The massive costs of caregiving can be a big surprise to most people. It is an expensive undertaking in the best of circumstances and can be a full time job. BETH PINSKER, a columnist at Marketwatch and the author of the new book, "My Mother's Money- A Finanical Guide to Caregiving" takes us through her experience. There are many great tips to help get support for this difficult experience.
https://youtu.be/WNYLOR_Pvw8?si=8dS2LPG3vfe1FWIX
https://www.amazon.com/My-Mothers-Money-Financial-Caregiving-ebook/dp/B0DW3RLJSF/
https://open.spotify.com/episode/120pb9198YPecMzPir7RyC?si=mqlnY7XmRA-gtRzfJemq_w
Outline
00:00 Introduction to Caregiving and Aging
02:15 The Importance of Planning Ahead
08:28 Navigating Legal and Financial Caregiving
10:33 Understanding the Emotional and Physical Toll
14:29 Making Informed Decisions for Loved Ones
19:40 Financial Planning for End-of-Life Care
25:28 Essential Documents and Digital Access
Transcript
Introduction to Caregiving and Aging
Frazer Rice (00:04)This is a real treat for me in the sense that I have had personal experience around this. Your book, which we'll get into in just a second, is going to be coming out in November. I think it's going to be an important resource for pretty much anyone who has ⁓ any exposure to aging or anything like that or any sort of caregiving. Give us a little bit of a sense of the timing of the book first and we'll get that out of the way, far away.
Beth Pinsker (00:35)Great, you know what, we're all in this together and nobody's gonna escape any of this. You will either need to care for somebody or you're gonna need to be cared for yourself at some point in time. Like it's inescapable. you ⁓ know, we're all, we all need this information.
The reason I put it together was because I couldn't find it out there when I went looking for it. When my mom got sick, there wasn't a resource that told me how to deal with the things that I had to deal with. Being a CFP and being a retirement columnist and a journalist, I got the caregiving information. Then I wanted to put it out there for other people to benefit from it so they could plan a little bit better or get through whatever they were stuck in the middle of.
I pulled together a bunch of columns I had written and brought in them out. I interviewed a lot of people, like almost 100 people, especially for this book. Over the years as a journalist, I've interviewed probably, you a thousand people about, you know, planning and estate planning and all of that stuff that goes into it. This book is coming out November 4th from a Penguin Random House imprint. You can pre-order it on bethpinsker.com or through the publishers portal. Hopefully you'll see it everywhere and every bookstore you go to.
Frazer Rice (01:51)One of the concepts of the book that I think is vital is that it's important to have these steps. This caregiving analysis, this process established while everyone is at least a little bit on the top of their game. That you're not making decisions under maximum stress, either emotional, financial or otherwise. Maybe take us through a little bit about how you came to that realization and how you articulated that.
The Importance of Planning Ahead for Caregiving
Beth Pinsker (02:06)
Yeah, so I got a call from my mom ⁓ one day. You know, she's perfectly fine, 76 year old, and she's like, I'm gonna have surgery. It's gonna be a big one. I'm gonna get my back operated on so that I can continue to walk. She really wanted to be able to walk and she was losing her abilities.
The thing we need, we needed two things. We needed a power of attorney for ⁓ financial needs and a healthcare proxy because she was going to be incapacitated for a certain amount of time. We didn't know how much and we needed those documents. If we would not have had those documents, my life would have been an utter disaster. It was already really hard with those documents, but without them, I would have had to go to court.
I would have like not been able to do anything. I would have had to pay her mortgage out of my funds, I would have had to pay the caregivers out of my own funds. I would have been locked out of her life and locked out of making decisions for her and I would have had to, you know, get a lawyer and, you know, that cost about $18,000, right? So instead we had forms that said I could act on her behalf and she got them as part of her estate plan.
The equation I put in the book is you can get those documents for free or you can pay $18,000 to go to court. Like that's the position that people are in before something bad happens. Like, do you want to just spend 10 minutes and get a power of attorney and healthcare proxy? Or do you want to go to court and spend months and agony and lots of money?
