Beth Pinsker: Lessons From ‘My Mother’s Money’

Summary

The Long View Podcast: “Lessons From ‘My Mother’s Money’” with Beth Pinsker

Episode Date: November 4, 2025
Hosts: Christine Benz, Amy Arnott (Morningstar)
Guest: Beth Pinsker, CFP®, financial planning columnist and author of My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the complex, emotional, and practical realities of financial caregiving through the lens of Beth Pinsker’s experience caring for her mother. Drawing from her recent book, Beth shares crucial lessons learned, actionable tips for family caregivers, and candid reflections on the challenges of managing another person’s finances and healthcare. The conversation ranges from the logistics of estate organization and navigating power of attorney to the emotional toll of caregiving and strategies to protect aging parents—and oneself—from fraud, exploitation, and bureaucratic headaches.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Beth Pinsker’s Mother and the Genesis of the Book

• [01:25] Beth describes her mother as an inspiring, organized, and generous high school teacher, highly engaged in both her community and personal finances.
• She began writing about their caregiving journey while her mother was still alive, with her mother’s encouragement:

  "She would give me story ideas and she would talk to me about all of these things because she knew that I was writing about them and that they would help other people. And that was really the way she rolled with her life." (Beth, [01:53])

• Her mother’s role as treasurer of her condo building and meticulous paperwork stemmed in part from their family’s repeated IRS audits during Beth’s youth.

2. Early Warning Signs & The Critical Event

• [04:24] Beth recounts how her mother’s health crisis (back surgery and related illness) quickly made it apparent that she needed support with her finances:

  "…I had to go to her desk and search her mail and search through her computer and her phone and write everything down and figure out the inflows and outflows of her life. And that's not easy…when you can't ask any questions and there's no roadmap, it's really hard." (Beth, [04:47])

• Beth was juggling her own family and work, often tag-teaming with her brother; a memorable anecdote involved her daughter’s urgent desire for Taylor Swift tickets. (Beth, [06:26])

3. The Importance of Preparation—Don’t Wait for a Crisis

• [07:28] Both hosts and Beth stress the value of preparing financial information, documentation, and access before a crisis:

  "If you leave a roadmap … you make it easier for them to come in and pick up the pieces if something should go wrong." (Beth, [07:49]) "We should all have some kind of death folder, no matter how old we are." (Beth, [09:31])

• What goes in a “death folder/death file”: marriage certificate, birth certificate, VA/discharge papers, Social Security info, bank account info, estate documents ([10:29]).

4. Uncovering Missed Details and Slipping Oversight

• [11:19] Beth’s detective work found unpaid bills and a lapsed long-term care insurance claim:

  "…I saw past due notices and they were for her long term care insurance. And I thought, that's a big problem … she owed five or six thousand dollars to them, and they would have cut her off if she didn't pay that money." (Beth, [11:34])

• Reinstating the claim required a bureaucratic obstacle course—one that was overwhelming even for Beth as a financial professional.

5. Balancing Support and Independence

• [14:19] Navigating the emotional balance: when to intervene in a parent’s finances without undermining independence.
  • Strategies: setting up trusted contacts for notices, getting power of attorney, being an authorized user, but cautiously considering joint accounts due to financial aid, divorce, and sibling issues ([14:53], [18:34]).

• "Power of attorney doesn’t really mean they have to do anything. It just means they're able to do something if it's needed." (Beth, [14:59])

6. Navigating Power of Attorney and Systemic Challenges

• [19:09] Despite having power of attorney, most financial institutions put up barriers—often refusing to accept even legitimate documentation without onerous steps.

  "[Banks] really want to be sure that you're supposed to be on the account and that you have the person's authorization … It was this whole long saga … And I think a lot of people give up." (Beth, [19:09])

• Going to court is far more costly and time-consuming—having POA in advance is essential ([21:50]).

