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A physician with fifteen years in clinical practice and a dual household income had the financial plan most parents assume they have. She had started a 529 college savings account before her daughter was born, carried benefits through a large integrated health system, and expected a pension to grow alongside her career. Then her marriage ended when her daughter was five, and the plan she had counted on needed to hold for one.

Dr. Katie Richardson is a board-certified pediatrician and the CEO of Lantern, a Colorado-based national nonprofit that delivers childhood development resources to more than 500,000 families across the United States through text messaging. More than 65 percent of those families live in low-income zip codes, giving Richardson a data-informed view of financial disruption at scale that few clinicians can match. She joins me on the Income Protection Journal Podcast to discuss what two decades of working with families, and one personal financial disruption, taught her about building financial security that survives the unexpected.

What Families Build For and What They Miss

Richardson’s work puts her inside the financial lives of families across the economic spectrum. Through Lantern, she oversees programs reaching families in more than 30 states. She also draws on fifteen-plus years of clinical observation watching middle-class and upper-middle-class families make healthcare decisions based on cost and coverage rather than clinical need alone.

A 2024 advisory from the Office of the Surgeon General on parental stress confirmed what Richardson had already observed at scale: financial pressure shapes how parents show up at work, at home, and in the exam room. She saw the shift firsthand in her clinical practice. Families that once agreed to imaging studies or specialist referrals without hesitation began asking whether the test was covered and what it would cost. That pattern, she says, spans the full income range.

Even among higher-earning families, the financial pressure is real. The households with the nicest cars are often under the same stress as households with far fewer resources, she says. They have simply scaled the problem up.

She describes the cascading expenses parents rarely anticipate before they arrive: the gap between what school systems cover and what children with developmental or educational needs actually require, the cost of travel sports, and the outlays that accumulate from pregnancy through the early school years. Lantern has measured this directly. A food insecurity program the organization piloted in Colorado found that 75 percent of participating families reported reduced food insecurity after receiving targeted text-message resources, and more than 85 percent said they discovered local programs they had not known existed. The same pattern holds for financial planning, Richardson says. Families often lack access to basic information, not the willingness to use it.

The larger finding from her two decades of work is that family financial planning tends to address the scenario where everything goes as expected. The scenario where it does not tends to go unaddressed until it is no longer hypothetical.

The Policies She Made Sure Were Hers

What shaped Richardson’s financial thinking was not a seminar or a planning worksheet. It was growing up with a mother who had not planned, and then navigating her own divorce.

“I was brought up by a single mom who, when I was in high school, we had creditors calling our house all the time,” she says. “And so I know what it can look like to have someone who hasn’t planned.”

That history made her deliberate. She watched her mother trying to make retirement work on $36,000 a year in Social Security and a small supplement, and decided she would not arrive in the same position. She kept life insurance and disability coverage alongside her employer benefits, specifically because she understood that employer benefits require the employer.

“My biggest fear going through my divorce was, am I going to be able to do this financially on my own? I need to make sure that no matter what happens, whether it be divorce, illness, any of those things, that I have really thought and made sure that my daughter is going to be okay,” Richardson says.

The question she asked during her divorce is the same question a life insurance policy is designed to answer before the moment arrives. The answer depends entirely on what was put in place when everything was still intact.

Richardson maintained individual policies throughout her career at that health system, and she is direct about why.

“Some of my insurances definitely and always has been outside of my employer, because even if I’m not working at an employer that offers those benefits, I know that I still have those things,” she says.

After nearly sixteen years at that health system, she made the decision to leave. The individual coverage she had maintained was part of what made the transition possible. Planning outside her employer had given her the financial flexibility to walk away when the organization’s direction no longer aligned with her own.

After thirty years of advising physicians, dentists, and other high-income professionals at Set for Life Insurance in Greenwood Village, Colorado, what Richardson describes is one of the most consistent findings I see: an employer benefit is a workplace benefit, and it ends when the employment does. Among the executives I advise, the ones with the most options when their employment situation changes are the ones carrying executive disability coverage outside their group plan. Individual life insurance and disability policies, issued in the policyholder’s name and not tied to any employment relationship, follow the insured regardless of where their career leads. Why even high-income professionals consistently underestimate how much of their future earning capacity goes unprotected is examined in a conversation with Michael Sir of One Protection, whose software makes the true size of the income gap visible in dollar terms.

What Richardson Tells Parents Now

Richardson is not an insurance professional. What she brings to this conversation is a physician’s and nonprofit leader’s perspective on how financial disruption actually lands on families, and firsthand experience navigating one.

Colorado recently joined a growing number of states requiring financial literacy education for every high school student, a development Richardson calls a meaningful starting point. She does not think it is sufficient on its own. Most families, she says, lack the background to make consequential insurance and planning decisions without professional guidance, and she was no exception. She sought out advisors for investments and coverage precisely because she understood that wanting to make good decisions is not the same as having the knowledge to make them.

She observes one more pattern worth naming. Through Lantern’s work with families accessing food banks and community resources, Richardson has seen how much shame attaches to asking for help. She sees the same dynamic in insurance. Families who have paid premiums for years sometimes hesitate to file a claim because the act of filing feels like an admission. Richardson says her answer to that hesitation is the same whether the resource is a food pantry or a disability policy: that is exactly what it is there for.

The families she works with through Lantern lose their financial footing for reasons most of them did not anticipate: a job loss, a health diagnosis, a family structure that changes without warning. What she observes consistently is that the families with the most flexibility when those moments arrive are the ones who built it before they needed it.