FA Center: After a deadly house fire, an adviser helps her family — and clients — get through

Sherry McKinney’s husband called in mid-2009 with news that shook her and her family: His father had just died.

“Mom and Dad’s house caught fire,” he said. “Dad didn’t make it out.”

McKinney, who’d lost her own father six months earlier after a six-month bout with pancreatitis, was jarred. She’d balanced daily visits to her father’s bedside — in a hospital and then a nursing home — with raising two teenagers and maintaining her financial planning practice, but as she heard the latest development her knees buckled for the first time she could recall.

Then she regained her composure and drove to her father-in-law’s home, where emergency vehicles lined the street and her mother-in-law took oxygen in the back of an ambulance.

This time, McKinney ultimately chose to step away from work. She ended up taking a leave of absence from her job as a financial planner at a small, independent company in Greensboro, N.C., choosing instead to help her family recover. Today, she’s back at work, and her experience has led her to offer clients more detailed — and sympathetic — advice on recovering from disasters.

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“I try to make myself more available to people going through a tragedy, even when it’s not convenient or I’m pushed for time,” McKinney told MarketWatch.

Sherry McKinney.

For the first four weeks after her father-in-law’s death, McKinney kept working as an adviser while devoting much of her day to handling the fire’s aftermath — from helping her mother-in-law cope with losing her husband and her belongings to navigating her insurance claim. Her husband, a chief financial officer at a commercial construction supply firm, was too grief-stricken to focus on such matters.

But McKinney soon found her family related duties too time-consuming, so she decided to take a leave of absence from her job. At first, she told her boss she’d need three months. Ninety days later, still swamped by work, she called him to say she wouldn’t be returning.

“He was very nice and understanding about it,” McKinney said. “And I had a certain peace knowing I was doing the right thing for my family.”

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McKinney, now 54, spent the next year helping her mother-in-law lay the groundwork for a new life. Through that experience, she learned lessons on how to manage insurance claims, rebuild a heavily damaged home, and deal with everything from replacing a destroyed car-title document to applying for Social Security widow benefits.

For starters, McKinney learned the importance of disaster preparedness. Today, she urges clients to videotape every room of their house, opening closets and drawers along the way.

Cataloging belongings, she says, helps you arrive at an accurate tally of their value in the event of a total loss. (A copy of the video, she urges, should be stored outside the home, along with receipts for costly items.)

She also suggests consolidating all personal information, such as usernames and passwords for bank accounts and online bills, in a single organizer. (She recommends the Everything Binder as an easy-to-use data storage tool.)

McKinney’s mother-in-law’s home was largely destroyed, but it was deemed salvageable, and McKinney helped hire a contractor with experience restoring fire-damaged residences.

“Some builders do whatever the homeowner insurance company tells them to do,” she said. “But we found a more savvy contractor who understood how to deal more effectively with insurers.”

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The builder redesigned the home’s floor plan. That way, McKinney’s mother-in-law could make a fresh start by moving into what felt like a new place.

McKinney did not abandon her career during her year off. She kept up her membership in professional associations and took the mandatory 40 hours of continuing education classes to maintain her CPA.

“I loved being a financial adviser and my goal was to eventually be an adviser again,” she said. “So as things finally started to settle down, I saw an ad for a financial planner at a local firm, applied and got the job.”

Today, she’s a senior financial adviser at Stearns Financial Group in Greensboro. From time to time, she gets referrals from attorneys and others seeking an adviser with experience rebounding from tragedy and comforting those in deep sorrow.

“Some people need an adviser who not only understands the estate process and insurance-claim process, but who can also give them a hug in a time of trouble,” she said.

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Morey Stettner is a writer in Portsmouth, N.H. He’s the author of five business books, including ”Skills for New Managers,” published by McGraw Hill. Email him at m.stettner@comcast.net.