7. Spotting and Preventing Scams

• [23:30] Scams and exploitation are not limited to older adults:
  • Payment method red flags: gift cards, prepaid debit, crypto, or cash as payment ([24:17]).
• Continuous charitable giving and gifting to caregivers can escalate without oversight.
• Secrecy in financial dealings is a major scam indicator:

  "If someone is saying to you, don't tell anyone about this," that's a bright red flag. ([27:01])

• Active monitoring (with POA or as an authorized user) helps spot problems early ([27:01]).

8. Protecting Against Family Fraud & Using Trust Structures

• [28:54] Most elder financial abuse comes from family members. Best practices:
  • Oversight and accountability via power of attorney
  • Trusts provide legal boundaries and accountability for distributions, offloading the confrontation burden from the elder to a professional ([29:11], [31:21]).

9. Hiring Help and Professional Fiduciaries

• [31:46] There’s a growing industry of professional fiduciaries: bill-pay services, geriatric care managers, estate attorneys, certified financial planners, death doulas.
• Certified professionals and fiduciary duty (CFP, CFA, attorneys etc.) are best.

  "You can basically pay for somebody to do a lot of these things, but not all of them … somebody … needs to be looking over things, and needs to be legally authorized to make certain decisions." (Beth, [31:46])

10. Solo Agers—Community and Planning

• [34:08] Solo agers (no spouse, no children) need to be extra proactive:
  • Build a community of care (friends, professionals)
  • Write explicit instructions in a will or trust to ensure wishes are followed. Otherwise, the state decides ([34:20]).

11. Healthcare Advocacy: Where Health and Money Meet

• [36:21] Healthcare decisions are inseparable from financial ones:
  • Essential documents: insurance cards, supplement plans, full medication lists, doctor contacts ([36:47])
• Beth’s mother’s “cheat sheet” with all medical data was invaluable and is replicated in the book.
• Always know and assert your (or your loved one’s) rights when negotiating with providers; appeals and persistence are often necessary ([39:49], [40:08]).

12. Long-Term Care Insurance—Was it Worth It?

• [42:13] Despite the bureaucratic hassle, Beth sees the value in her mother’s long-term care insurance:

  "…it made my mom feel like she was financially able to have the help she needed in the house … And for me that was relieving… she wasn't going to go broke that way, but two, that she had help and she needed help and she felt confident that she could afford it." (Beth, [42:32])

• Coverage limits and restrictions meant out-of-pocket costs still existed; insurance provided peace of mind rather than complete financial cover.

13. The Emotional Toll and Personal Impact

• [46:22] Writing the book was cathartic:

  "It was a way to keep her with me for like a whole extra year … it almost felt like a dialogue with her." (Beth, [46:41])

• Beth now prioritizes decluttering, living in the present, planning ahead so her kids face fewer burdens:

  "I don't want any of the hard things I have to do to be something my kids have to do for me … these things seem hard to do ahead of time, but they're much easier … than after the fact." (Beth, [47:45])

14. Resources and Further Learning

• [50:34] Beth prefers learning from real-life stories, particularly through social media streams focused on caregiving, rather than AI or generic advice. She cautions against using AI for complex financial or tax questions.

  "Understanding what real people go through is what I want to do. So I like to look at Instagram feeds of other caregivers or other social media feeds of what people are going through." (Beth, [50:57])

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Notable Quotes

• “We should all have some kind of death folder, no matter how old we are.” —Beth Pinsker ([09:31])
• “Power of attorney doesn’t really mean they have to do anything. It just means they're able to do something if it's needed.” —Beth Pinsker ([14:59])
• “You can basically pay for somebody to do a lot of these things, but not all of them.” —Beth Pinsker ([31:46])
• “The best kind of insurance is insurance you never need. You don’t want your house to burn down... For some reason, people want a return on investment on [long-term care insurance].” —Beth Pinsker ([42:32])
• “It was a way to keep her with me for like a whole extra year…almost like a dialogue with her.” —Beth Pinsker ([46:41])
• “There’s life to be lived right now… the planning aspect of it is because I just don’t want any of the hard things I have to do to be something my kids have to do for me.” —Beth Pinsker ([47:45])
• “Understanding what real people go through is what I want to do.” —Beth Pinsker ([50:57])

