- A Forum for Men over 40

10 Things to Look for When Inventorying Your Finances

hether you want to organize your life for retirement or leave your next of kin on firm financial footing, taking inventory of your finances is a smart move. Set aside a folder in your filing cabinet, and fill it with these 10 pieces of information:

1. Any and All Debts

Mortgages, car loans, your kids’ school loans, credit cards, and other forms of debt are difficult to keep track of, but you can help yourself out by filing them all in one location. You’ll never have to guess how much you owe on one account or another, and you’ll be less likely to miss payment deadlines. Should something happen to you, your estate’s executor or caretaker can continue to pay bills on time, and they won’t be hit by debt collection agencies months or years down the road.

2. Bank Accounts

Equally important are your savings and checking accounts. Insurance payouts can take weeks to finalize, which can make handling medical or funeral expenses difficult to cover. Your bank accounts can pay for small expenses until your insurance plans, investments, real estate, and other large assets are disbursed.

3. Turning Money into More Money

Unless you’ve only worked at a single job your entire life, you likely maintain a number of retirement and general investment accounts including IRAs and 401Ks. While rare, some retirement accounts go unclaimed after the account holder passes away.

Take the uncertainty out of your investments, and make sure that all of your account information is located in your financial folder. Even if you don’t include account numbers and other sensitive information, list all of the companies with which you maintain an active account.

4. Tangible Property

Everything that you own has some monetary value. Include vehicle and home titles in your folder, so your executor will know exactly what needs to be appraised, auctioned off, or given away to beneficiaries.

5. Insurance

Insurance is one of those things nobody ever wants to use. If you use auto insurance, you’ve been in an accident. If you use home insurance, a tree branch damaged your roof. However, insurance is also one of those things that everybody loves when they need it.

If you pass away, your life insurance policy can quickly give your beneficiaries hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you can rest assured that they’ll be taken care of financially. However, your life insurance policy won’t be of much use if nobody can find it. Other types of insurance like auto and health aren’t likely to make your family rich, but the estate might get a partial refund for the remainder of the policy period.

6. X Marks the Spot

This list is already pretty long, and it’s only going to get longer. Instead of jamming every document into a single folder, consider writing a list. Your executor can look at your financial inventory list and find every item on it, and if an important document is missing, your executor can still contact the bank or insurance company to request account information.

7. Contact Info

Nobody knows your life as well as you, so nobody will know who to call if you’re incapacitated. Create a list detailing phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses for your executor, family members, friends, business colleagues, and any other individuals who are important to you.

8. Your Living Will

Your living will is one of the hardest documents you’ll ever have to write, but it’s important to finish while you’re still healthy. With this single document, your executor will have a road map to finalize your estate, and you’ll prevent your family from bickering over your assets.

With any luck, you’ll never need somebody with medical power of attorney over you, but if you do, make sure that it’s somebody you trust. Update your medical files with a document giving a close friend or family member medical power of attorney.

9. Cash Flow

Everyone wants to live to a ripe old age, and you can ensure that your retirement years are filled with luxury by preparing today. When it comes to getting your finances in order, sooner is infinitely better than later. Print out all of your bank statements from the previous year, and look at your cash flow over time. How much did you earn, and how much did you spend? If necessary, change your habits today to give you that much more financial freedom in retirement.

10. Shoot for the Stars

It’s never too late to find a fresh purpose in life, but life’s biggest goals are often the most expensive. A kid can cost more than $100,000 to raise. Want to go back to school? Expect to pay at least $20,000 a year. Write down all of your life goals regardless of their cost, and start saving for them today.

What Happened to My Wife After the Wedding?

here’s no doubt that your wedding was one of the biggest events of your life. Friends and family gathered to celebrate the amazing love you shared with your then fiancée, and you were excited to begin your life together as a married couple. Of course, you might have faced doubters who told you that the relationship wouldn’t work out long term. Perhaps you got cold feet and worried that you were making the wrong choice. Whatever your worries, you decided to take the leap and begin your journey through life as a married man.

