My mom is 78. My dad died 3 year ago and my mom previously was not involved with finances or paying bills. Lately my mom gets confused and I am concerned about some of the financial decisions she is making and concerned about her making mistakes. As an example, she wrote me a check recently to reimburse me for something I bought for her online. She was supposed to pay me $341.75 and the numbers she wrote was $311.75 and the verbiage was $375.00. She also is planning to spend what I think is a ridiculous amount of money re-landscaping her front yard, but I guess it is her money to spend. During the landscaping discussions she asked my sister the difference between a pine tree and a palm tree, which concerns me just in that she forgot the difference, they are quite different trees! I've gently tried to discuss this with her but she is adamant that she can handle her finances. For the past two years she forgot to make her quarterly tax payments, thinking that somehow her tax accountant would pay them for her as if he has access to her checking account. She recently opened up new credit cards. However, it seems to me that nothing is glaring enough to get a judge to deem her incompetent and I don't think it should go that far. Ideally I'd just like to get her to let me help her by reviewing her bills and accounts. Thoughts? Thanks.
Unfortunately, what is that thing to do? Yours doesn't want help and insists it's her money. It took my mother bouncing checks and paying a bunch of late fees to be "mortified" into asked for help, as she'd never bounced a check nor paid a late fee in her life, previously. Even now that she has asked me for help, she doesn't understand that she can't throw it around and still pay her bills.
Strangely, and I'm sure this is true of others in her condition, she sometimes refuses to buy little things (today, refused to spend $1.99 for a bottle of clear nail polish to fix the hole in her lap desk), but is willing to give a relative a few thousand dollars for their rent. Except, of course, she no longer has it to give.
However, I am taking her back to the clinic to have her competency recorded. She was not happy about this, but my brother is questioning whether Mom had the ability to understand what she was doing when she signed the POA agreements with me and a lawyer suggested doing this. This will record which areas she really understands her decisions in.
What they'll do is ask her questions that I supply. I don't know if they try to adjust them or just use my list as a set of suggestions. In her case, they'll ask about whether she knows she owns a house, where it's at, whether she realizes she's trying to sell it, whether I'm supposed to be helping her with this. I'm not quite clear on this but I think I'm supposed to bring the questions.
In my mom's case, I think she does understand the stuff regarding the house. However, I think she might actually need a guardian over her finances rather than a POA. I'm not sure about all this, so I guess I'll find out the details when I take her in.
When I initially told her about this, she flat-out refused to go. She usually has a knee-jerk "no" response to everything like this. I explained a little of why she needs to go, because her decisions she makes, now, can be questioned if she really doesn't have the ability and we need to verify that she really does have the competence in the areas where she does have it. In our case, it's to keep my brother from constantly challenging and questioning this. And, for this reason, I told her I'd keep helping her with her memory exercises but that I insist she go so that my hard work as her POA won't be for nothing.
Eventually, after glaring at me for quite awhile, she grumped out an "okay" and we're going to go. What I'm trying to get at is that I'm not claiming it's easy to get them to go to these types of things.
Another note I should add is that my mother's primary care physician is at the local geriatric clinic, not just the internal medicine departments. They said this isn't an unusual request for them.
The other day, she did her math on the back of an envelope to end up with a little over $2,000 in her checking account after paying bills but mistook her own "$" sign for a one and wrote that she had $12,000 in her checking account ledger. She was pretty excited that she suddenly had so much money. I had to fix it, of course.