Dementia and your finances

There IS a good solution to this. Give Power of Attorney to a much younger person that you can trust with your life and with your money, and do it while you still have your wits about you (or earlier if you are showing the signs of early-onset dementia). Then, relinquish your role in managing your own finances when the time comes. I am POA for my mother. Early on, we both had power to take actions on her behalf. Now, she is completely incapable of even the simplest financial task. In between then and now was a danger zone; a time where she thought she has things under control, but before I realized it, she’d been on the phone with a scammer for 30 minutes. He was trying to get her to give him full access to her computer screen. She was going along with it, but he caught her at a bad time, so she wasn’t able to follow his instructions correctly.

My mother has dementia. This is the only time where I found having a financial advisor absolutely saved her. In the period of not having the diagnosis yet and her decline a “friend” convinced her to fund a real estate purchase while the person would run it. He flagged it as suspicious and already noted the changes in my mom as he had known her for 20+ years. He advised her against it and she listened. She would not listen to me. It would have cost her millions and if she was able to do it herself or able to have her friend move the funds, it would have happened.

If you have adult children that you'd trust to manage your money, start getting the paperwork in place now; it's much easier for everyone if you do that while you're still competent to sign legal documents, and they don't need to take effect immediately.

If not, look into Childfree Trust. It's specifically designed for us, and reasonably priced.

You need to empower other people in your lives, starting with your partner and then including adult children when appropriate. Hire an advice only financial advisor that is YOUNGER than you if appropriate.

We took control of our parents' finances as they declined. Thankfully, I have two siblings I can work with.

This is an important topic. Need to have a plan in place!

I haven't listened to this podcast, but I am aware of the problem and actively dealing with it in my own family. I have a relative who has a very strong aversion to discussing anything money-related. Everyone in the family thinks "oh, they're really savvy and they're very well organized." And that is true, for now. I can't even bring up the issue of age-related cognitive decline to this person in order to try to make sure that things are in order financially because they would consider it massively insulting and intrusive, and I can't find support from anyone else in the family to help broach the topic. This has to be one of the more difficult problems to deal with in terms of personal finance.