The answer to this question is, as you probably anticipated, “it depends”.  It depends on who is legally in charge.  It depends on whether the siblings were on the same page before Dad couldn’t handle the finances any longer.  It depends on whether there is underlying trust or distrust among the family members.  And, it depends upon whether Mom made a plan before she became incapacitated and shared that plan with the kids.

If your parent has made one of his or her children the Power of Attorney (POA) then that person has the responsibility to handle the actions and decisions that are covered by the document.  While the POA is not required to consult with her siblings, it might be a good idea to do so, especially if there may be disagreement.  While the ultimate decision belongs to the POA, obtaining the input of siblings and discussing the options will help the others feel involved with the decision even if they don’t ultimately agree with it.  On the other hand, if one of you stepped in and took over “helping” your parent with his finances without the benefit of having been designated the POA, you’re on shaky ground.  The helper doesn’t have the “right” to make the decisions, and it isn’t unusual for the others to feel angry or frustrated.

As with so many things, communication is really the core solution.  If you have been named POA by your parent, it’s a good idea to have periodic family meetings in person or by phone or video chat to discuss important decisions or changes.  Likewise, sending a budget and periodic accounting of your parent’s finances to your siblings will help them feel like they know what is going on.  Yet as POA, there will be times when you simply need to make a decision and act on it, and it is important that your family doesn’t miss out on deadlines or opportunities because of “analysis paralysis”.

If you aren’t the POA but have stepped in to the role of “chief financial officer” for your Mom, then it is even more critical that you communicate with your siblings since you don’t have any legal authority to take action.  The last thing any family needs is to be fighting with each other in court.  The only winners in this case are the lawyers who represent all of you!

Let’s look at things from the perspective of the sibling who isn’t in charge.  Why is she disagreeing with your management of your parents’ affairs?  Perhaps it is because she has a different point of view.  Or maybe he’s hurt or frustrated that you haven’t asked for his opinion.  Could it be as simple as feeling left out or in the dark?   Often, the unknown makes us assume that something is being hidden from us.  Whatever the motivation, finding a way to act as a team with your siblings will always make things less stressful for all of you.

Planning ahead for the time when you or your parent can no longer handle financial affairs is a multi-step process, one that most people would rather avoid.  Yet taking this important step will often mean the difference between family harmony and fireworks.

Article by Transition Aging Parent.Com.

Here are a few other reasons why you should buy the Lifetime Medical Organizer:

According to the National Alliance for Caregiving, more than 65 million people, 29% of the U.S. population, provide care for a chronically ill, disabled or aged family member or friend during any given year and spend an average of 20 hours per week providing care for a loved one.

• The Lifetime Medical Organizer can reduce the amount of time you spend keeping track of medical information and sorting through notes and records.

Approximately 73% of family members who care for someone over the age of 18 either work or have worked while providing care; 66% have had to make some adjustments to their work life, from reporting late to work to giving up work entirely; and 1 in 5 family caregivers have had to take a leave of absence.

• The Lifetime Medical Organizer is a communication tool that helps you to keep information consistent between family members, doctors, and hospital staff even when you are unable to accompany a loved one to doctor appointments or treatments.

Studies found that a communication gap exists between parents and adult children when it comes to sharing health related information.

• The Lifetime Medical Organizer will speak for you in the event of an emergency. It will provide all the necessary information to loved ones who are unfamiliar with your situation when assistance is needed most. 

Some of the questions a first responder will ask when providing aid to a loved one have to do with allergies, medications, and last food intake.

• During an emergency, emotions can run high with distractions to your concentration. The Lifetime Medical Organizer is a quick reference to help first responders with your health needs.

22% of family caregivers said they need help communicating with physicians.

• The Lifetime Medical Organizer helps doctors, patients, and you share information and communication easily.

“I wish all my patients, especially those accompanied by adult children, would make a medical organizer like this.”        –Dr. George S., OB-Gynecologist

Studies found that senior parents and their adult children want to discuss health topics but are waiting for the other to bring it up. For senior parents already discussing health issues with their adult children, more than half report they are not discussing the topic enough.

• The Lifetime Medical Organizer can help to bridge the gap of communication with health related topics between you and your family members and encourage more dialogue.

Here are some of the benefits you will receive by purchasing the Lifetime Medical Organizer:

• It speaks for you: Family, doctors, hospital staff, and first responders can easily access your information and communicate quickly if you are suddenly unable to speak for yourself.
• Taking care of a family member is easier: Family members, who accompany a spouse or parent to doctor visits or help with daily care, can use the organizer to share and update medical information.
• Peace of Mind: You won’t have to be concerned with recalling little details about your medical information because the organizer remembers it for you.