Marriage can bring many joys, but the journey into couplehood is also rife with challenges. During the first year of marriage, which is widely considered the toughest by psychologists and married couples alike, you started to notice that your wife was just a little different than she was when you were dating. Over time, these tiny differences can turn into huge personality conflicts. Like many men, you might be left wondering what the heck happened to my wife after the wedding?

While there’s no one answer to why so many women seem to change after marriage, the key may lie in looking not at your wife herself, but at her parents. We all know that how we’re raised can have a big impact on how we act as adults, so it makes sense to look at a woman’s family to predict how she might act as a wife. Of course, doing so means looking beyond the physical appearance or annoying personal habits of your mother-in-law. It also means looking at how your wife’s parents interact as a couple.

Getting a Grip on Relationship Role Models

As humans, we learn to interact with one another largely by observing our parents and family members interacting with each other when we’re infants. Throughout childhood, we learn the rules that will govern how we act in public and how we treat others in relationships. However, these basic rules don’t just apply to our interactions with friends and acquaintances. They have even deeper implications when it comes to our relationships with romantic partners.

Take a moment to stop and think about marriage as a concept. Where did you learn about the roles of men and women in marriage? From whence do your expectations about how your wife should act come? If you’re like most men, the honest answer is that the majority of your thoughts and feelings about marriage likely come from watching your own parents interact and either build a successful family or pursue separation.

Reality is no different for your wife, who also grew up learning about how relationships work by watching her mom and dad. While there’s no way to go back in time and make new choices about your marriage, understanding why your wife changed can be a big help in moving forward and creating a more satisfying relationship. For those who are considering getting married again, taking the time to get to know your girlfriend’s parents and observing their relationship might just be the key to deciding if you should really propose this time.

Taking an Honest Look at Mom

Growing up as a child, you might not have paid much attention to the little things your mom did that nagged at your dad. After all, kids see Mom as a nurturer and tend to take her side no matter what. However, it pays to step back as an adult and look at the relationship your parents had. As you do so, talk candidly with your wife about her parents’ relationship.

Pay attention to how your mother-in-law treats your father-in-law. Look for obvious signs of discord such as disagreements and fights, but also be attuned to more subtle cues. Does Mom bug Dad about not spending money wisely or not contributing enough to household chores? Is she only concerned with getting her own way, or does she try to accommodate those around her?

Paying attention to these signs can mean the difference between marital bliss and a total blowup. If the relationship between a woman’s parents leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth, it’s likely that you’ll encounter similar struggles once you get married. If you’re stuck with a wife who has just changed too much, take time to think about her parents before you make any life-changing choices.

Can It Still Be Happily Ever After?

For men who find that their wives just aren’t the same after marriage, the idea of happily ever after may seem like nothing more than a childish pipe dream. However, the fact that your wife changed so much after the wedding doesn’t have to spell the end of your relationship. If you can understand why she changed and communicate clearly about your own expectations and shortcomings, you just might be able to overcome your issues and move forward into marital bliss.

10 Reasons You Should Keep Your Men Friends’ Close

omen are wonderful, and your woman fills your life with love and warmth. Still, the old joke about a war of the sexes holds a great deal of truth. Women typically see relationships quite differently than men.

For most women, a romantic relationship deeply colors all aspects of their lives. For just about any self-respecting man, a romantic relationship is a major part of life that still must be kept away from the clubhouse. Women often get mad at their men over this strong exhibition of masculinity.

That’s okay, though. It’s par for the course. You saw that cliché coming, didn’t you?

Keeping your buddies close is one of the most important aspects of playing through without being struck down by the lightning zaps of a normal relationship filled with occasional storminess and squalls. You probably knew this already, but expanding on it may help a bit. Let’s wander around the ten top reasons to stay firm with your men friends!

