All Aboard the Money Bus

Coming to a city near you: financial planners available for a discussion of your money problems.

By Fred W. Frailey, Editor

From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, December 2008

Very few people can claim to be unaffected by the financial panic that gripped most of the developed world this autumn. If you're not alarmed because your retirement kitty is being sliced to pieces, you're worried about getting a mortgage, paying off credit-card debt or keeping your job.

Fear causes people to react in unpredictable ways. A friend in Indianapolis sent word that well-off clients of a financial planner he knows are (against the planner's advice) closing their investment accounts and taking the cash proceeds home. Presumably, they are stuffing the currency in mattresses or burying it in the backyard (I am not recommending you do this).

Quite by coincidence, as these stark events unfolded, a bus began an eight-month tour of the U.S. with a mission to provide free financial advice to any American who desires it. This noble project is being undertaken by the foundation of the National Association of Personal Finance Advisors, in conjunction with Kiplinger's Personal Finance and TD Ameritrade. At each stop, financial planners who belong to NAPFA will be available for a sit-down discussion of your financial problems.

Late on a windy autumn afternoon, I met up with the Your Money Bus on 125th Street in Manhattan, where it was parked just a block away from the historic Apollo Theater.

"What's on people's minds?" I asked financial planner Anja Luesink, one of the volunteers. One visitor, who lives on limited income because of a disability, said she had $12,000 in credit-card debt that had gone into collection. Anja advised the woman to negotiate a settlement with the debt collector -- "They buy the debt at dimes on the dollar," she said -- and then set up a repayment schedule she can abide by.

Another person asked a familiar question: What should he do with his IRA, invested in stocks? Clearly, it's unsettling for people to see their investments gyrate up and down -- but mostly down. "Do you need the money soon?" Anja asked. No, he replied. "Then leave the IRA investments alone," she advised. The volatility will eventually end, and now is not the time to sell.

Planner Maureen Whelan says her clients in New York City are worried that the market's swoon will delay their retirement. She said she's had to warn some of them that they need to cut their spending to keep their retirement planning on schedule.

I have a soft spot for the men and women of NAPFA. They are the cream of the crop of financial planners, and each January for the past five years they have volunteered their time to provide free advice by phone to thousands of readers of this magazine, during our Jump-Start Your Retirement Plan call-in days. To find out when the Your Money Bus will be near you, go to YourMoneyBus.com. Some folks in Indianapolis seriously need to pay it a visit.

A family loss

As companies go, the one I work for is small -- we are like a family. And so the death from melanoma of Todd Kiplinger -- at too young an age -- came as a blow to all of us.

Todd was vice-chairman of Kiplinger Washington Editors. But more than that, he was everyone's friend, a man totally without pretense. You'd see Todd outside the elevator and ten minutes later you'd still be there, talking about all the things that leaped to his agile mind. To his wife, Dana Kiplinger, and their daughters, and to his brother Knight and dad Austin, go the sympathies of the entire staff.

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