I will make this quick because I love me some brevity and also because I do not have all of the details, which is why this is not in the case study portion. In May my dad died suddenly of a heart attack and he handled the finances for my mom. She has now asked me to come on board and make sure that she is not doing anything crazy with their money and that they are not being taken by their financial planner. So full disclosure, my parents are mustachian per se, but they are quite frugal. They downsized and bought a house near less than 3 miles from me and have no mortgage. They own their car outright and have no other debt to speak of. The house was a foreclosure and we did a lot of work on it so it is in tip top shape. I have two questions. 1. What should my mom do with the 403b's she has inherited(see below) 2. She wants to set up an investment (she is open to anything here investment property, money market account, IRA, Bitcoin, literally anything) with the remainder of his life insurance that she would be able to draw on the interest and donate to a charity every year. I would love some suggestions.
Her accounts are as follows and are all invested with a fiduciary
IRA ~145,000 never taken distributions from this
403b ~225,000 in a tax sheltered annuity that can be taken out or switched to a different investment. They were drawing on this but it stopped when he died
2nd 403b ~25,000 also in TSA never taken distributions also could be taken out of TSA
100,000 in a checking account left from life insurance which needs some investment
3900/month in guaranteed pension for the rest of her life. This amount is more than enough for her expenses and she is thinking about starting to save/donate excess money from this income stream.
The fiduciary is pushing to re-up the TSA's and get her locked in to that 7% guaranteed growth for another 7 years.
I am open to any and all suggestions. I know there will be some calls for facepunches about the management fees from the invested accounts, but take it easy on us we are trying to do better.