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Important Timestamps

• [01:25] — Beth introduces her mother and the book’s origin
• [04:47] — First signs of needing to intervene in her mother’s financial life
• [07:49] — The case for pre-crisis, organized preparation
• [11:34] — Slipping finances and lapsed long-term care claim
• [14:19] — Balancing support with parental independence; best practices for sharing control
• [19:09] — Bureaucracy and difficulties enforcing power of attorney
• [23:30] — Recognizing and preventing financial scams
• [27:01] — The role of secrecy as a scam red flag; the power of regular account spot checks
• [29:11] — Mitigating risks of family fraud, trusts as guardrails
• [31:46] — Professional fiduciary options for care and bill management
• [34:20] — Advice for solo agers; the importance of community and written wishes
• [36:47] — Medical advocacy tips and the intersection with personal finance
• [42:32] — Evaluating long-term care insurance post-crisis
• [46:41] — The book as catharsis; how caregiving reshaped Beth’s perspective

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Episode Takeaways

• Advance preparation is the most powerful tool for future caregivers—don’t wait for a crisis.
• Organize both digital and physical “roadmaps” of essential documents, with special attention to account access and passwords.
• Establish clear legal and practical safeguards: trusted contacts, powers of attorney, and (where advisable) formal trusts.
• Beware of both scams and “friendly fraud”; active oversight and communication are essential.
• Integrate financial planning with healthcare advocacy; medical and financial decisions are deeply intertwined.
• Prioritize living well—and planning to spare your loved ones’ excess stress—now, not later.

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This summary captures the major themes, advice, and memorable moments from the episode. Beth’s candid, compassionate storytelling and her practical suggestions offer a deeply relatable guide for anyone facing, or anticipating, the responsibilities of financial caregiving.

Transcript

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[Christine Benz]

Hi, and welcome to the Longview. I'm Christine Benz, Director of personal finance and Retirement planning for Morningstar.

[Amy Arnott]

And I'm Amy Arnott, portfolio strategist for Morningstar.

[Christine Benz]

Our guest on the podcast today is Beth Pinsker. She's a certified financial planner and the author of a new book called My Mother's A Guide to Financial Caregiving. Beth is also a veteran financial journalist. She's currently a financial planning columnist at MarketWatch and has also worked at Reuters, Fidelity, and WalletPop.com prior to covering personal finance, she was a film critic and entertainment business reporter, writing for Entertainment Weekly, the Dallas Morning News, and many other publications. Beth received her bachelor's degree in English from Harvard. Beth, welcome to the Longview.

[Beth Pinsker]

Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

[Christine Benz]

Well, we're glad to have you here. I have to say, Amy and I both really enjoyed your book and got a lot out of it. So we're excited to talk to you about it and talk about the main takeaways. But first, let's talk about your mom, because she seems like a really inspiring person. She's passed away, but this is about your journey with her and the last part of her life. Maybe you can just set the stage and talk about the person that she was.

[Beth Pinsker]

My mom was a teacher, so the first thing she would want is for this book to come out and to help people. And she was alive when I started to write about our journey together, taking care of her, of her finances. And she would give me story ideas and she would talk to me about all of these things because she knew that I was writing about them and that they would help other people. And that was really the way she rolled with her life. She was a high school teacher. She helped kids not just with their schoolwork, but she coached after school programs. She made sure that the programs were accessible to kids of all income levels, even if they couldn't afford the travel. Or we did mock and speech and debate and you were supposed to be dressed appropriately and she was always finding sport Coats for the boys and dresses for the girls so that they would look appropriate when they were out there in public representing the school.

[Amy Arnott]

That's great.

