Her Husband Died Unexpectedly. She Spent a Year Untangling Their Finances.
Estate | Investing | Widow | Financial planning | November 19, 2025
This Week's Quote:
"Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."
- Herb Kelleher
Alice Stone Nakhimovsky is a retired university professor who can read Russian and Yiddish and wrote 11 books.
But the 75-year-old has long struggled to grasp the language of finance. For decades, her husband—Alexander Nakhimovsky, a professor of linguistics and computer science who went by Sasha—managed that aspect of their life. When he died unexpectedly last year, the task fell to Alice.
Immediately, she felt overwhelmed. She spent hours poring over a convoluted spreadsheet Sasha kept and found communications with several different financial advisers. She tried to figure out how much she could afford to spend each month worry-free and puzzled over why Sasha purchased a single share of what appeared to be every stock in the S&P 500.
Her experience highlights the danger for couples when knowledge of their finances is concentrated in one partner’s head. If that partner dies first, the other can be thrown into learning how to manage their finances during a time of profound grief.
The problem disproportionately affects women, who on average live longer than men and might have been expected to leave investing to their partners.
Just under half of about 400 widowed women said they felt prepared to manage their finances after their spouse’s death, according to a 2024 survey by the financial-services company Thrivent.
Alice understood when Sasha was alive that she would be in a vulnerable position if he were to die before her. Once or twice a year, she would panic and ask him to walk her through their finances.
After a few minutes, she would zone out, and he would lose patience. The spreadsheet he created was a mess of account numbers and annotations that only he could understand, Alice said. The couple always figured they could discuss their portfolio at some other time.
After they both retired, they sold their home in upstate New York and moved in June 2024, to New York City, where they had kept an apartment for years.
One morning about three weeks later, Sasha didn’t wake.
Alice frantically tried to rouse her 80-year-old husband, then raced downstairs to the lobby in her bathrobe, shouting for help. The doorman and a few members of the maintenance staff dashed upstairs to find that Sasha still wasn’t responsive. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital, where he was declared brain-dead because of an aneurysm. He was removed from life support the next day.
After the burial, it sank in that her husband of almost 50 years was gone. It also hit her that she would have to untangle their finances.
She knew they had over a million dollars, but she had only a vague sense of how their money was allocated. She had trouble understanding the jargon of investing and was confused by such terms as ETFs and index funds.
“It’s mostly because I have no interest in learning about investing,” she said.
Mail regarding their various accounts came in, and Alice, overwhelmed, piled it up unopened on Sasha’s desk in the bedroom. She would occasionally scream to herself in frustration, not understanding some of Sasha’s decisions.
Mail still piles up on Sasha’s desk.
As she started managing her finances, Alice was worried she would be scammed given her lack of knowledge. After all, Sasha lost about $350,000 of the couple’s money in a Ponzi scheme a couple of years earlier.
“I knew I was a bit of a sitting duck if I wasn’t careful,” she said.
Because women tend to live longer than men, they usually have more years of retirement to plan for. Understanding the level of investment risk they are comfortable with and whether that is reflected in their portfolio is crucial, said Karen Altfest, a New York City adviser who frequently works with widows.
She recommends that couples keep a shared list of their accounts and passwords in a secure place.
In the weeks after Sasha’s death, Alice found email exchanges between Sasha and two advisers from different firms. Alice felt more comfortable with one of them, Logan Reed, a financial planner in Branford, Conn., whom she had met in a videoconference.
With Reed’s help, she consolidated about a half-dozen investment accounts, rolled over others to prevent a large tax bill and swapped some individual stocks for cash and municipal bonds to reduce the risk in her portfolio.
More than a year after Sasha’s death, Alice no longer feels overwhelmed by her finances. Looking back, she regrets not learning about them earlier. She wishes she and Sasha had recorded a video of him outlining their accounts and the rationale behind each investment.
Alice said she still isn’t an investing whiz and doesn’t intend to become one. But she understands her finances now, and so do her two adult children, whom she has included in many of her meetings with Reed.
“Catastrophe can strike at any time,” she said.
Credit goes to Veronica Dagher, Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2025.
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This Week’s Author, Belinda Stickle