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Lori Walsh: As the economic impact of the coronavirus continues to wash through South Dakota, financial management has become fraught with emotion in new ways. For many people, what they thought about their financial security has to be re-examined drastically. Rick Kahler is a frequent guest on In The Moment. He's a wealth advisor and pioneer in financial therapy. Boy, do we need him now. He's also founder of the Kahler Financial Group in Rapid City, and he joins us on the phone. Welcome back, Rick Kahler. Thanks for being here.
Rick Kahler: Thank you, Lori. It's always good to be with you.
Lori Walsh: I'm sure, like many people, you spent the weekend really tuning in to the latest and getting updated. I hope you also got some peace of mind. But as you watch the media reports, you say it was a surreal experience. Is this really happening?
Rick Kahler: I had to pinch myself several times just in listening to the radio where I listened to a lot of that and television. It doesn't matter which channel you're on, it's just like a clip from a movie, of talking about the disaster and the quarantining and everything going on. Like this can't really be happening, and it came upon us so quickly. It wasn't but 30, 40 days ago, markets were all time highs and the economy is doing as good as it's ever done.
Lori Walsh: We're grieving too already, even if loss hasn't hit people fully yet. There's already some anticipatory grief, some real pain going on right now as we look at the ending of life as we knew it.
Rick Kahler: That's so well said that I don't think it's grasped all of us. It certainly hasn't completely grasped me of the change of life that will happen from this.. I mean, we're just 30 days into it and there's grieving that has just begun. I would say we're probably just more shocked. We're probably more numb than than anything else about what's happening and what's to come.
Lori Walsh: All right. What's similar to 2008 or 2001, 9/11? From a financial standpoint, there are similarities and then we're in new territory. Expand on that please.
Rick Kahler: Yeah. 9/11 was a national crisis, a national disaster. It came upon us very similar, just boom, so quickly, so there's a lot of similarities to that. The real dissimilarity is in times of disaster, hurricanes and war and things like 9/11, people can come together and there wasn't really a huge disruption. I mean, you could still go out to eat. You could still gather together as a community, could still go to places of worship and things of that type. This is very different because isolation is the key to a pandemic. I did some rough a study over the weekend of past pandemics, and it's sad because disasters, natural disasters can bring us together, but pandemics serve more to fracture relationships and communities.
Lori Walsh: Because we need to stay away from one another and then do so even more than we need to, or what did you learn?
Rick Kahler: Well, maybe not more than there's need to, but I mean, just think of the isolation and loneliness is inherent in a pandemic for survival, for self-reservation.
Lori Walsh: I guess. I didn't mean, to be clear, we're isolating more than we need to physically. I meant we're also ... Can we isolate ourselves physically without isolating ourselves emotionally or spiritually or connectedly in that way, yeah?
Rick Kahler: I think that's the one difference of a lot of past pandemics. This is all conjecture on my mind, but we're making this up as we go anyway, is that yesterday, I attended a national conference by Zoom. We're looking at holding some Zoom meetings for both the community and our clients just to answer questions and to give them a chance to connect with other people. This has not been an option in past pandemics, so I think one of the things that could come out of this that would be a really big positive is just simply knowing how to set up Zoom, go to meeting, Facebook Live or whatever the live streaming social media outlets will be, so I'm really hopeful that this can help us with our connectivity.
I do feel a bit of fear, sadness for elder folks. I've reached out to a few clients who have said, "No, I just want to keep it simple. I don't want to set up anything that complicated," and it's not that complicated. I mean I'm part of a 12 step group and we met over the weekend. Everybody in that group is between 65 and 80, and I was prepared with get on 15 minutes early and I'll help you. They all nailed it. No problems whatsoever.
Lori Walsh: Talk to me a little bit about decision making at this time, because you've been thinking about that as well with just the huge volume of changes that are coming in. The things that need to be done compiling on top of what a lot of people are experiencing, which is they can't work. There's a million things that you can't do anymore, added to a million things that you can do. It's a huge time of transition and upheaval. Let's go through some tips that might help people clarify the decision making process or the thought process here in the days ahead.
Rick Kahler: Yeah, absolutely. We can become so overwhelmed and like I said, numb. We can become frozen, just overwhelmed in a transition where we're actually in ... There's four typical transitions. You got the anticipation of the transition, the ending, the passage, and then the new normal. We've been thrust into ending very, very quickly. So there's one thing that can be done and that we use both in our practice with people and that anybody can do, is to just give yourself a timeout. Because usually, there's so much to be done and list get out of your head, everything you're concerned about, everything that needs to be done, all of the worries. Once that's out on a piece of paper, you can of course put it onto an Excel sheet or Word, go through the list and label each thing in one of three ways.