[Beth Pinsker]

It wasn't a very high income area that we came from, so there was a lot of struggling back then.

[Amy Arnott]

And it sounds like your mom was a very organized person and quite scrupulous about managing her finances before she became ill. Can you talk about that?

[Beth Pinsker]

Yeah, my mom was really very organized on purpose. And I think most of it came from the fact that we got audited a lot when I was growing up. We got audited three times by the irs. And my mom was not only terrified of the irs, but angry at them. She did not liked this process, and she was determined to never miss a step with the paperwork. So my dad was a college professor and did a lot of writing on the side. So he kind of had his main job and the side business. And she would take a home office deduction for him and travel deductions and wherever he went for conferences and whatnot. And every year, the dining room table would get full of folders and piles of receipts, and she would go through each one and she never lost an audit. I will say that. And my father is probably responsible for me becoming a writer, but my mother is responsible for me going into personal finance writing for sure.

[Christine Benz]

So what were the first indications that you needed to get more involved in your mom's financial life? It sounds like it was around the time that she was having a big back surgery and dealing with a lot of other health conditions. So the financial red flags or yellow flags were kind of concurrent with a lot of health issues. Can you kind of talk about that unfolding?

[Beth Pinsker]

Yeah. I mean, she was in charge of her whole life. She was in charge of her whole entire building's financial situation. She was the treasurer for her condo building. She was on the ball and on top of everything. And I had no concerns about anything in her life until she had this back surgery. And she called us up and she said, we got a date for the back surgery. You know, can you come help? I don't know how long I'm going to be incapacitated. It was going to be a week in the hospital and two weeks of rehab. And when she had the surgery, it was a lot harder than that. And enough time went by that not just needing to be on tap immediately and write checks and all of that, but a month had gone by, bills needed to be paid. I had to figure out all of that stuff because she was too incapacitated at that point to focus on it. And so I couldn't even ask her a lot of questions, you know, like, how do you pay your electric bill? And you know, how does it work with the building maintenance? Is that monthly? Is that quarterly? Do you write a check? I couldn't ask any of those questions, so I had to go to her desk and search her mail and search through her computer and her phone and write everything down and figure out the inflows and outflows of her life. And that's not easy when you're dealing with that, when you can't ask any questions and there's no roadmap, it's really hard.

[Christine Benz]

And one other dimension of this is that you have children and so you were multitasking with work and your children and trying to help your mom with it. Sounds like the support of your brother as well.

[Beth Pinsker]

Yeah, so my brother has kids. You know, everybody's busy. We both have schedules and things we have to do, and so we hopscotched each other a lot. I would go for a week and as soon as I would leave, he would go for a week. And then, you know, we worked it out that way for a while. But yeah, I mean, I remember there was one moment I was trying to get out of her apartment to go to the hospital for the day, but Taylor Swift tickets were on sale and I was stuck in a queue waiting to see if I was gonna be able to buy tickets for my 14 year old daughter, which for her this was the most important thing in the world. And I called over to my mom at the hospital and I'm like, I'm gonna get there as soon as I can, but I'm stuck in this queue and she's like, oh, no, Taylor Swift tickets are more important than being here. Don't worry about it. So I finished up that T for my daughter and then I went to the hospital and then I worked from the cafeteria and came home and did billing paperwork. It was a very intense cycle of activity.

[Amy Arnott]

So there's so many lessons in the book, and it seems like one of the key ones from this first experience with the back surgery is not to wait until you're in some sort of health crisis to do at least kind of a partial handoff on your finances or get that backup plan in place. Would you say that' the case?

