conversations, but it’s extremely stressful for people dealing with that.

Claer Barrett
But also the utility companies must know death is a fact of life. Well, you know, why don’t they have a get a better policy, a better customer journey, as they call it, within these institutions of dealing with that kind of call, a specialist team, you know? It’s not that difficult.

Miranda Green
The training really does need to be improved. But I think also there’s a, there’s a sort of, you know, blanket security policies where they have to check who it is on the phone. You need to have a way of diverting that call to the specialists who can deal with it when it’s following a death, because, you know, it’s not possible to speak to the named client for very, very obvious reasons.

Claer Barrett
And then with all of these phone calls, you’re trying to get a resolution, which is normally for an account to be closed down. Gosh, I mean, there just seem to be so many hurdles to jump through with this. I mean, I hate to ask, Miranda, can you envisage a time when all of this is finished, where the bag on the floor next to the shredder is gonna have nearly all of the stuff in it?

Miranda Green
I would love to think that everything in this pile here in front of me, which is still the “dadmin” pile is going to that pile over there, which is the shredding pile. It will happen. I’m sure it will happen.

Claer Barrett
I mean, do you feel that you’ve had to put some of your own grief on hold to deal with this? Because, I mean, this is like a full-time job, as you said in your piece.

Miranda Green
I think it complicates the grieving process, actually. And I was really interested when we got such an overwhelming response from FT readers to the piece. Some people said in the early stages it helps to have admin to do because it takes your mind off the grief.

Claer Barrett
It’s a distraction.

Miranda Green
Yeah, and some people said, it really, really complicated their grieving process. One reader wrote in who’d lost her sister. And she felt that the difficulties of trying to tie up all her sister’s affairs had really been a huge problem for her emotionally because it meant she hadn’t been able to process her feelings about losing her sister. And that shouldn’t be happening to people, really.

Claer Barrett
No. What else did FT readers tell you? Because you had an absolute barrage of the emails and letters after your piece was published in April.

Miranda Green
A lot of people wrote in to say, just very simply, this really struck a chord. I went through this. It’s hell. Good luck. Prepare for the long haul, which is really sweet of them but also not that reassuring given the long haul comment. And a lot of people had very specific, terrible experiences to report, either of telephone lines being really unhelpful and obstructive when they were trying to tie up loose ends or financial firms being unresponsive and unhelpful. And there were some quite bad individual stories of things still going on years later.

Claer Barrett
Years later?

Miranda Green
Years later in some cases, yeah.

Claer Barrett
What would your message be to financial companies, people who work for the banks, for insurers, you know, for the financial regulators who listen to the podcast? What would you like to tell them about the horror of going through this process and what they need to do to make it better for people?

Miranda Green
I would like to applaud those private sector financial companies that already have a bereavement line or bereavement department. Some of the utilities don’t seem to have that. And so you’re just through to a general call centre where people are telling you to have a nice day, which is really not what you want in those situations.

Claer Barrett
Oh gosh. Is there anything else that you wish you’d known at the beginning of this process that you’ve learned through (paper rustling) hours of dealing with the “dadmin”?

Miranda Green
If there had been a single place where I could have kind of organised his affairs and indeed mum’s, the surviving spouse, her affairs as well, because, unfortunately, let’s face it, I’ll probably have to go through this process again for mum, then it would have been much easier to sort of tick off and make sure all of these financial institutions were informed and that there was an actual sort of resolution. Because the problem is that you start these hares running by notifying of a death. And then some of it gets followed through, some of it doesn’t get followed through. The next time you phone up, they haven’t sent the form, or they have sent the form to his address rather than mine.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Claer Barrett
There was one breakthrough for Miranda in this gruelling process. She was pleasantly surprised to discover the public sector has beaten the private sector to the introduction of a simpler system.

Miranda Green
I think, really, there’s a very good example of what we need to happen, which is that the government side of things, over a number of years and going through a very complicated process, turns out to have come up with an excellent service called Tell Us Once.

Claer Barrett
Tell Us Once.

