A group of men spent three days together at a retreat in Montana. They planned, prayed, and dreamed about the future. One of them was a pilot, and when it ended he offered three of the others a ride...
A group of men spent three days together at a retreat in Montana. They planned, prayed, and dreamed about the future. One of them was a pilot, and when it ended he offered three of the others a ride back to Dallas in his small plane. One passenger was an entrepreneur with a young wife and two boys under five. Another was a banker with three sons. The third was a surgeon whose children were grown, and the fourth was a pastor with three children of his own. The plane took off without incident and then, somewhere en route, disappeared. When the wreckage was found days later, there were no survivors. In an instant, four women were widows and eleven children had no father.
Ron Blue tells this story at the start of a chapter in Faith-Based Family Finances, the 2008 book he wrote with CPA Jeremy White after forty years advising families through his Christian financial planning practice, and he tells it because of what one of the widows said to him many months later. Her husband had always assured her that if anything ever happened to him, she need not worry, because his best friend knew their entire financial situation and would help her through. The friend was one of the four men on the plane.
"Death is rarely expected," Blue writes, "so people rarely plan for it adequately." This essay is for the reader on the other side of that sentence: the one for whom the unexpected has already happened. You have buried a husband or a wife. The funeral is over, the relatives have gone home, and now come the questions, arriving faster than you can breathe: the accounts, the land, the house, the school fees, the people with advice, the people with requests, the people with claims. Everyone around you seems to believe the most dangerous thing you can do is wait. Ron Blue spent a career watching what actually happens next, and his counsel is the opposite, and it is the single most useful sentence a widowed person can be handed. Wait. Deliberately, openly, on almost everything big, for up to two years.
Blue's rule rests on an observation about the mind, not the market. "Mental-health experts estimate it takes about two years for a widow or widower to absorb what has happened and be capable of making major decisions again," he writes. The first shock and numbness give way to deep loss, and then to the daily discovery that every task once shared, the taxes, the insurance, the repairs, the planting decisions, now lands on one person alone.
Then comes the rule itself, stated as practice, not theory: "Because of that two-year period of psychological adjustment, I advised all my clients who were widowed not to make any major financial decisions during that time." All his clients. Not the fragile ones, not the inexperienced ones. All of them, because the impairment is not a character flaw. It is what loss does to a human mind, including a strong one.
And Blue is precise about the enemy of the rule: "the fear of being unable to maintain their standard of living often drives people to make major financial decisions too soon. In many cases, they make the wrong decisions." Notice the mechanism. It is not greed or foolishness that wrecks the widowed; it is fear wearing the costume of responsibility. Deciding something, anything, feels like taking control. So the house is sold in month three, the settlement is invested on a friend's tip in month five, the land is leased out in the first planting season, and the decisions made to quiet the fear become the losses that justify it.
He gives the rule a face. One client's husband was killed in an accident, and she received a wrongful-death settlement large enough to make her financially independent for the rest of her life. She had no experience with money, so she turned to a friend for investment advice, and among the purchases she was steered into was a seven-bedroom house, though only two of her children still lived at home. By the time she reached Blue's office, she was living alone in that enormous house with no cash reserves at all. Enough money to last a lifetime had been converted, in the season when her judgment was most wounded, into rooms she did not need and could not eat.
It would be cruel to tell a grieving person that nothing requires action, and Blue does not. His chapter lays out a sequence, and the sequence is the practical heart of this essay: a short list of small, necessary, protective tasks now, and a firm refusal of everything large.
Immediately, he says, look for any funeral instructions your spouse left, and obtain multiple certified copies of the death certificate, because nearly every benefit, account, and title change will demand documentary proof of death. He even adds a caution that sounds like it was written for our context as much as his: arrange for someone to stay at the house during the funeral itself, because "unscrupulous people prey upon those who've been widowed."
Within the first weeks: have the will reviewed and filed with the proper authority, gather the documents that establish your marriage and your spouse's affairs, and notify the employer, the insurers, and whichever institutions owe benefits, so claims can begin. Within the first months, one instruction matters more than all the others, and it is the humblest one in the chapter: "Keep a record of your cash flow so you can determine where you stand financially and what your living expenses are likely to be." Not an investment plan. Not a restructuring. A record. Money in, money out, written down, for a season in which you should be learning your new financial ground, not reshaping it. As money arrives from insurers or employers, Blue's counsel is to park it somewhere safe and boring on short terms, and he waves off the anxiety that always attends this: "At this point it's not necessary to worry about missing out on 'better' investment opportunities. Your primary focus now should be to ensure you can pay your bills as they arise."
