Are you ready to be your Parent’s Helper?

First Steps to Being Ready to Manage Your Elderly Parent’s Finances

Elder law attorneys in San Diego very often find themselves advising adult children of the elderly on the intricacies of managing their parents’ finances. Why get help from an Elder law attorney and not from an accountant? With rare exception, most of us know how to pay our bills. We don’t need an accountant to tell us when SDG&E or the water bill needs to be paid. Helping or handling a parent’s finances may seem straightforward at first, but without pre-planning senseless hurdles can make it stressful and unnecessarily difficult.

Too many children and grandchildren only realize that a senior’s finances have gone sideways when they see late notices in a mail pile or notice stacks of unopened mail. Parents often feel that their privacy has been violated when their lack of attention to paying their bills has been discovered. They often become evasive and defensive, when all you want to do is help.

Sometimes families are forced to deal with a senior’s financial situation without warning. These emergencies come to the surface after a bad fall or stroke which prevents a senior from handling their own affairs.

Adult children often come to an Elder law attorney to help them after their parent has suffered a debilitating health crisis. They are often in the dark. Culturally, to our own detriment, we are all trained to keep our finances private. Few seniors realize that failing to share makes it harder for them to stay captains of their own financial ships. Many seniors find it easier to be forthcoming about their finances with an elder law lawyer to provide against an uncertain future. Sometimes this is a first step that lets them begin to open up to their children. This can take time, for many senior seniors it feels wrong to speak about their finances with family members.

San Diego Elder law attorneys are accustomed to helping families deal with these issues. Seeking out an experienced elder law or estate lawyer before problems arise can help you and your parent avoid awkwardness, embarrassment and heated emotions.

The biggest triggers, making families dive-in to rearrange senior’s affairs and empower adult children to manage their aging parent’s finances, are probably health events requiring long term care and sudden realizations that their parents have significant memory issues. Financial management problems make these types of events even more painful. At times like these, getting an answer to important questions may be difficult or even impossible. Sidelined seniors seldom can tell you who they owe, how much they receive each month or where they have bank and investment accounts.

Acting ahead of time, or at least before ordinary bill paying has become a problem, empowers older parents and adult children to act as a team and avoid being forced into a role reversal. Working with an Elder law attorney, a senior maintains control by putting into place the marching orders for how things should be handled. They get to choose how their financial safety can be monitored.

Using an Elder law attorney changes the paradigm. No disruptive and harsh role reversal is needed. A good Elder law attorney can coach a family and help seniors put in place tools protect themselves while staying actively involved in their own finances. Some home bill pay pre-planning mechanisms are legal documents, many are not. The goal is for our parents to put in place mechanisms to shield them from everything falling to pieces, if and when, illness or disability prevents them from doing what must be done. Proper planning allows a senior senior to choose who they want to have act for them and put in place alerts so that their chosen person, whether family member or friend, can step in and make certain the bills are paid and the lights stay on