[Beth Pinsker]

Absolutely. I'm trying to do that now with other relatives and to make sure we don't make the same sort of mistakes we made with my mom, which weren't really mistakes, but more like miscalculations or just, you know, they didn't really harm anything, but they just made everything harder. And the whole point of my book is look at the hard things I had to do and see if you could make your life a little less hard and the lives of your loved ones to be a little less hard. And if you leave a roadmap of where you have your bills paid and where the passwords are and how to do all of the stuff that you don't think about every day, but you just do, then you make it easier for them to come in and pick up the pieces if something should go wrong. My mom thought she had done a lot of this stuff and she had good intentions and she got most of the way there. But she had this little check register where she would write down the passwords so that she would remember them. And when I would ask her, do you remember what your password is for the cable account? She would say, oh, it's in the check register in my desk. And I would go to the check register in her desk, and it would just be squiggles to me. I couldn't make heads or tails of it. And I would go back to her and I would say, can you read this for me? And she couldn't either at that point. And so I. Then you have to start Jerry rigging things. You go to the account, you say, I want to reset my password. It sends a code to my mom's phone. I've got to have my mom's phone to reset the password and create a new list. It's just heavy lifting. And if you can make that easier for somebody by being thoughtful about how you manage your affairs and how you leave things in order, that can really help. I wrote a story once called what should be in your death file? Or some headline like that. This guy had gone to his dad's house after he died and was expecting to find a huge mess and just was so overwhelmed by the task. And he went to his dad's computer, and on the desktop, in a Microsoft file, little icon, there was one called Death, and that was his death file. And he double clicked it, and everything he needed was in that file. And he's just like, thank goodness that he put this together for me. And he was. Right away, he was like, I need my mom to do this too, before it's too late. Like, we should all have some kind of death folder, no matter how old we are.

[Amy Arnott]

So what kind of things would go in there?

[Beth Pinsker]

If you're married, you need your marriage certificate. If you're a veteran, you need your VA discharge papers, you need a birth certificate, you need Social Security information, you need where all your bank accounts are. And even if you don't have those things in like a computer folder, they can be in a physical folder, they can be in, you know, my estate folder with all of my information is in a little carry bag that the estate planner gave me. And I just have that on a bookshelf. And I'm like, all the important things are in here. I tuck everything in there. And if something should happen to me, you know, somebody just has to go and lift that off the bookshelf and they'll have a roadmap to everything that they need. So you have to point people in the direction where you keep things.

[Christine Benz]

You had to do some detective work to get up to speed on your mom's financial affairs. When you did that, you found that there were some warning signs that your mom had previously been incredibly detail oriented, but there were some things slipping. Can you talk about that?

[Beth Pinsker]

Yeah. The first night I went to go through her mail, I saw past due notices and they were for her long term care insurance. And I thought, that's a big problem. She had been on claim, which means when you go on claim in long term care, you're not paying premiums anymore. They're paying you basically, they're covering your long term care expenses for my mom had private aids and they were covering part of the cost of that. But my mom had been feeling ill even before her surgery, but hadn't told anybody, and she had fallen behind on filing the paperwork for the aids that she had. And when you slip that for 90 days, they pull your claim and you go off claim and have your premiums due again. So she owed five or six thousand dollars to them and they would have cut her off if she didn't pay that money. And that seemed like a big deal to me. That's like when you get on the phone and I had to Federal Express them a check the next day from my own account because I didn't have access yet at that point to her. And so then all of a sudden I'm paying $5,000 or $6,000 out of my account, not sure, but pretty sure that I was going to get it back, but not completely sure. And then I had to start going through and compiling three or four months worth of paperwork of the charges that the aides had racked up. And all their claims needed to be recertified. They had to file new W9s. I had to get A new certification from the doctor that she was disabled. And it was just, it was so much paperwork. I mean, I literally cried every day I couldn't fill out this paperwork. And no wonder she couldn't do it. If you're not feeling well. I mean, it involved organizing paper statements. You had to write in little boxes all the hours of the aids, and then you had to have a copy of the process check from the bank account, which involved cutting and pasting them onto new pieces of paper. So they were organized by caregivers. And it was intense. And no wonder she didn't want to do it. But what that did was create a past due situation and that needed to be solved immediately. And once we solved it, they sent us the money back, but we had to FedEx it to them and then they regular mailed it back. The whole system is just ridiculous. But that was a big warning sign that something hadn't been going right in the first place before her surgery. And then she had the surgery and things just kept going wrong and wrong after that. You know, the more we went down the rabbit hole, you know, the crazier things got.