Only by the second year does he ask for planning proper: list what you own, what you owe, what income exists, what the expenses really are, and begin thinking about long-term needs. "In the second year and beyond, implement your financial plan, making decisions about housing, investments, insurance, and lifestyle." Housing is on that list deliberately. The house decision, the one everyone wants settled first, is scheduled last.
He allows for personality: "It may be nine months, a year, or two years. You need that time to adjust to the death of a significant part of your life." The rule is not a prison term. It is permission, with a number attached, and numbers are what permission needs to survive pressure.
Blue's mechanics are American and dated, and we will say so plainly rather than pretend otherwise. His checklist assumes probate courts that function on schedule, life insurance that pays reliably, a government benefits office, and bank products from 2008. The specific instruments do not transfer, and none of his figures should be reused anywhere today. But strip the instruments away and every step has a local translation: proof-of-death documents matter in Kampala exactly as in Kansas; benefits from an employer, a pension scheme, a burial society, or an insurer all begin with paperwork filed early; parked money can sit in a fixed deposit or a money market fund as easily as in his certificates of deposit. The sequence survives the ocean intact.
What the book could not anticipate is how much harder the two-year rule must work in many of the settings this journal serves. Blue's widows faced pushy investment advisors. Many African widows face something rawer: relatives who arrive for the funeral and begin, sometimes before the burial, the quiet inventory of the land, the equipment, the house. Property-grabbing from widows remains one of the ugliest open secrets of family life across the continent, and it thrives on exactly the window Blue identified, the season when grief has impaired the survivor's judgment and fear makes any settlement feel safer than conflict. Add the pressures the book never met: the in-laws with opinions about where a widow should now live, the customs that reassign a dead man's assets to his brothers, the suitor or the pastor or the cousin with a business opportunity that must be seized this month. Every one of these pressures has the same demand at its core: decide now, sign now, while you are weakest.
Against all of it, the two-year rule is more than financial hygiene. It is a shield you can say out loud. "We do not make major decisions in this house for the first year. It is our rule." Said early, said evenly, said to relatives and advisors alike, it converts a hundred exhausting individual battles into one standing policy that does not require you to fight anyone. It refuses no one and nothing except speed, and speed is the only thing the predators actually need. Blue observed that fear drives bad decisions; in our context, other people's urgency does too, and the rule answers both with the same word. Later.
There is one more gift in the chapter, easy to miss among the checklists. Blue advises the newly widowed to seek not a financial advisor first but "a personal advisor," someone with wisdom and judgment rather than products, and he warns against choosing advisors merely because they are family, friends, or fellow believers: what you need is wisdom, and another widow who has walked the road may be the best counselor you can find. And then he lets one of the Montana widows have the chapter's last word. More than two years after the crash, she told Blue and his wife: "I have reached an identity crisis. Who am I? Am I to be forever my husband's widow, or am I a unique person? I do not want to make a career out of widowhood." That, finally, is what the two years are for. Not merely to protect the money, but to give the person time to become someone who can decide, so that the decisions of the second year are made by a self and not by a wound.
If you have been widowed, recently or not, here is the shape of this month, taken from Blue and translated for the ground you stand on. Do the small necessary things: gather the death certificates and every document that proves what your family owns, and put them where you can find them. File the claims that start clocks: employer, pension, insurer, burial society, cooperative. Park any money that arrives somewhere safe and short-term, and let it be bored. Then open a simple cash log, today, and write down everything that comes in and everything that goes out. The Cash Log in LegacyPot exists for exactly this season: a plain running record that asks no decisions of you, but quietly builds, month by month, the accurate picture of your new financial life that the second year's planning will need. It is the one financial tool grief cannot misuse.
And refuse the big things, out loud, with the rule as your reason. Do not sell the house or the land. Do not invest the settlement. Do not fund the opportunity. Do not relocate, remarry, or restructure. Not because you are incapable, but because you are grieving, and grief and haste are the two ingredients of every story like the seven-bedroom house.
If your spouse is alive, this article is still for you, and its assignment is different: make sure the person you love would not be the widow in the first paragraph, comforted only by a plan that lived in one other man's head. Write things down. Put the documents where your family can find them. The Montana widow's husband had a plan; it boarded the plane with him. Paper, and time, are the two mercies you can arrange in advance. The two-year rule is simply time, given permission.