1. A man is not a decorative plant.
No matter what loud-mouthed feminists like to say about total equality between the sexes, men are men. They need to step outside the home and do manly stuff with buddies who also like to roam around doing manly stuff. Suddenly whacking to other places little round balls that had been peacefully minding their own business on calm blankets of grass, going to crowded stadiums to cheer as large guys head-butt each other during titanic struggles over the possession of air-filled, torpedo-shaped balls and gathering in smoke-filled dens to swap witticisms over a nice game of poker all qualify as genuine markers of manly men.

2. Fair’s fair.
Women do generally like to have their gal pals for chattering and nattering about everything under the sun. It’s ridiculous to expect that men won’t have their own pals for talking soberly about important matters such as which baseball teams are composed of bums who will never win the pennant and how to escape a deep sand trap without wildly digging a deep hole.

3. Gender differences matter.
Your girlfriend or wife can also be your best friend, and it’s perfectly okay to have casual women friends, but men friends are different. Just as most women are much more comfortable about discussing certain matters with other women, especially love and relationships, men are much more comfortable with the other guys when talking about subjects that would be awkward to bring up around women.

4. Friendships need exercise to be healthy.
Letting the seed of jealousy in a possessive woman grow into a carnivorous weed that consumes all your time and energy outside of work will slowly strangle your ability to have real buddies. Friendships die if you rarely ever feed them. You might eventually find yourself staring blankly at an old friend you’ve known since college. Go do stuff with your buddies regularly!

5. The old boys’ club is real.
We call it networking these days, but having contacts that may lead to a better job or other opportunities doesn’t just happen. Your men friends aren’t just your buddies; they’re gateways to the wider world. Letting their memories of you fade into the mist could mean stagnating in the backwater of a nominally terrific set of relationships filled only with your nearest and dearest.

6. Women are weird.
Yes, they are weird in a delightful way, but the way so many of them think is like that of a Martian, or was it a Venusian? If you don’t hang out with the fellows on a regular basis, you may start to feel your antennae twitching as they detect subtle emotions in relationships that need to be explored at great length. If this weirdness isn’t stopped in its tracks, you’ll soon find yourself immersed in picking out absolutely the best color for the bathroom drapes. The horror only increases after that!

7. Relationships don’t always last.
Painful as it may be to contemplate, many relationships reveal themselves as having a fixed expiration date. Modern divorce rates are high, and breakups with girlfriends slam in with the tides. Keeping in touch with your single or married men friends’ means keeping up the chances of later dating the attractive, single women they may know at work or through family members.

8. Absence makes the heart fonder.
This old saw is totally true. Being together too much can make little personal flaws and quirks loom larger and larger until they turn into cats and dogs fighting it out with much blood and fur flying. Prudently dividing your free time between your loved ones and your closest buddies will harmonize the celestial spaces and all that groovy jive.

9. Broader activities increase your personal development.
Regularly smashing about the bigger world with your men friends’ means continuing to mature intellectually and emotionally. You’ll become a more interesting person to yourself and to others, and your woman will pick up on that even if she sulkily acts otherwise.

10. Wusses are pusses, but he-men win.
Pusses are harmless little kittens that women like to pet and cuddle and put into cages to be neutered at the veterinarian when they grow troublesome and noisy. The dirty little secret of relationships is that while a woman may say she loves you for paying lots of attention to her and supposedly meeting her every emotional need, her innermost being almost certainly wants her man to be a swaggering bad boy who goes his own way. This deep biological imperative goes all the way back to when Ugg the Caveman clonked a lion over the head with his knobby club while Muna the Cavewoman squealed with fear and appreciation from the top of a large rock. You need not sport a motorcycle jacket with chains hanging everywhere or start fights at bars to be a real man, but you do need to make your own way across the whole eighteen holes with your balls intact. This refers to your golf balls, naturally — what kind of analogy did you think this was?

Your men friends are an essential element of being a real guy. They smirk at dumb jokes, occasionally make crude remarks, scratch themselves in public and even drink beer as if it were mere flavored water. This is the way of men, and without it, the world would be a poorly maintained six-hole course with dying grass.