[Amy Arnott]

Well, we have some more questions about long term care, but before that, Beth, I wanted to ask. It seems like anyone in your situation is kind of trying to strike a balance where you want to help your parent or other loved one maintain their independence for as long as possible. Also recognizing that some of these financial management tasks are a good exercise for your brain and at the same time you want to make sure that they don't run into big scary problems. So do you have any advice on how people strike the right balance there?

[Beth Pinsker]

Yeah, it can be hard. It's sort of like, you know, the old dilemma of when do you take the car keys away?

[Christine Benz]

Right.

[Beth Pinsker]

It's a hard, emotional thing. And with the bills, the first thing, with something like the life insurance or the long term care insurance, you can be what's called a trusted contact. And when you put a trusted contact on those accounts, if you get past due notices, they send a duplicate past due notice to whoever it is that you've identified. When my mom got those past due notices, my brother also got one and he's like, hey, don't we have to get on top of this? And I'm like, yeah, I'm on it, don't worry. I just got a notice for my long term care insurance that I need to update my trusted contact because my trusted contact is my mother. And. And that wouldn't work out so well with me if something happened because she's no longer there. So you gotta keep on top of these things. You can do that for a brokerage account. And then if your elderly mother calls up her broker at Schwab or Fidelity or Vanguard and says, I wanna take out $5,000 and put it in gift cards, they can say, maybe we should call your trusted contact before we put through that transaction and alert them that you're making a large withdrawal and trying to put it in a denomination that's very familiar in scams. And they're trained on their end at the brokerage firms to look for that sort of cognitive decline or potential elder abuse. And they can flag the trusted contact if they see something that's amiss. When you're talking about bills and other things, this is where the power of attorney comes in really handy. You can be power of attorney on somebody's account and just get it set up that way even if you don't need it right away. So we're trying to do this now with other relatives, just get it in place so that when the time comes you have access and you don't have to worry about it. Power of attorney doesn't really give the other person, the person who is the power of attorney doesn't really mean they have to do anything. It just means they're able to do something if it's needed. And so it's a helpful thing to have on file. And if you go ahead and do that, then it's in place for when you need it. It works for my purposes. In my estimation, it works better than having somebody to be joint on the account which most people default to. It's like, oh, mom's getting old, somebody should be joint on her account. That causes some problems that a lot of people don't think about. One is those assets in your parents accounts count towards your assets. So I'm in the middle of college for my K and I have to fill out financial aid forms all the time. And if I was joint on a parent's account, I would have to count those as my assets. And you know, I was never really sure what my mom was going to have in those accounts, so I didn't really want to do that step. If you're getting divorced and you're splitting up assets, if you have creditors, you know, all of those things can be complicated when you're joint on somebody else's account. And the other thing is if you have siblings and only one of you is a joint signer on your parents account, there can be hard feelings with the other siblings with power of attorney, there's a fiduciary duty, there's oversight, and you can hold that power of attorney to account for what they've done. If you're a joint signer, you have free access to the account. You can take money in and out at will. And if there are siblings involved in their bad feelings, that can be a big family problem.

[Christine Benz]

Yeah, those are all good points. So you want to be an authorized user, potentially on the everyday bills, so you can pay bills for your loved one. A trusted person for financial accounts. It's debatable whether you wanna be a joint signer. I was a joint signer for my parents and it worked out fine. But it does seem like the family dynamics are important there. Let's talk about power of attorney, which your mom had gone ahead and drafted that documentation. But when push came to shove, it sounds like it was a little bit touch and go in terms of your ability to actually use that power of attorney. So can you talk about that?

