Don’t get me wrong, for most, once they have truly made the transition, retirement really is a lot of fun. I love the message in that commercial that says retirement is the time you pay yourself to do what you want, but retirement is not one long vacation.
In fact, an increasing number of newer retirees are spending their time and money on things they did not have on their retirement to-do list. Suddenly, they are caring for their parents. Like most families in similar situations, my mother and her brother worried about money as their parents needed more care. More often though, their concerns were about health and safety issues.
Financial planning firms need solid software, knowledge of the latest in tax and estate planning, investment strategies and all the traditional subject matter, of course, but some of the most effective and meaningful planning I see is that which helps clients help their parents age with dignity.
We were fortunate to have my uncle living in the Chicago area. He was able to find a place to move his parents that could give good care and was located just a few miles from his home. These days, with family spread around the country if not the world, the experience is more like that of my mother who lives near me down here in Florida.
Fraud and exploitation of the elderly is epidemic in America. Mom was lucky to have a trusted insider on site. Sure, now and then they would disagree, but there was no one else on earth my mother could have more confidence in than her little brother and his wife, who happens to be a nurse. Most families don’t have that level of knowledge and resources so readily available to them.
Planners need to know and work well with health-care personnel, counselors and geriatric care managers. Developing skills as a screener of these providers is important.
There are three primary tasks necessary for families to tackle: assess the need, keep documents in order and visit often.
To assess the need, a great resource with which to connect your clients comes from the growing field of geriatric care management. A geriatric care manager (GCM) can perform an assessment. They do not possess a crystal ball, but can realistically lay out where things are probably, or possibly, headed. GCM’s can also be contracted to provide continuing monitoring services as a person ages, sometimes a great stress reliever when no reliable family is near by.
Assessments from a professional geriatric-care manager are usually a only few hundred dollars. Ongoing work is usually in the $75 to $100 an hour range. At The National Association of Professional Geriatric Care Managers Web site www.caremanager.org, you can get more information and search for a care manager by zip code and level of certification.
Planners can more directly help with important documents. In addition to the usual wills, trusts, living wills, durable powers of attorney and health-care proxies, families should also assemble the contact numbers for the doctors, lawyers, neighbors and others that interact or need to interact with the person needing care. Make sure that any and all privacy releases that may be needed are in order.
I am also generally a fan of empowering as many appropriate people as possible to see what is happening with the elderly person’s money. Involving several family members in the finances scares a lot of people because they fear disagreements will arise. Well, you can almost bank on that, but in my experience, it is worth it to let more people in on the plan and endure the arguments, second guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking that transparency brings in order to protect the elderly’s assets from fraud, exploitation and bad ideas.