Good Neighbor Podcast South Charlotte
Bringing Together Local Businesses and Neighbors of South Charlotte.
Good Neighbor Podcast South Charlotte
Ep # 144 Trust, Care, Loyalty: The Fiduciary Solution for Solo Agers
What happens when there's no one to manage your finances as you age? This question haunts millions of Americans aging without traditional family support networks.
Jennifer Szakaly, co-founder of Silverstone Financial Fiduciary, reveals how her decades of gerontology experience led to creating a solution for this growing demographic crisis. With the fastest-growing segment of older adults being those without children or family support, Jennifer identified a critical gap in elder care services – professional fiduciaries who can serve as financial power of attorney agents.
The conversation delves into the practical challenges solo agers face: unopened mail piling up, utilities being disconnected due to unpaid bills, and vulnerability to financial scams. Jennifer explains how Silverstone bridges this gap through a fiduciary relationship built on trust, care, and loyalty, working alongside existing financial advisors and CPAs rather than replacing them. Her partnership with Philip Markson combines her care management expertise with his financial acumen to create a service that helps prevent court-appointed guardianship – a situation that strips individuals of their rights and should be "avoided at all costs."
Most compelling is Jennifer's insight into the psychology of aging: "We just don't want to believe that, as we age, we're ever going to get to a point where we can't do something ourselves." This denial leads many to delay critical planning until it's too late. For adult children living far from aging parents, Silverstone provides peace of mind through local oversight and coordination of services.
Whether you're planning your own solo aging journey or supporting an aging loved one, this episode offers crucial insights into protecting financial independence and dignity through professional fiduciary services. Visit SilverstoneFF.com to learn how professional financial fiduciaries can provide the support network many Americans increasingly need.
Silverstone Financial Fiduciary
Jennifer Szakaly
704-749-3118
6135 Park South Drive, Suite 510, Charlotte, NC 28210
inquiry@silverstoneff.com
silverstoneff.com
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Regina Lee.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast. Here in Charlotte, north Carolina, my favorite thing to do is talk to local business owners, and today I have with me Jennifer Szakaly. Jennifer, I met you many years ago and I know you are now the co-founder of Silverstone Financial Fiduciary Welcome.
Speaker 3:Yes, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I happened to do a podcast a month ago with your co-founding partner, philip Markson, and I guess this has all come about since that podcast. So tell us what Silverstone Financial Judiciary is.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, this has been a new business that we're excited about, that we've just started in the last few months.
Speaker 3:So Silverstone is an organization that people can appoint in their documents to serve as agent under a financial power of attorney. So as people age, they're generally aware of the fact that they need to have a healthcare power of attorney in place and a durable or financial power of attorney. Really, any adult over 18 needs to have these documents in place. But as you're aging, you tend to think about the people that are around you a spouse, adult, children, that sort of thing and increasingly the fastest growing kind of sub group of older adults in our society right now are the people who are child free, single, never married, widowed or estranged from family. And if you look at all of those people, they're having to create kind of a chosen family and really build community around them. And there's two kind of important pieces where they really need to make sure they've got support and one of those is making sure that they can identify a person or an organization who can serve as that financial power of attorney. So we created Silverstone to meet that need.
Speaker 2:So in visiting your website, you come with a lot, a lot of experience. Tell us a little bit about this journey. Tell us a little bit about this journey, and you know what you mentioned is you guys identified a gap that existed in this whole caregiving profession.
Speaker 3:So share us, your share the journey, yes, yes. So I'll re quickly recap the last maybe 25 years. I have a master's degree in gerontology, and so I've always had jobs within the aging industry, and 20 years ago, I started Caregiving Corner, which is a care management company, and we were increasingly asked if we would be willing to serve as healthcare power of attorney in our capacity, as you know, as care manager and with Caregiving Corner, and we began to see kind of the signs of that population that I was just talking about, people that are solo, aging and that really need to have professional services that they can rely on. The issue, though, is that, as care managers, we can't also do the financial piece, and so Caregiving Corner has only really ever been able to step in and help with the health care power of attorney, but every time we had attorneys that were calling us, saying I've got a client for you who needs to be in your solo senior program. They need you to be health care power of attorney. Do you know anybody that can do the financial power of attorney piece? We didn't have anything, and so Philip and I started talking about some business ideas and ways that we could work more closely, and I mentioned it to him because this is definitely up his alley. He's got a Harvard MBA financial background and so I kind of put this in front of him as an opportunity for us to partner, where I could kind of develop the program and connect Silverstone with all of the right people that need to know about this offering, and then Philip is kind of running the day-to-day of the business. So it's been a great partnership and, just as we suspected, it has really, really taken off.
