On a hot August afternoon in 2003, a sagging power line in northern Ohio brushed against trees that should have been trimmed. On its own, that's a small event. Lines trip all the time, and the grid is built to route around them.
What turned it into one of the largest blackouts in North American history happened in a control room. The alarm system that should have warned the operators had quietly stopped working, and nobody knew. So they kept doing their jobs the way they always had, confident everything was fine, while lines failed one after another. By the end of the day, about 50 million people across eight states and Ontario were sitting in the dark.
Engineers have a name for this: a single point of failure. One part that, if it stops working, takes everything else down with it.
If you spent your career as an engineer, a program manager, or anyone responsible for systems that couldn't go down, you know the idea cold. You probably spent years designing around it. So it may surprise you how often the same flaw sits right in the middle of a household's retirement money.
When one person runs everything
Every so often, a couple sits down with me where one spouse has managed every dollar for 20 years or more. They read the statements, track the funds, rebalance, and they enjoy it. Many of them are good at it. Nothing in this article says otherwise.
But I always ask the same question. If that person stopped running the money tomorrow, who makes the next decision?
Too often, the answer is nobody. The other spouse may not know which accounts exist, where the logins are kept, or what the plan was supposed to do next. Money that has to last the rest of both their lives rests on one person's time, attention, and health.
Four ways the control room goes dark
Death. Premature death is one of the seven risks my Carefree Retirement Income Model™ is built around. When the spouse who ran the money dies first, the survivor inherits the portfolio and every open decision at the hardest moment of their life. Whether the money even reaches the right hands depends on paperwork most people haven't looked at in decades, which I covered in Your Will Doesn't Control Your 401(k).
Illness or injury. I watched this happen to a couple who had chosen to keep running their own investments. Right after he retired, he got seriously sick, and he stayed sick for most of a year. It was exactly the stretch when money should have been moving from their long-term investments toward the money they would be living on soon. None of it moved. He was fighting to get well, and she was taking care of him. Nobody was thinking about the portfolio, and nobody should have had to.
A slow fade. This one is the hardest to see, because it doesn't feel like anything. Researchers Michael Finke, John Howe, and Sandra Huston studied financial literacy among older Americans and found that scores declined steadily after age 60. Confidence in one's own financial decisions did not.
That's the silent alarm. Their study compared groups of people at different ages, so it describes averages, not any one person. But it describes most of us. We won't feel the slip, because we'll feel just as sure as we always have. That isn't a comment on anyone's intelligence. It's simply what happens with age, and it's why the backup has to be in place before anyone thinks it's necessary.
Wanting your time back. Running a portfolio well takes hours every month. Retirement is supposed to give those hours back.
Why my clients don't run it this way
After 2003, the grid didn't go back to hoping for the best. It added protection: better alarms, operators who could see trouble sooner, and reliability standards that utilities are now required to meet.
The couples who work with me made the same kind of decision. They looked at the single point of failure and chose not to have one. They hand my team the whole picture: the investments, the income plan, the taxes, and the coordination with their CPA and attorney. Both spouses understand the plan, because both sit at the table when we build it. And if one of them gets sick, or simply wants to spend a Tuesday on the golf course instead of on a spreadsheet, the plan keeps moving.
We hold ourselves to the same standard. Every plan at RC Planners is built on the same method and documented the same way, no matter which advisor leads it. If something ever happened to one of us, the rest of the team could read the notes and know exactly what was planned. Nothing stops. Nothing waits. No single point of failure on their side of the table, and none on ours.
Find it before the lights go out
The trees in Ohio didn't grow into that power line overnight. They had been growing for years, in plain sight, while everyone assumed the system would handle it.
If one of you runs the money, sit down together this month and answer four questions. What do we own, and where is it? How would the other person get into every account? What is the plan supposed to do next, this year and over the next five? And who do we call if the person who runs it is suddenly out of the picture?
If those answers are hard to write down, you've found your single point of failure. And if you're deciding who your backup should be, start with the questions in How to Choose a Retirement Income Planner. Ask them of anyone you're considering, including me.
Let's fix it while the lights are still on. Start with a 30-minute Exploratory Call.
This article is for general education and is not individual investment, tax, or legal advice.
Sources: U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, Final Report on the August 14, 2003 Blackout (2004); Federal Energy Regulatory Commission; Michael S. Finke, John S. Howe, and Sandra J. Huston, "Old Age and the Decline in Financial Literacy," Management Science 63, no. 1 (2017): 213-230.