Your Emergency Financial Planning Guide, Pandemic Edition

We do many things to try and ward off future pain: Get annual physicals. Save for retirement. Buy insurance. Drawing up plans to combat the financial devastation from a global pandemic hasn’t been one of them.

With careers and nest eggs suddenly seeming more fragile, many financial planning issues pushed to the side during a bull market take on new urgency. “A lot of people have been going through life without a good pulse on their finances, because everything has kind of been working out,” says financial planner Mitchell Kraus of Santa Monica, Calif.-based Capital Intelligence Associates. “They’re now questioning what they thought they knew and looking for unique solutions or for more details, because solutions aren’t as easy as they used to be.”