Speaker 3:But it's something that you know over the years, as I became, you know, certified care manager and then later as a guardian, I'm very active in the National Guardianship Association.
Speaker 3:You know, one of the components of guardianship can sometimes be that a person finds themselves under guardianship because they never had these documents in place, and so that's really an opportunity that as soon as I started getting involved with the National Guardianship Association and became certified with them and I'm now a national master guardian, national Master Guardian I really saw this as an opportunity to do something profound to possibly change the trajectory of there even being as people that are in guardianship situations. And, of course, if you're under guardianship, your rights have been taken away from you and the court is assigning someone to be responsible, so it's something that should be avoided at all costs. But what Silverstone does was kind of the missing piece that we still needed. So I was so excited that Philip was interested and eager to look to see where this went, and we have just had a tremendous amount of success, you know, in enrolling people just in the very short amount of time that we've been open. So it's very exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when is the perfect time, in your opinion, to think about this? Because you're not replacing the financial planner or CPA or the attorney that does your wills and estates. You're just are you the bridge between that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we kind of are, you know. So, as people, you know the most basic need that people have, that they start to struggle with is keeping up with their bills, paying bills. You know if you've got a senior who's living at home alone, they're managing their household expenses. You know bills are coming in. They might have had the opportunity to set up, you know, auto, auto pay, but but maybe something's kind of gone awry with accounts or something like that. They're starting to be utilities turned off, that sort of thing that's pretty common for us to see.
Speaker 3:And you know that is just a person that probably needs some assistance, somebody to come alongside them and manage the bills, stay on top of everything, make sure that things are being paid and perhaps even also you know sign contracts if they're starting to use care services, if they are starting to use meal prep services to be able to stay at home independently. You know, all of the different services that you need later in life come with contracts and not everybody has a family member that's going to step in and be the person that signs the contract. So I would say, you know, it's never too early to be thinking about it. We have found that the people that are going to be solo agers already kind of know that pretty early on. They know that they didn't have kids and so they're going to have one another.
Speaker 3:If maybe they're still married, they're going to have their spouse, but they don't have that backup person. You know what happens if something happens to my husband first and then I'm. You know that I don't have a second person named in my document. So so we do have people planning ahead, but we also have some people that have gotten to a point where it's time for the financial power of attorney to step in and start doing lots of things for them, but the financial power of attorney is very overwhelmed and they've decided that they can't really, you know, assist the person the way the person needs to be assisted.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this is kind of like the day to day, easier things that normally maybe a kid, an adult child, wouldn't step in and help. You know that's happening in my own family, so my wheels are spinning. You know it's, I think, the word fiduciary. Explain that, because it sounds to me that's the key to all of this.
Speaker 3:Yes, absolutely yes. So a fiduciary is any person or organization that acts on behalf of another person, and this is the important part they're legally obligated to act in that person's best interest. And there's kind of different components that really come along with fiduciary, and those are trust, care and loyalty. So those are kind of the standards that we are held to as fiduciaries, and it's really important we're going to be taking the best care of assets or, you know, bank accounts, whatever it is that we are helping manage.
Speaker 3:The component of loyalty is that we are going to do whatever is needed. We're going to place your needs above ours, and trust is huge when anyone is serving in a fiduciary capacity. You're trusting that they're acting on your behalf, without you in some cases, and so you need to know that you can trust them. So we felt like it was really important to have the word fiduciary, even though it's hard to spell yeah, it's hard to say yes. We felt like it was important to have that in the name of our business because we really wanted people to know that that's. We put that at the forefront of everything that we do.
Speaker 2:So you have, then, the credentials in all of those things you described, that you had to get certified in order to use that word.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, so so Philip is a certified financial fiduciary. He went through that process earlier.
