A woman sat down across from me a little over a year after her husband died. By the time we met the case had settled, and there was a number in an account. A large one. The kind that’s supposed to fix things. She said something I’ll never forget. She said the money felt like a weight. She said it felt . . . heavy.
That's the name.
I’ve spent more than thirty years working with people whose money arrived from a loss — widows and widowers, parents, adult children settling an estate with their siblings across the table, families holding a settlement for something somebody else did. That work has its own psychology, its own order of operations, and a whole set of decisions that don’t come up anywhere else.
Heavy Money is the book about it.
What makes this money different has nothing to do with how you feel about it.
01
It arrives all at once, with no next paycheck behind it.
02
It carries tax rules and structures most people have never seen.
03
It may have to replace an income that died with a person.
Nothing stands behind it the way a salary stood behind every decision you’ve made before.
And for many, there’s the other thing — the money is also the last remaining object connected to a person, or the figure a court assigned to a life.
Not all of it is heavy. You feel the loss. You may not feel the weight. Light is not the same as excluded, because the question is where the money came from, not how it feels.
The book is a plan for both. Five steps, and the order matters.
1. Use pencil, not pen.
2. Name the weight.
3. Give it a job.
4. Set it up once.
5. Get it out of your head.
Weight First, Then Money.
About Robert
Three decades at the intersection of wealth and life-changing events
Robert Pagliarini is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional with a doctorate in financial and retirement planning and a master’s degree in psychology. He's a partner and senior wealth advisor at Beacon Pointe Advisors.
He's spent more than thirty years working with people after the ground moves — sudden wealth, the sale of a business, retirement, and Heavy Money from an inheritance or legal settlement. He's written eight books on personal finance. The work and the books have always sat at the same intersection. An event, the money, and the life the money has to support.