7 Things Men should Know after the Divorce

hen life throws you a curve ball, the sensible option is to keep on playing like the pros always do. Life-changing events such as divorce, the breakup of a long-term relationship or the death of a partner may throw you for a loop. No matter the cause of the schism, starting over can be disconcerting especially if you can’t even find the TV remote on your own.

1. Gather the Basic Paperwork

To get started on establishing your new routine as a newly-single man, you will need to have a handle on the basic papers attesting to your single-hood. Obtain copies of the divorce decree or the death certificate, whichever is applicable in your case. When applying for certified copies, make sure to include extra sets in your request as financial institutions will require copies for their files to support any changes requested on your account.

2. Where is that Checkbook?

Typically, couples would have a household account for paying and tracking bills and other household expenses. Quite often, one partner takes charge of bookeeping and household management with the other contributing financially but without major administrative input. All is well until the day the relationship is severed.

Post-divorce, the matter of checking accounts and bills would have been neatly addressed by your divorce decree. Accounts are listed, examined, adjudicated and closed according to your agreement. There is no errant checkbook to speak of – only a clean parting of ways.

However, with the death of a partner, your routine is upended especially if the event was unexpected and your partner left few clues regarding the practical details of household budgets and maintenance. Finding the checkbook and ledger pertaining to this account would be the logical first step in your financial housekeeping. Locate online files that may refer to this account and review the pattern of expenses as this will indicate the bills that should be paid regularly to ensure that your household will keep on running smoothly. In most states, survivors have 30 to 60 days to use a joint account to settle the estate. After the grace period, you will be asked to open a new account in your name.

3. Who to Pay to Keep the Lights On

Before the Internet became so prevalent, all it took to organize bill payments was to go through the mail, and line up billing statements. With online access, you may need to recover or recreate a list of accounts and regularly scheduled payments that may include include rent or mortgage, phone, cable payments and utility services covering electricity, water and sewer bills.

If your partner has been making online instead of mail-in payments, knowing the passwords would help tremendously. If you do not know the account passwords, contact the respective companies to explain your life-changing event and get them to update the account.

4. A new Budget for a new Lifestyle

Often, the partner handling the household books was doing the job so efficiently that you were never bothered with mundane matters such as keeping track of expenses, paying bills on time and avoiding costly penalties for missed or late payments. Since your life situation has changed, your expenses will vary. Create a budget reflective of your current circumstances.

5. Insurance Coverage and Payouts

If you are the beneficiary of insurance payouts, you have to contact the insurance companies and file the papers according to their guidelines. If minor children are in the equation, you will also have to take charge of filing those papers. Aside from life insurance policies, health insurance coverage will also be an issue especially if the deceased partner was the primary insured. Fortunately, most insurance policies will provide continuing coverage for survivors subject to restructured premium payments.

Insurance policies are often a major sticking point in divorce proceedings, so these issues are clarified as the divorce is finalized. Review your insurance coverage and adjust as you see fit based on your new lifestyle.

When insurance details are not clear cut after the death of a spouse or partner, examine the bank and credit card statements closely to look for payments made to insurance carriers.

6. Your Life on a Spreadsheet

After a monumental change in your life situation, it is important to have a clear idea of where you stand financially. A spreadsheet showing your assets and liabilities would be a good start. Rough out a list of what you have and what you owe, marking up items that may need further research. Refine this list as you go about finalizing the divorce or closing the estate. This spreadsheet will become the basis of making new goals, reinventing your life and planning for retirement.

7. Hire a Financial Planner

Disassociating yourself from a long term relationship is fraught with complications. You will need to close old accounts and establish new ones in your name only. You may need to change beneficiaries on existing insurance policies. Any financial recompense must be optimized for the benefit of your remaining household.

A qualified financial planner specializing in estate planning for people emerging from a divorce or recently widowed may help to redefine your goals and keep you on track. Embrace your new status, and keep on moving forward.