Miranda Green
Tell Us Once, and it’s on the GOV.UK website. When you go to formally register the death, which you have to do in person because of obviously ID theft concerns, that government representative in the local council office where you registered the death gives you a one-time code. You go home. You tick all the government departments you want to be notified of the death, and that’s passport, that’s HMRC, that’s the benefits office, that’s council tax . . .

Claer Barrett
Department for Work and Pensions.

Miranda Green
DWP for benefits, exactly. Almost everything you can think of. If you’ve been in the armed services, it can also notify the armed services pension people. All of that. Driver’s license even. And then you sort of send that in to the system, and it spreads out all the tentacles of the state and tells everybody that one time. The private sector and the financial institutions don’t have a centralised system. I think they really need to look at this.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Claer Barrett
Sitting with Miranda and hearing about her experiences really brought home to me how many people there are who turn up in the office every day, do a brilliant job, as she does, and then have to go home to deal with all of this stuff. Their colleagues probably have got no idea about how hard this is and just feels so needless. We’ve heard from Miranda that the public sector has stepped up. So I wanted to find out why can’t the private sector do a better job? Eric Leenders is the director of personal finance at UK Finance, the trade body that represents around 300 financial services organisations. I started off by asking him what his organisation is doing to make Miranda’s life and the life of millions of bereaved people like her get easier.

Eric Leenders
In my experience, I think that bereavement is probably one of the most difficult thing that financial services staff need to face, and we felt it’s very important that we support the industry by providing industry standards in a number of areas.

Claer Barrett
So tell me more about the minimum standard of care that UK Finance thinks the banks should provide customers and relatives who are left behind.

Eric Leenders
Yeah. The, I guess the main thrust of the work that we have been doing probably goes back several years to the standards that we felt were appropriate that included ensuring that there were, there was the right level of expertise, the experience, and certainly, it is very important given the emotions involved, that there was a degree of empathy, the right bedside manner, if you will.

Claer Barrett
Now, a cynical person might say, well, why should the banks divert their hard-earned profits into providing a better experience for customers who’ve been bereaved because after all, they’re customers at one remove, they’re not the person whose name is on the bank account. Are they really worth investing in? Will this be a good use of money, making people feel better about that bank? Will they be more likely to use them in the future or less likely if they have a bad experience?

Eric Leenders
So certainly at the human level, I think it’s important that across financial services, we treat all customers in particularly difficult circumstances that clearly they’ll be vulnerable, at least emotionally, with the right degree of professionalism. And I think that’s regardless of whether that relationship is ongoing or not. We need to consider, of course, that somewhere within financial services, those that are dealing with the bereavement will himself be involved in the industry. So actually, I think our reputation is very important and the industry demonstrates that it does support customers through bereavement, and that it has trained and professional staff that are empathetic to the situation that those that are dealing with a bereavement are facing into.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Claer Barrett
And a footnote to that, after talking to Miranda, I went away and looked at what the Consumer Duty, the financial regulator’s new rules for financial services firms, had to say on this. They were quite explicit about it. The guidance says companies should provide the same level of support to that person trying to close the account as they would have provided to the customer. And the customer should not face unreasonable barriers when trying to act on behalf of relatives. Now, the financial services sector does already have a very useful scheme called My Lost Account, which helps customers of any bank who’ve lost track of accounts to be reunited with their cash. But could this go further? Eric says UK Finance has taken some inspiration from the government’s Tell Us Once initiative and is introducing its own version of it.

Eric Leenders
So we know that an average executive or administrator will probably have to deal with something on the order of about 21 organisations. And if we try to extrapolate some time spent on that, it’s likely to be around five hours. And that obviously is repeating the message some 21 times.

Claer Barrett
So is that five hours per organisation?

Eric Leenders
I’d like to think that would be five hours in aggregate. Well, I think sometimes it can feel as though a repetition of the messaging makes the clock perhaps drag a little slowly. So that’s part of the reason the provenance for our Death Notification Service, the equivalent of the Tell Us Once public sector initiative. And, you know, it’s used a lot. I think in the last six months or so, over 60,000 notifications have been made through the Death Notification Service. And since it’s launch four or five years ago, we’re getting approaching something like 420,000-430,000 notifications across the service to date.

