Keep Asking: Financial Caregiving, Self-Advocacy, and Relentless Tenacity with Beth Pinsker CFP®

Beth Pinsker, financial planning columnist at MarketWatch, CFP® professional, and author of *My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving*, joins *The Power of the Ask* to talk about advocating for yourself, preparing families for financial caregiving, and why sometimes the most important ask is the one you have to make more than once.  Drawing from both her career in journalism and her personal experience caring for her mother, Beth shares how asking for opportunities helped shape her professional journey and how navigating financial caregiving revealed just how difficult it can be to put even the best-laid plans into practice.  Beth, Lisa, and Precious cover:  - **Asking for the Opportunity:** Beth shares how asking her employer for educational reimbursement to pursue her CFP® certification helped her expand her expertise and take an important step forward in her career. - **Preparing Before a Crisis:** From powers of attorney to healthcare proxies and estate documents, Beth explains why families shouldn’t wait for an emergency to begin planning. Having the right documents in place early can make an already difficult situation easier to navigate. - **Starting the Caregiving Conversation:** Talking with a parent about money and aging can feel uncomfortable. Beth shares why asking rather than telling, and approaching the conversation as a shared responsibility, can help preserve a parent’s independence while opening the door to important planning. - **Protecting Your Own Financial Future:** Women often become the default caregivers in their families, sometimes at a high personal and financial cost. Beth discusses why caregivers need to be thoughtful about protecting their own retirement savings, income, benefits, and long-term financial security. - **Managing Someone Else’s Money with Their Values in Mind:** Beth reflects on one of the central lessons from *My Mother’s Money*: when you’re managing finances for someone you love, the money remains theirs. Your role is to make decisions for their benefit and in line with their values. - **Making the Ask That Changes What’s Possible:** Beth opens up about the personal decision that gave her more time and self-determination to pursue her own goals, including earning her CFP® certification and building the next chapter of her career. - **Being Relentlessly Tenacious:** For Beth, the power of the ask means being informed, being kind, and being willing to ask again. Whether you’re dealing with doctors, banks, insurance companies, Medicare, or another complicated system, persistence can be essential to getting the help you or your family needs. **Important Links:** - Savvy Ladies (https://www.savvyladies.org/) - Precious Williams' LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/precious-l-williams/) - Lisa Zeiderman's LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisazeiderman/ - Beth Pinsker (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bpinsker/) **Important Links for Beth:** - Beth's Website: (https://bethpinsker.com/) **About Beth Pinsker:** Beth Pinsker is a financial-planning columnist at MarketWatch. She has been a CFP® professional since 2018. Previously, she worked at Reuters, Fidelity, and Walletpop.com. Before covering personal finance, she was a film critic and entertainment business reporter, writing for Entertainment Weekly, The Dallas Morning News, and other publications. Her book, "My Mother's Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving," came out in November 2025 from Crown Currency. Book orders are available at bethpinsker.com. You can follow her on all major platforms, listed in this episode's bio.   Now let's welcome our guest, Beth Pinsker. We are so happy to have you here today.