Igniting a Romance When You’re Past 40

parking a romance with your partner when you’re over 40 can be daunting. Whether your spouse is many years your junior, forty-something, or much older, she will have certain needs. She will desire ongoing attention, occasional romantic gestures, stimulating conversations, shared interests, exciting adventures, and much more. The question becomes how to meet her needs without exhausting yourself, including using your middle-aged imagination to surprise her. Getting stuck in a rut for too long is sure to kill any romantic feelings she currently holds for you.

For many women, the primary concern is the emotional connection with her male partner. The physical and platonic connections of your marriage are also important, but a woman needs to feel you love her unconditionally and deeply care about the quality of the relationship. If you’re always keeping that in mind, you’re ready to ignite a romance after age 40. First, decide if you’re ready and willing to attend to her diverse needs and make concerted efforts in the romance department. She deserves to feel special and wanted. What’s more, you must love something about her, or you probably wouldn’t be with her.

Laying the Foundation
All of the romantic gestures in the world won’t matter if you’ve hit your forties and let yourself go. A woman can feel more excited about her romantic connection with you when you maintain your appearance and a reasonably current wardrobe. She could easily tire of a man who sits on the couch most nights, watches sports and other TV programs, and consumes potato chips like there’s going to be a potato famine. If you’ve been married for a while, your spouse knows your personal habits, and she will notice if you make small changes to improve your attractiveness. It might be time to go back to the gym or start taking walks with your wife after dinner.

Planning Special Dates
At least once a month, plan to take your wife out on the town and spoil her. Give her a reason to buy a new evening dress, a pair of pumps or sexy sandals, and a clutch purse. Make her want to get her hair styled differently and keep her pedicure appointment. She should be as excited about special nights out with you as she was when you were first dating. Only now she knows what to expect, conversation can be more relaxed, and there’s time to start planning your golden years. If you’ve been together for many years, her preferences for going out may have changed. Hopefully, you can find a way to ask her without coming off as a cad.

Preparing for Alone Time
Typical nights at home and special evenings out on the town are both opportunities for concluding your time together with intimate moments. Only you know what your wife likes in this department, and you must take time to set the mood. It could be time to stock up on candles and scented oil, order her favorite Belgian chocolates, or schedule a couples massage. If your spouse likes to talk for three hours before cuddling up in bed or asks you to heat up the Jacuzzi earlier in the day, you must follow through on these simple requests. Don’t expect her to jump right to the hanky-panky without any efforts on your part. If your wife puts a time limit on you intimate time, it could mean you should reschedule. She may have pressing obligations looming the next day that make it difficult to focus on romance.

Scheduling Separate Activities
As much as you want to spend every free moment with your wife, she is also getting older and discovering new interests she didn’t have much time for when she was establishing herself in a career and perhaps raising kids. Talk with her about which days of the week you both will pursue your separate friends and activities. Time away from each other makes the time you spend together more precious and gives her a wider social network. Monopolizing your wife’s time, no matter how physically and emotionally connected you feel, could eventually make her feel smothered. She cannot give up her self-identity to stay married to you.

Showing Her Affection
The most important thing you can remember is to show your wife frequent, physical affection. It’s easy to keep expecting she will always do your laundry and make your bed. She might love to cook and clean and maintain the home. She doesn’t owe you these things until death do you part. There would be less to do if she lived alone. Hold her hand, give her affectionate pats on the shoulder, smile at her often, rub her feet and her sore back, cuddle with her in bed, and show affection in other ways she prefers. If you let the frequency of such romantic gestures decrease over time, she will begin to wonder where the romance has gone. The only way this is acceptable is if it is what she wants. Only you can determine if your wife is naturally less inclined to show or receive affection.

In the end, you are laying the foundation for your golden years together. Middle age is a time when many people change dramatically and discover they want and need different things from their spouses. Middle age is also a time when some marriages fall apart because couples lose their romance and stop pursuing shared interests. Make the time and follow through on what you promise your wife. Leave her with no doubt about how much you love being her husband.