Claer Barrett
And how could listeners go about using the Death Notification Service? Because certainly that’s something that Miranda didn’t find in the course of the “sadmin” she’s been carrying out for her late father.

Eric Leenders
So it’s only a Google away, or for those that are less digitally confident, and I would encourage the customer dealing with a bereavement to speak to the bank, and certainly if it’s one of the participating banks, to ask them about the Death Notification Service, confirm that they’d be happy for the brand concerned to use it, and their bank would be able to support them with that.

Claer Barrett
And roughly, how many banks are members of this service, and do you think that could expand in the future?

Eric Leenders
So there’s some 35 member organisations currently and obviously very happy to broaden or expand that. I think the requirements of Consumer Duty might encourage some other firms to participate.

Claer Barrett
And I suppose it’s a vain hope that this could be expanded to include other financial services providers as well as banks and lenders. Could it ever go in to the worlds of insurance, other parts of the industry or such is gonna be too hard to connect all the dots?

Eric Leenders
I think that the answer is probably in time. I think certainly there are things that we can do within the banking industry, perhaps, to your point, to encourage more participant firms. Certainly, you know, there’s a significant number of building societies, smaller banks out there. And it’s surprising actually, to find that actually customers do shop around, and they do perhaps leave money with institutions that aren’t immediately familiar. Long gone, I think, are the days where everyone had all of their financial affairs with perhaps one large provider.

Claer Barrett
Well, and of course, Miranda, as her father was older, he had paperwork. So she had a pile of paper that she could look through that provided all of the clues for where these different accounts were. Whereas, if it was me, everything that I do with banking is online. I might have a plastic card tucked away somewhere, but that would be it. Unless she can crack in to my phone or apps or emails, you wouldn’t know what money I’ve got where.

Eric Leenders
Well, that is, I think, a slightly separate challenge and certainly something that I don’t know that I have the ready answer to.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Claer Barrett
None of us want to think about our own death and even less about what happens after somebody we love has died. But going back to Miranda, I wondered whether her experiences of the bureaucracy that accompanies death had forced her to think differently.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

How might all of this alter how you deal with your own financial affairs? Because people who read your articles will know you’re a cancer survivor. You’ve survived a brush with death. Has it made you think very differently about how all of your paperwork is organised? I can notice there are lots of other shelves in here with very neat and tidy coloured folders and . . . 

Miranda Green
It’s quite revealing though, isn’t it? The ones that are neat and tidy are not the ones that are in use. The ones that are in use are the mess. I think it’s actually really important for everyone to think about how much more complicated our finances are now than previous generations. All of these different pensions, sort of hangovers from the jobs that people pass through, open accounts all over the place. I mean, how many times have we all opened accounts for some sort of service and either sort of let it hang or close them without sort of properly disappearing from their system? It’s all very well like just sort of putting those emails into a junk folder. But actually we should probably go around closing down things that are not relevant in the interests of all surviving relatives so they don’t have to clear up after us.

Claer Barrett
Next time, we’re gonna hear more from Miranda about some of the alarming financial discoveries she made after her dad died and how she dealt with them.

Miranda Green
So I found out their microwave was insured, and their heating system was insured. And their boiler was insured. Their oven was insured as well as the household contents are insured.

Claer Barrett
Completely needless insurance policies . . .

Miranda Green
This is the thing . . . 

Claer Barrett
Plus, I’ll be putting more of her questions to the powers that be.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

That’s it for Money Clinic this week. We know that “sadmin” isn’t an easy topic to talk about, but we hope that you found this episode useful. If you’d like to share your own experiences with us, then please email me. Our address is money@ft.com. We always love to hear from our listeners. And you can find links in today’s show notes to some of the organisations and help services that we’ve mentioned.

This edition of Money Clinic was presented by me, Claer Barrett, and produced by Philippa Goodrich and Laurence Knight. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. And sound design is by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of podcasts. And very special thanks to Miranda Green for letting us in to her life. See you again next week. Goodbye.