Keep It Simple!!

Some organizer products appear complex or include forms that don’t apply to your situation. Why pay for more than you need?

The Lifetime Medical Organizer is a HOW-TO book that is very simple to follow and provides the essential forms to help you get started. The instructions and tips in the book make it easy to fill out the forms and customize it for your own specific needs. It’s easier than you think!

Take Action Today

“The best way to get started is to begin.”

Don’t wait to get started. Let the Lifetime Medical Organizer become your personal assistant today! Click on the links below to buy the book.

Buy the PAPERBACK book and use the forms already provided to help you get started.

Buy the E-BOOK and have the ability to print the forms for future reference.

Senior parents don’t like talking about death and adult children are afraid their parents will assume they are after the inheritance if they bring up the assets. There are also the kids who are in denial that their parents are aging and parents who don’t want to upset the children by raising the topic.

It’s not easy to have “the talk” between parents and children but there are ways to approach it that get the job done with as little stress as possible. Here’s a few ideas to help all of you adult children and senior parents get started.

My first suggestion is to simply talk with your parents (or children) about their (your) plans. Discuss the documents and resources you put in place and choices of how you want to age when you can no longer take care of yourself. However, if that’s just too difficult for your family situation then you might have to resort to some more roundabout approaches. While it is best for this conversation to be open, honest, and straightforward, sometimes it is just not the reality.

One way for you to start a conversation with your parent is to ask for advice or suggestions about your own situation. This could lead you to naturally ask what plans they have made. Perhaps your friend is struggling with the role of caregiver or financial support and you can begin by incorporating the situation into the conversation.

For parents, pick an evening to share your plans and let your children in on the details. If you don’t feel comfortable giving them the details, at least let them know where you keep the information in the event you become incapacitated or suffer a pre-mature death. If you don’t know how to begin the conversation, consider the idea a senior parent shared with me about how she will bring up the topic with her kids:

“I am going to create a medical organizer from your book and share it with my kids. It is a good way to introduce them to my aging health situation.”

If you have your information in a folder or file, you may want to give the documents to your children to review at their leisure. This gives them time to process the situation and ask questions at their own pace. When my parents purchased a burial plan, I wasn’t interested in the details. When my father died, I appreciated the decisions my parents made together about burial choices because it made it easy on me without the guilt of worrying if I’m doing what they wanted. Your children will likely thank you for the preparation you did to help them with decisions down the road.

The sooner you take on the task of talking with your family about these matters, the easier it will be to talk about the things you’d like to happen and the resources available to make it happen.

But a new national survey tells us that we’re not talking the talk when it comes to families – particularly seniors and their adult children -discussing critical life issues related to aging, health and financial security.

This is especially true about health-related issues. We’re either in denial that a crisis could happen at any time or we’re just waiting for someone to start the conversation!

Yorong’s book could be that conversation starter. But don’t wait for a health crisis to begin the process. It’s best discussed when all parties are calm and rational about life decisions.

Yorong created Lifetime Medical Organizer based on personal experience during a medical crisis with her father, Pedro Larot Yorong.

“In January 2007, my father died of lung cancer at the age of 82,” Yorong writes. “At the time of his diagnosis, his doctor told him he had between four and six months to live. Unfortunately, that was not the case. He passed away only three short months later. As one can imagine, my family struggled with a tidal wave of emotions during these months.”

Narratives such as this start each chapter of the 90-page book. Yorong’s personal story provides powerful and heartfelt accounts of why hope is not enough when dealing with a medical situation.

The Lifetime Medical Organizer is a tool to help navigate through the emotional and intellectual mire of care-giving. The simple guide to organizing matters of life and health includes how-to instructions and forms to aid the process.

“During that short period of three months, my family was confronted with many issues and concerns about how to manage my father’s care and approaching death,” the author recalls. “We had not dealt with anything like this before, and there was much to manage with my father’s appointments, medications, eating habits, legal affairs, medical bills and other related matters.

“My siblings and I were challenged with managing the logistics and concerns of everyone involved, but most importantly we had to balance the respect we had for our parents and the decisions that only they could ultimately make,” she adds.

The medical organizer provided her family with peace of mind during a difficult time. It is her hope that it will do the same for others.

Yorong created the organizer after searching bookstores and the Internet to find something helpful. She found products that were very expensive and too complex.

“It seemed they were created by medical people,” she says. “I liken it to baking a cake with ingredients but no recipe.”

