Reply to What is the right age to begin to talk to your parents about protecting their finances?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here's the problem, from my experience. Getting a POA and trust set up (along with advance medical directive etc) is good, but it's not really enough to protect a parent's finances.

What you really need to do is have a sit-down with them every six months and go over everything - their bank accounts, their spending, their credit card bills showing what they spent where, their retirement account balances, etc. That way you will be able to see if they are pissing away their money on stupid stuff or getting scammed. One example - my mom kept signing up for all these stupid financial newsletters that were on auto-renew and that came to something like $300/month when you added it all up. And she kept basically day trading - she'd read something about palladium being a good investment and she'd run out and buy some palladium.  :roll:

Unfortunately it is not guaranteed you will be able to [b]stop [/b]your elderly parents from pissing their money away, but at least you will know about it. Not impossible they will resent this effort to protect them, but you have to try. Both my mom and my FIL went off the rails financially later in life. I had to take charge of their finances completely - as in, I control their spending, I get their bills and pay them, and I took away their credit cards. This happened after they'd already wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I wish I'd done it years sooner, but I had no idea how bad they were screwing up. In my mom's case, I attribute this mostly to medical issues, and to the overuse of lorazepam, which turned her into a zombie until I put a stop to that, too.[/quote]

This is all so true. The problem is with things like dementia sometimes they completely lack self-awareness and there seems to be this time-frame where they can pass a dementia test, but are clearly impaired to anyone who knows them well. So you may discover obvious fraud and they are convinced the woman on the internet is their fiance and then YOU are accused of money fraud. Or..the parent who was so careful with money and thrifty is suddenly falling for scams, but won't allow you to take over and while they will fall for a stranger's stories, nobody in the family is worthy of managing things. If you go the route of getting them declared incompetent, you may unleash the wrath of a thousand lions. I've heard it all and I am always so relieved when a friend has an easy experience.[/quote]

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