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October 21, 2025 
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Hello everyone. This week, we’re talking with Beth Pinkser, a longtime financial journalist and a certified financial planner who is about to release her first book: “My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving.”
When it came time to manage her mother’s financial life, Beth said she had book knowledge in a situation that demanded street smarts, which left her feeling helpless at times. But during the period she oversaw her mother’s affairs, she was uniquely positioned: As a columnist, she was able to call upon experts about the issues that flummoxed her, and then write about them.
“To really get what’s involved,” she writes at the start of her book, “you have to feel it.”
We asked her, as we do all new authors, about the single piece of original thinking in her book — related to money — that she’s most proud of.
Here’s what she told us:
Managing your money is not just about you, and it’s not just about making good decisions. My book is for people who have to step in for somebody else and take over their affairs, and you never know what you’re going to get. Most people come at all this sideways, called in an emergency, with no planning in place. Even those that do a lot of the hard work ahead of time with legal documents and careful money management still hit stumbling blocks.
This was me.
I had to dig in and find my way through, and I wrote about it while I was doing it. My goal is to help people through the stuff that nobody ever talks about and isn’t in textbooks, like making financial decisions when you have all bad choices and how to be relentlessly tenacious cutting through all the red tape.
“My Mother’s Money” comes out Nov. 4.
Below, you’ll find a roundup of this week’s money-related stories from across The Times. Have a good week.
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