254: Easing the Burden for Family Caregivers with Max Mayblum and Givers

“The sandwich generation” is used to describe people who find themselves taking care of their kids and aging parents… while trying to take care of themselves, too. (That part gets left out sometimes.)

Today’s guest, Max Mayblum, prefers to call this group the caregiving generation, because they care for people on all sides of the age spectrum–and that’s who his business is created to support.
 
Max has been in digital healthcare for most of his career. When his aunt was diagnosed with terminal cancer and his parents put their lives on hold to take care of her, Max wanted to help as much as possible, so he put his skills to work looking for resources online.

What he found was a very broken system. Max witnessed the emotional and financial toll that caregiving took on his parents, and he knew they wanted to spend every possible moment with his aunt–not navigating logistics and applications for funding.

The whole process was a nightmare, and Max found himself having conversations with his parents about other families who would be facing similar issues, without a digital health expert to help them figure it out.

His desire to scale his experience from his household to help caregivers throughout the rest of the country led him to found Givers.

Caring for a loved one can be an expensive and time consuming ordeal, and without the right support, covering those costs can derail the plan for a child to go to college, delay retirement for years, or keep people from getting the care they need.

Max created Givers to connect caregivers with existing funding and support in their state, without getting lost in the process. His company mapped the programs available in all fifty states, and built an algorithm that generates a step-by-step guide to help users access the programs they need so they can be paid for caregiving.

A major problem isn’t the availability of resources, it’s the awareness of and access to them. When it comes to funding, if you don’t use it, they lose it–and as Max pointed out, you won’t get what you don’t ask for. (I agree!)

Hit play to listen to the full conversation now or download the episode to save for later, and check out the show notes at hendershottwealth.com/254.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this week’s episode of Love, your Money®:

• 05:23 Max’s start in telehealth and how a family diagnosis launched him into wanting to fix a broken system around caregiving 
• 07:28 Max’s firsthand experience with the Givers motto – that “the burden of caring isn’t the care itself; it’s everything else that surrounds it.” 
• 09:11 How Max has been able to scale the support he provided his parents as they were caregiving for his aunt 
• 10:31 The programs available to caregivers of all income levels across all 50 states–and the real barrier to accessing them 
• 15:30 The specific diagnoses that Max finds are most likely to have access to public funds 
• 19:05 The surprising or creative ways Max has seen people navigate the financial burdens of caregiving crises 
• 20:48 How Givers is accessed: What you can do on the website versus the plethora of benefits from the app
• 22:45 Spending down as a financial planning strategy, when to contact an elder law attorney, and using a Medicaid plan to access caregiver benefits and resources as

Hendershott Wealth Management, LLC and Love, your Money do not make specific investment recommendations on Love, your Money or in any public media. Any specific mentions of funds or investments are strictly for illustrative purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice or acted upon by individual investors. The opinions expressed in this episode are those of Hilary Hendershott, CFP®, MBA.