So, you know, if you put it that way and you explain to people why and show them how hard it is to not have those documents, I'm hoping it will spark a discussion that somebody in the family will say, hey,
Does mom have those documents and does dad have those documents? Does Aunt Sue have those documents? We really need to get those and do it. Everybody over the age of 18, so don't send a kid off to college without them. My son turned 18 and he needed some minor surgery before he went off to college.
Printing out documents and marched him down to the notary and got those signed for him. He's like there was no way I was gonna have him do even a minor surgery where he wasn't even gonna be really fully under and Was gonna come home the same day I wasn't gonna let him do that without having some sort of paperwork in place because he's 18. He's a legal adult You know
Frazer Rice (04:46)I mean, everything related to the Terry Schaivo case to situations where decisions for accidents that happen abroad and so on to not have those documents in place is a disaster waiting to happen as you described.
One thing that I've gotten from my experience is that it's important to not only keep them reviewed to make sure that people are in place, et cetera, but also to have them just generally updated. I've found that hospitals and medical practices sometimes say, you know what, this is more than five years old. We're not going to respect it.
Beth Pinsker (05:22)Yeah.
Frazer Rice (05:23)Was that any part of your experience or have you heard about that from anyone?
Beth Pinsker (05:26)Absolutely, because ⁓ people move, right? And so my mom and dad had their estate plan done in Pennsylvania. ⁓ Then they retired and moved to New Jersey, primarily. So Pennsylvania and New Jersey have different rules. If they would have gotten sick in New Jersey and had a Pennsylvania power of attorney,
Frazer Rice (05:30)Right. Mm-hmm. No question.
Beth Pinsker (05:47)We would have had trouble. Then they packed up and moved to Florida. So if they would have gotten sick in a time period where I needed to take over for them and they still had their old documents, we would have been stuck. ⁓ As it was, my father died in 2018.
The first thing I did was have my mother redo her entire estate plan in Florida as a single adult, right? No longer, I give everything to my husband and my husband gives everything to me, ⁓ which they call sweetheart wills, which everybody in your audience already knows, but ⁓ if you're watching and you don't know, that's what they call those. ⁓
Frazer Rice (06:18)That's right.
Beth Pinsker (06:25)But so they had sweetheart wills and if something happened to one of them they said I give the power to the other in a power of attorney and my brother and I were named as you know successors. ⁓
But after my father died, those things are no longer any good, right? So my mom needed to update her plan and I was already a CFP and a retirement columnist by then. So she listened to me and she went and got all these documents done in Florida. And so when she got sick, it was within five years. ⁓ Nonetheless, I went to the bank with them and tried to get access to her bank account and they just look at me and they shook their heads.
They said, Nope, you need a court order. And I said, Nope, I don't. I don't need a court order. have valid paperwork. They said, Nope, you need a court order. We went back and forth like that in like, you know, for like 10 minutes. I knew what I was doing and I stood my ground, but I wonder how many people don't ⁓ and go off and you panic. But I made, I stood my ground. made them, you know, let me talk to a customer service rep. made an appointment. I came back and they put the paperwork through, but I really had to like, ⁓ you know, hold a sit-in and refuse to leave.
Frazer Rice (07:42)Gosh, the one of the things that that brings up, go in all sorts of directions on this. But the first one is that is the changing of planning once an event happens. And so when your father died and your mom was on her own and the characterization of the estate planning is different at that point, you know, it's sort of take it's taking one set of circumstances into account.
Well, those circumstances happened and now you have to prepare for the next tranche of life. both from a caregiving perspective and then from an estate planning perspective. It's also, I think, a unique opportunity to sort of look in as you sort of diagnose too and understand who is actually making the decisions for people at this point because the dynamic is now completely different.
Navigating Legal and Financial Caregiving
Beth Pinsker (08:28)
Yeah, no, my mom, you know, didn't know a lot of this ⁓ stuff. And I think a lot of people don't like in the process of writing this book. I got an edit note that was like, I didn't know this, you know, and it was that when you have a couple and they're both getting Social Security when one dies, you know,