Financial Planning, Part 1

Last fall, not two weeks after I had been to visit her, my uncle and my mom’s minister told me that they thought my mom was dying. I knew that she hadn’t been feeling well, but I didn’t know just how bad she was. Apparently she was staying in bed and not eating and had become very weak. When they had gone to visit her they said she could barely hold up her head and was very confused. The minister said that he thought she could be gone in a matter of days.

When I called my mom I told her that my uncle was going to take her to the doctor. She got riled up and said she was fine and wasn’t going to go. I knew then that she wasn’t dying. She was just too feisty. Nevertheless, I realized that I had to go there and see what was going on. At the time my husband was out of the country, so I couldn’t leave my son at home and fly there on my own. I packed up my son and drove the 950 miles to my mom’s.

When I first started talking to the local Alzheimer’s Association about my mom’s situation, they recommended that I hire an elder law attorney. I talked to the Association office nearest to my mom to get a recommendation for a lawyer and talked over the phone with the office that was most highly recommended. But I put off making any decision about hiring them. It seemed like such a big step to take and such a lot of money to commit.

This crisis forced me to see that my mom’s condition was not going to improve; it could only get worse. I felt as though I could no longer put off making difficult decisions, so I made an appointment with the lawyer for the time I would be at my mom’s and subsequently hired them.

My mother at the time had two bank accounts, one of which was in both our names. In order to pay for the lawyer, I wrote a check on her local account and had the mailing of her bank statements changed to go to my home so that she wouldn’t see that I had hired a lawyer. I would much preferred to have had her involved in meeting with the lawyer, but I knew her level of denial was such that she would not have seen the usefulness of such a meeting, much less spending the big bucks to retain the lawyer.

The lawyer’s staff has been great, really knowledgeable and helpful. They assured me that we will be able to protect at least half of my mother’s assets. My mother doesn’t have a lot of money, but she has always said that if she ever had to go into a nursing home she wouldn’t want the government to get it all.

When she can no longer live alone, I hope to move her into a facility here. However, she may have to go into a local nursing home before I can bring her here, either because she refuses to come here or because it may take me a while to find a place for her here. The way things are set up now, she can go into a nursing home and not lose all her assets, which means that when I move her here there will be money for the move as well as money to pay for the first few months at a nursing home if that is what is required to get her into a good place. After those expenses I hope there will be enough remaining for her to live comfortably the rest of her life.

So, when I got to my mom’s, I found her sleeping in bed. My son and I unpacked the car, and I finally woke her up. She was confused and weak, but after several days she regained her strength and seemed back to normal, well, as normal as it gets.

In Part 2 I will talk about what happened when my mother noticed that she wasn't receiving her bank statements.