AARP the Other Talk by Tim Prosch

Author:Tim Prosch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2014-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

Step 1. Establish a Financial Power of Attorney

If you have more than one child and all or some of them will be participating in the Other Talk, I recommend dividing up the responsibilities among them:

One child could oversee the finances and handle all the bill paying.

Another could monitor the medical diagnoses and treatments and stay on top of doctor visits.

A third could be in charge of the home maintenance or be the liaison with the assisted-living center.

That way all the kids have a responsibility, nobody feels overburdened and eventually underappreciated, and the opportunities for sibling disagreements are reduced.

When choosing the child who will handle your finances (I’ll get to the other two choices in later chapters), Linda Kaare, a Michigan elder-law attorney, urges that you should select “someone who is organized, dependable, and trustworthy and is financially stable in his or her own life.”

In addition, you should be honest about the amount of work and the challenges involved. When it came time for me to take over the financial responsibilities for my parents, I found the tasks—paying bills, making investment decisions, and filing tax returns, to name a few—fairly time-consuming and ongoing, especially since my parents and I lived in different states.

There are shortcuts, however, like electronic banking and automatic withdrawals for recurring expenses, like home healthcare, utilities, and phone bills, which will save time and allow the kids to monitor your accounts for correct deposits and withdrawals.

In addition, keeping an eye on the money can help your kids protect you from financial scams that target older Americans, which have become so prevalent that the National Council on Aging, on its website, calls them the crime of the century:

Why? Because seniors are thought to have a significant amount of money sitting in their accounts. Financial scams also often go unreported or can be difficult to prosecute, so they’re considered a low-risk crime.

However, they are devastating to many older adults and can leave them in a very vulnerable position with little time to recoup their losses.

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