[Beth Pinsker]

Yeah. Power of attorney is. It sounds great. You really need it. I think it's the most important document that you need in your arsenal as an adult human being. But it's really hard to use at a bank. I found it easier to use power of attorney in any relationship where my mom was the one who owed the money to the other person. The credit card companies, anything she was paying a bill to was happy to accept money from anybody. They didn't really care. But the banks and the brokerages and anywhere where they were holding money and they were worried about you taking it when you shouldn't. They're really sticklers for their own paperwork, for certified paperwork. They really want to be sure that you're supposed to be on the account and that you have the person's authorization. And they generally want to see that person come in and say affirmatively, in person, as a well, human being, that, yes, they authorize you to be on the account. It was too late for us. My mom was already sick at that point. She was in the hospital. She couldn't walk. So I went to the hospital with these forms that I knew were legal and good. And I went to the bank with these forms and they said no. They just shook their heads at me. And it was this whole long saga of me standing there saying, you have to take these forms and them shaking their heads. We just went back and forth. And I think a lot of people give up. And what I was trying to do with that part of the book was to tell people that you have to know your rights so you know when to stand your ground. And if you know your rights and you know that this is legal and this is how you need to proceed, then you will find your way to the answer. You know, I was able to get power of attorney at the bank for my mother. It just was, you know, crushingly hard. You know, it took a lot of sitting there, making appointments, sitting through hours of appointments. I think in total, it was like six hours of sitting opposite this woman at this desk over the course of two or three times. And we finally got it done. But that's still less than it would be if I didn't have the documents, which I would have had to go to court. That would have cost about $18,000 is the going rate now to go to probate court to get power of attorney enforced at a bank without power of attorney, to be legally named as the guardian for my mother would have taken $18,000 in legal fees and probably six months to a year of time. My mom didn't have that much time. She would have been gone by that point. So, you know, we're lucky that she had that document.

[Christine Benz]

Well, that was one thing I really liked about the book, Beth, was that you delve into aspects of being a financial caregiver that weren't your family's experience. So you delved into the specifics of conservatorship and guardianship. You didn't just stick with your own situation. I wanted to ask kind of a process question that the book is so detailed about your specific experiences as you were trying to help with various healthcare and financial matters. Were you taking notes or journaling or something to keep track of everything that was going on?

[Beth Pinsker]

I keep a journal. I was writing about this stuff for my, you know, my day job as a retirement columnist at MarketWatch. And so I was writing about some of this stuff while it was happening. So I had the notes from those times. But really, I've just been trained as a reporter my whole life. I just remember stuff. But you have to keep notes while you're doing this stuff anyway.

[Christine Benz]

True.

[Beth Pinsker]

All of it has to be documented. All of the financial stuff. You have to keep really good records. And I have folders and folders and folders of this stuff. But really, it came down to, for me, just being really engaged in it. I just threw myself into the management of this because I was trying to do what my mother would have done for herself. And I took that very seriously, you know, out of respect for her, out of respect for the way that she lived her life and was very careful and thoughtful about things, and I wanted to step into her shoes, not just to get the job done, but to do it the way that she would have done it for herself?

[Christine Benz]

Yeah, it was quite moving to me in that respect. Like, it sounded like it was just a terrible time for you, but it was obvious that you were honoring her with your actions and with your. Your diligence on all of these different matters. I wanted to go back to this idea of scams, which you mentioned earlier. And we know that a lot of older adults can fall into scams.

[Beth Pinsker]

Not just older adults.

[Christine Benz]

People can fall into scams. So if we're talking to older adults in our lives about how to protect themselves or any red flags when they're dealing with various entities, are there kind of a top few that you can tick off that we can share with older adults to say, okay, if someone says this, it's time to get off the phone or whatever the case might be?

