Getting a head start on end-of-life issues

In a hospital room in the winter of 2004, we fought hard to have a choice.

Just two days later, my 32-year-old sister-in-law, Rosaria “Za” Vandenberg, succumbed peacefully at home to a Stage 4 brain tumor. She died surrounded by love, at the end of a day in which she opened her eyes for the first time in more than a week and had the chance to see and feel her young daughter, Alessia, snuggled up next to her in her bed — something the 2-year-old had been afraid to do in the hospital.

We fought hard for the right to take her home. If we hadn’t, she would have died like the majority of Americans — in a hospital setting, against her preferences. And she would have missed that opportunity to look long and hard into her daughter’s eyes, transferring a lifetime of love into a moment of time.

The Tech Update column “New tools available for end-of-life planning,” which appeared in the Jan. 4 issue, brings to light a very important topic: understanding and respecting end-of-life preferences for ourselves and for our loved ones. It is a topic that has been grossly misrepresented.

And most of the fear-mongering misses the point — the travesty in which so few of us take the opportunity to share, and then have followed, our end-of-life wishes. Years after Za’s death, we were still struggling with how we could have done better — how we could have moved sooner and with more clarity, to follow what we knew she wanted, which was to go home.

Engage With Grace (engagewithgrace.org) was a result of this frustration, and the idea behind it is simple: We as a nation need a tool to help get these difficult conversations started, something that can be shared easily with family, friends, colleagues — anyone, really.

And so we came up with just five questions that each of us should answer for ourselves and for our loved ones. They should commit themselves to supporting those preferences — no matter what the opposition.

This is a process to help minimize the gut-wrenching decisions that so often must be made in end-of-life situations. It leaves politics and policy out of it, so we can all end our lives in the same way we lived them — with intent.

Alexandra Drane

Co-founder, Engage with Grace President, Eliza Corp.

Beverly, Mass.

Eliminating 12(b)-1 fees would abandon clients

Re: “Goodbye to 12(b)-1 fees” (Fiduciary Corner, Jan. 18): Blaine Aikin’s call to kill the 12(b)-1 trailer is another attempt to impose a one-structure-fits-all compensation regime on one of the main markets that benefits from this existing structure.

I have more than 500 accounts below $50,000 that won’t be serviced by any financial adviser if the existing structure is eliminated. The costs to set up, bill, collect and monitor fee-based accounts for the majority of these small-account holders who have little activity but need an adviser relationship are prohibitive. As a result, a core group of consumers who still value the relationships with their advisers will be lost.

These accounts will be abandoned and left to the fund companies, which will have to hire more people to deal with all the nuances we deal with as broker-dealers of record.

Even at the high end of the spectrum, how many advisers on a fiduciary basis put their clients into $1 million worth of loaded funds at net asset value and accept just the 25-basis-point trailer as their sole compensation, without a typical 1% fee wrap? See, there is no one package.

What is wrong with compensating with trail commissions as is disclosed in the prospectus? When you need your own hand held after a property/casualty claim, your insurance agent is there to help you and gets trails on his or her business for this service.

Finally, regarding Mr. Aikin’s comments as to what is fair and reasonable, do you send your office’s income-and-expense summary to all your clients to review to see if your wrap fee is fair and reasonable?

I believe for the low-end and high-end investor, an annual wrap fee of 0.75% to 1.5% may be too much, and therefore not a fiduciary program for them, especially if you include the same no-load funds with the management fees charged for who knows what reason. So the case of conflict and confusion can be made for all cases, and it is better to let the consumers decide what they want or need rather than eliminate options.

Oren Peretz

Branch manager

Encino, Calif.

First Allied Securities Inc.