Financial advisors should be on the first line of defense for clients struggling with cognitive decline – but must plan ahead to address their struggles with memory, behavior and daily functions.
One eldercare expert, Jodi Lyons, author of The Smart Person’s Guide to Eldercare, argues that a financial advisor should be among the first visits for a person who notices the signs of memory loss or dementia.
“If anyone thinks they might have a problem with their brain, stay away from the doctor and go to a financial advisor and a lawyer first,” Lyons told advisors during "Brain Health and Financial Planning," a session at the Investment and Wealth Institute’s Annual Conference Experience in Las Vegas on Monday. “The reason I say this is that you need to have your paperwork in order -- you need to know what the plan is, how much it will cost, and you need to have those legal documents in place first. If you go to the doctor first, you could forget all the paperwork.”
While medicine has made great advances in treating aging in many parts of the body -- knees and hips can be replaced, for example -- preserving or restoring the function of the brain remains a challenge, said Lyons.
Failure to plan can be a critical mistake, she said.
“One of the hardest parts of my job is to look at someone who is a millionaire and say congratulations, you’ll be on food stamps in two years,” said Lyons. “There are different types of diseases requiring different lengths of stay in different types of care setting that have different costs -- and they can vary wildly. The federal numbers most people are using to do their planning are usually nowhere near reality.”
Lyons co-authored another book, Brain Health As You Age, with Dr. Steven Simmons, M.D., of DocTalker, a concierge medicine practice located in Vienna, Va., to help Americans understand what to expect from various types of cognitive decline.
Simmons explained that the general public tends to identify severe cognitive decline with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, but in actuality there are many different kinds of dementia with different pathologies, largely because they impact different parts of the brain.
For example, chronic encephalopathy can manifest symptoms similar to Alzheimer's, but is typically caused by repetitive injury to the outer areas of the brain. A stroke, on the other hand, is caused by a loss of blood flow to part of the brain, and is often accompanied by weakness or paralysis on one side of the body.
Furthermore, not all memory and cognitive issues are signs of dementia, said Simmons.