Everything They Don’t Tell You About Taking Care of Aging Parents | by Adeline Dimond | Oct, 2022 | Medium

Get ready to fight, and don’t expect people to understand.

In addition to the emotional toll and time involved, there are few who can help. If you have enough money you can buy eldercare. But it ain't cheap.   Long-term care insurance is available but read the policy and benefits page carefully. 

2. Long-term care insurance might be bullshit.

When I recently wrote about the difficulty of taking care of my parents, including the stress of watching their savings dwindle, a lot of commenters wrote “I have long-term care insurance, so I’ll be fine.” Yeah, not so fast.

My parents also have long-term care insurance. They have (or had) exactly $938,000 in coverage. Their insurance only covers costs associated with an assisted living facility or a skilled nursing facility. It does not cover in-home care.

This is because halfway into paying premiums, the long-term care insurance company suddenly raised their rates. My father couldn’t afford the new premiums, but the long-term care insurance company continued to offer a cheaper option, one that only covered care if he entered a facility. Left with no real choice, he switched to the cheaper plan.

Some of the challenges:

1. Financial institutions will refuse to honor power-of-attorney documents.

Yes, this is likely illegal. But large financial institutions know that in order to be held accountable for failing to honor POA documents, the attorney-in-fact would need to sue them. Otherwise, there are no consequences for them at all. But suing a financial institution takes money and grit, which they are betting that the attorney-in-fact does not have.

Review the POA language very carefully.

In my case, my father’s POA documents listed my mother as his attorney-in-fact in the first instance, and me as a successor POA if my mother was “unable or unwilling to act.” My mother’s POA was the same, listing my father as the first POA. Financial institutions seized on this, asking me to “prove” that my parents were “unwilling or unable to act” on each other’s behalf.

Open a bank account with your parents.

I could have avoided all the above POA pitfalls if I simply were a signatory to my parent's bank accounts. Of course, not everyone has the type of relationship with their parents that allows for this; I definitely didn’t. But if you can swing this, being able to immediately access their funds at a moment’s notice is worth the uncomfortable conversations this might require. Parents hate giving up control.  I don't know why they would want to maintain control when they are dying or dead.  Some parents cannot get over  "I know what is best for you."

Go ahead and get the passwords to your parents’ accounts, and pretend to be them.

Eventually, in some cases, after it became clear that the financial institutions were going to block access to my parents’ accounts despite the perfectly executed POA documents, before spending my energy drafting more scary letters, I just got my parents’ passwords (and the answers to the security questions), logged on to their accounts, and pretended to be them.

I was warned by one financial institution that “they don’t allow this,” but I just didn’t care anymore. I have my parents’ authorization to access their accounts, and that’s enough for me.

https://adelinedimond.medium.com/everything-they-dont-tell-you-about-taking-care-of-aging-parents-de64e5bb47a7

Everything They Don’t Tell You About Taking Care of Aging Parents | by Adeline Dimond | Oct, 2022 | Medium