This is something that must be done now. If it's an abstract worry, break it down into actions. What can I do? What can I do around this worry? When you have the actions, it's either something that needs to be done now, something that needs to be done soon, or something that can be done later, so label them all now, soon and later. I cannot tell you how much relief this can bring to folks in this stage of over overwhelm and helplessness. Then you concentrate just on the now task, and when those are done, your soon tasks move up to become now. This can bring some relief and some clarity and some order. Like yesterday, one of my now tasks was find toilet paper.
Lori Walsh: Sure. It returns.
Rick Kahler: Who would have ever thought?
Lori Walsh: For everybody in Rapid City who is having the toilet paper conversation right now, Sioux Falls went through this and the supply chain gets restocked. Pretty soon there's enormous piles of toilet paper in your store. It's generic toilet paper, but you'll get it. So you can sort of see the waves.
Rick Kahler: Is that so?
Lori Walsh: Yeah, each. Now, what has to be done with ... Now, here's a journaling technique that I've used from Kathleen Adams who wrote Journal to the Self. She has the list of 100. You just sit down, label a piece of paper 1 to 100 and list everything that you are worried about right now, everything, everything, everything. Make yourself go to 100 and don't stop, and then go back and look at that list and sort things through. I would suggest the same thing. What are the things that I have control over right now? What are the things that I'll have control over in a little while, and what do I just not have control over at all?
Rick Kahler: Absolutely.
Lori Walsh: That can be a really interesting therapeutic writing tip as well.
Rick Kahler: I think it's really important too, to be kind to yourself to realize that feeling overwhelmed, feeling numb, feeling despair are all very, very normal. We will have the tendency, the little critics that live in our mind of beating us up and saying, you shouldn't be feeling this, you shouldn't have despair, you shouldn't be feeling numb. You should be going into ... Just the whole list, and to try as much as possible to give yourself a little grace. These are unprecedented times. As one of my CFP of friends said over the weekend, he said that this is the greatest time of an uncertainty in my lifetime and it is. This is unprecedented and it's like 100 years ago, is the last time something like this happened in the United States.
Lori Walsh: Do we have a sense of ... If I can ask you, with your money, with your financial management, are there things that you should be doing right now? People want to know even if I have money in a savings account, should I take it out of the savings account? If I have money invested, do I need to do anything? Are there actions that we should take right now?
Rick Kahler: I think maybe the first action is to take a snapshot of where you're at financially, and most of us right now are okay. For today, we're okay, but take a look at that. As far as the ... Oh my.
Lori Walsh: That's all right. You're listening to In The Moment on SDPB Radio. My guest is Rick Kahler. We're talking about any of those financial tips that you can act on right today, so take stock of what ... I love what you said about right now and for even people who have lost their jobs, right now, are you hungry?
Rick Kahler: Right now?
Lori Walsh: Right now, do you have a roof over your head? Let's deal with right now and acknowledge the reality of the right now. Okay, so take stock. What should you do soon?
Rick Kahler: Yes, so look at your income, look at your out go, just draw some relief in the fact today, you're okay. Many, many of us that are living off of portfolios have reserves or we have some cash, and we'll be okay for a few months. So I think that's really important, is to not get too far into the future with horriblizing that while I'm going to lose everything that I've got, markets will come back. It may not be soon, but markets will come back, and-
Lori Walsh: For people who are in debt?
Rick Kahler: ... probably, the best thing to do is nothing.
Lori Walsh: Is nothing. For people who are in debt, Rick, do you stay on top of those debts now with the money that you do have, knowing that you lost your job? So you're paying off your credit card or you're making minimum payments on your credit card, do you need to keep paying those things at the expense of having the cash on hand and keep that, for people who are a little bit tougher going into this situation?
Rick Kahler: Yeah, that's a really great question. Lori, I think that's really individual. One thing that I would do is if you were concerned about making a payment versus having enough money to buy food, is to contact the credit card company or whoever the lender is and ask them what leniency they may have. I'll guarantee you everybody's going to have some leniency going through this time. It really hasn't washed through the economy yet, so I would just make that call and see what's possible.
Lori Walsh: All right, and be kind to those people on the other end of the phone call. Let's all be kind to each other right now. Great advice. Right now, take some financial stock. Don't take any drastic action, don't make any major decisions. If you think you're going to have problems soon going forward, then it's soon, you'll need to start making some phone calls and having conversations with those credit card companies and mortgage lenders. Rick Kahler, thank you so much for being here today. We appreciate your time.
Rick Kahler: Thank you so much, Lori.
You can access all of SDPB's COVID-19 coverage at www.sdpb.org/covid.