Speaker 3:You know, and what's nice about this is that that comes with its code of ethics and standards. I, as a care manager, have a robust standard of practice that I get from my professional organization and the code of ethics, and then the same thing with guardianship. So I feel like the two of us, as people that started this business, are certainly blanketed in, you know, as many kind of guide points as we possibly can be, as you know, as to show us the way forward and how we should be treating each and every one of our clients.
Speaker 2:Is this state regulated? Are you able to do this for people anywhere?
Speaker 3:We're able to serve anywhere. What's going to look different is how that's drawn up in the documents, because power of attorney documents look different depending on the state where you've drawn them up. Yeah, and so if we're working with a client, you know, because Charlotte is a border town and we're in between North and South Carolina, we get a lot of people that are in South Carolina. They are going to need to have an attorney that's barred in South Carolina and able to do documents, and we're going to make sure that that attorney is using the correct language to meet the statutory requirements for South Carolina.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Very cool. What are some of the misconceptions? I know the business is young, but are there misconceptions you're finding as you talk with people?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the biggest misconception is that I think people feel like they don't necessarily need to have these documents in place, and I think if you talk to any estate planning attorney, that's going to be something that they're going to echo as well. We just don't want to believe that, as we age, we're ever going to get to a point where we can't do something ourselves. And, you know, frankly, even for us in the industry, it's not something we want to think about. But the reality is is that it does happen and it happens to nearly everyone. There's very few people that are living well into their 90s at home alone with absolutely no support or assistance at all, and so you know, when you look at that, you really do have to be very intentional, and I think this model shows people that if you're not intentional by doing the work and setting things up in place ahead of time to make sure that you're covered, I can tell you personally what happens on the back end when it's a guardianship situation, when you are then taken out of the position of being in control and you are, you know, essentially stuck with whatever the court comes up with.
Speaker 3:You know the court is obviously going to make the best decision that they can, but still, I think most everyone would prefer to know that they had a hand in setting up their own affairs to be managed the way that that they should be, you know, from early on. That's that's. I think one of the things that I like most about this is that our model if we're working with people who are planning it really gives us the opportunity to be able to build really solid relationships with people and and then, over time you know, are planning it really gives us the opportunity to be able to build really solid relationships with people and then, over time, eventually that person may not know who we are, that person may not be able to have any conversations with us about their financial affairs, but we will still be working with their financial advisor and we will still be getting all of the documents to their CPA every year for tax filing.
Speaker 3:We're still giving the attorneys updates, but to know that we've been able to build that relationship with them on the front end is truly very special.
Speaker 2:Well, it comes to mind. You know Charlotte's such a big city and oftentimes maybe the adult child lives somewhere else but likes the idea of you guys being local because their aging parent is here and has someone you know boots on the ground, that knows the area. Is that an option?
Speaker 3:Yes, that's definitely something we do on the care management side and then on the Silverstone side, a lot of people find the logistics.
Speaker 3:Even though banking can be done online and bill pay can be done online, what we see happen is mail starts to build up at home and so you've got a senior who's living at home alone. Maybe family is out of state and maybe they've got they're in the documents as financial power of attorney, but what's happening is mail is starting to build up and that senior is getting overwhelmed and possibly even confused. So they might see a statement and think that it's a bill and they might also be getting solicitations. You know what looks like a bill and it's from a fake nonprofit, because that's a scam. You know somebody is trying to get them to write a check, and so sometimes the adult children tell us that it's difficult to not be right there to be able to say mom, don't worry about that piece of mail, and so for us to be able to go in and kind of manage that piece of things is a huge help for families.
Speaker 2:Oh, I can just see and you know, having had a parent go through into assisted living and now my mom being alone and 90, you know all these things come to mind and the thing I often say is you don't know what. You don't know until you are thrown into all of this and it is a very, very complicated thing and I just love, jennifer, what you guys are doing. So tell our listeners how they can find you.
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. Our website is SilverstoneFF. com. We decided not to have people spell fiduciary, so SilverstoneFF. com. That website has got great information about our services. Great information about our services. It's got the way to reach out if you need more assistance. Our phone number is also 704-749-3118.
Speaker 2:Perfect. Thank you so much. This is. I can see much success in your future of helping people and families. This has really opened my eyes. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you, families. This has really opened my eyes. Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3:Thank you, regina, this has been fun.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNPSouthCharlotte. com. That's GNPSouthCharlotte. com, or call 980-351-5719.