The organizer also serves as a communications tool among family, friends, health-care providers and others.

“Most people have what I call a ‘chop suey’ approach to managing important information,” the author states. “Their legal documents are tucked away in a safe deposit box at the bank. Medicine is in a cabinet or on a counter-top. Financial, insurance and personable data are stored in a computer.”

Imagine the problems you create for loved ones when they have to find this information. The biggest mistake we make is taking for granted that someone will have this information available when we need it most.

Yorong deals with this every day as a financial adviser and former trust officer and investment portfolio manager with more than 17 years of experience in the financial industry.

“When communications is not managed effectively, lack of communications can lead to assumptions, stir all sorts of conflicts and create doubt,” Yorong says.

Now, thanks to Yorong’s organized mind and compassionate nature, she’s made it easier for all of us.

A reader reports, “I wish I had something like this when my late mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer at age 83. It was a nightmare for her to try to remember a lifetime of medical procedures. And then to keep repeating it over and over again as she moved through her round of appointments and involvement with the many specialized branches of the health-care system. If we had it all written down in one place, we could have saved many hours and much frustration.”

Article written by Susan Sunderland for Midweek June 3, 2008. Follow Susan on Twitter @alohasks

But when the tickets didn’t arrive, she phoned the cruise line, which had no record of her reservation. When she asked a GlobalCruisesOnSale.com representative by email about the preponderance of bad reviews, she was referred to a site called BuySecureOnline.org, which “certified” the business as legitimate.

“I think it’s a hoax,” she told me.

Actually, Cacella’s cruise is a textbook scam. Here are a few telltale signs something is wrong with a company.

Ever heard of the business?

If you don’t know the company, it could be a scam. If no one you know has heard of it, there’s an even better chance. And if you can’t find any information about it online – good, bad or otherwise – run. I receive regular emails from readers asking me if I’ve heard of a particular company that’s offering an attractive deal. Good businesses leave a trail of happy customers. Bad businesses try to cover their tracks. A fraudulent enterprise won’t even offer an address or phone number on its site.

Is the price unusually attractive?

Most scams look too good to be true. That’s because they are too good to be true. And you probably already know that on a subconscious level, but you’re consciously overriding it because you want it to be true. Fact is, if something looks wrong to you, it probably is.

Do they want you to pay by cash or money order?

Virtually all legitimate businesses accept credit cards for major purchases. (Some exceptions apply. A hot dog vendor may be a cash-only business, but for reasons everyone understands.) Beware of businesses that sell big-ticket items like TVs, cruises or cars but doesn’t accept cards. And if they want you to wire the money, turn around and don’t look back. You can’t dispute such a transaction if something goes wrong. Once an unscrupulous business has your money, it’s over.

Do they ask for personal information by email?

No legitimate business asks for your credit card information or passwords by email. If a business demands that information by email, it’s almost certainly a scam. Never, ever share personal data in an email.

Are they asking you to buy now?

Shady businesses apply high-pressure sales tactics, claiming they’re offering you the last available unit in a timeshare or that only one more car model is on the lot. While this may be true, the tactic suggests the company may be ethically challenged in other ways, and it may signal a problem with its products. They may also worry that you’ll shop around and compare their products to those of a competitor. Take your time, and don’t rush into anything.

Are they offering something for “free”?

Remember, there’s no such thing as free. But if a business says something is free, you shouldn’t have to pay anything for it. Most of the scams I deal with start with a “free” offer but it turns out you have to buy something in order to get it. That’s a classic bait-and-switch game, and it may indicate a problem with the company. The product you’re buying may not be what you expect.

Do they tell you not to worry about the contract?

The most accomplished scam artists assure you the contract is “nothing to worry about” or offer a “Reader’s Digest” version in either a brochure or verbally. Neither count for much. What does? The actual contract, which you should read carefully before you buy something.

How many of these applied to Cacella’s cruise? Too many.

I contacted Royal Caribbean to find out if it had ever heard of the business. It hadn’t. It referred the matter to its legal department, which sent the company a cease-and-desist letter. Before I could ask the online agency for a reaction, both GlobalCruisesOnSale.com and BuySecureOnline.org went offline.

“We are out a whopping $1,300,” Cacella told me, urging me to share her story with others so that they could be warned. Most, she says, let them know that a legitimate business accepts credit cards.

“And just because a website looks good with authentic logos and terrific pictures and correct schedules does not mean that they are authorized or trustworthy,” she adds.

Christopher Elliott is a consumer advocate who blogs about getting better customer service at On Your Side. Connect with him on Twitter and Facebook.

Number of View : 504]]>