The One Thing Married Women Should do to Protect Their Finances Before They Retire by Ryan Derousseau When Kathleen M. Rehl lost her husband, she remembers, beyond the grief, how much fear she felt. There was an underlying burden of worrying whether she would survive financially. That was unexpected, considering Rehl was a financial advisor. She was 60 when her husband died at age 72. The two ran a financial advisory firm together, and she didn’t know if it would survive his loss.