[Beth Pinsker]

Yeah. If they ask for weird payment of any kind, nothing you do should have to involve a gift card, a prepaid debit card, crypto or cash. Those are just like, absolutely, you know, no, hang up the phone. My mom gave differently, though. Like, she. When I was. Went to start to go through her papers, she was giving to every politician in the country, I swear to God. She had whatever email she got soliciting her for political money. And she was liberal, so they were all Democrats, but anybody who asked her for money, she gave it to them. And she just was supporting, like, so many politicians, which is lovely, but it gets out of control. And when you start to look at the amount of money that she was giving, and another person I talked to, who was a gerontologist who studies this stuff for a living and is an expert in scams and elder fraud, went to her dad's place to help him and found he had stacks and stacks of calendars from the different charities he was giving to. So some of this is not nefarious at all. It's not somebody trying to bilk a parent, an elderly person, out of money. But it is just, you get on a list and you keep getting solicited. And if the person has any sort of cognitive decline, they're not going to have a measure for how much they've given away or how many causes they've given to. Whereas in their earlier days they might have said, okay, I gave to three politicians. It's not very effective for me to give to 27. They're just going to keep Doing it because they're going to have forgotten or lost track of how much they've already given. And some people will give to anybody who asks them without even thinking about it. My mother also was prone to giving gifts to the caregivers. So I would see checks written out for their hours. Then I would see just other checks written out. I was like, well, what's this for? Why are you giving this caregiver $50? And why did you give the other caregiver $150? Just on a whim? And some people get carried away with that. Some caregivers will take advant, and tens of thousands of dollars go out the window.

[Christine Benz]

I was wondering, Beth, in a case of a relative who was recently scammed, the scammer was saying, don't tell anyone. Don't tell your brother, your grandson, or whatever. Do you think that's a red flag that older adults should take to heart as well? If someone is saying to you, don't tell anyone about this?

[Beth Pinsker]

Absolutely. We just went through that in my family, too. Somebody was calling an elderly relative and they said, don't tell anybody. But his wife got a little freaked out and called her son, who called me, and we got the whole thing shut down. But, yeah, I mean, secrecy is a big part of this. There's a lot of shame involved also. And one of the things about being power of attorney or being on the account is you can just sort of keep an eye on things. You don't have to talk to them about it. If you have power of attorney and you have digital access to their bank accounts, you can look at the statements every once in a while, do a spot check the way you would with a young adult who's first learning how to use a credit card. I have my young adults as authorized users on my credit card. I can see what they're spending. And when somebody gets older and starts to. To have some cognitive decline or some other concerns, you might want to just keep a spot check on things. Just every once in a while, look at those statements and see what they're spending their money on and ask questions if you have to. But yeah, I mean, at some point, somebody in the book was talking about this, and, like, you need boots on the ground at some point, you know, like, they're not always going to tell you the truth. They might be keeping secrets. You got to look at some point.

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[Amy Arnott]

We'Ve also seen data suggesting that most financial fraud involving older adults is perpetrated by close family members. What are some of the best practices for protecting against that type of risk?

[Beth Pinsker]

I think oversight is a good one for that, too. Power of attorney, As I said before, like, there's a fiduciary duty to it. There's accountability with it. And so if you have two siblings or multiple siblings or an aunt or an uncle, whoever it is, who jumps in, they can take that power of attorney to court and get them removed, or the person who has authorized them can get them removed. There are some checks and balances there. If you just have free rein in somebody's account, then you're counting on their goodwill. And not everybody's a good person. And so you have to be cautious about who you trust. There's a lot of families where there's substance abuse or mental health issues, and that's where trusts can come in really handy, because trusts will lock down the assets and put parameters on who can take the money and when, and who's in charge of who can take the money and when. And that can be really helpful in situations. I know I suggested once a while for a letter writer into MarketWatch, that one sibling was trying to close off access to their mom's funds for another sibling, and the mom actually wanted to close off that access, too, but didn't have the heart to say no to the other sibling. And anytime that sibling would ask for something, she would just end up giving it to them. And I suggested a trust in that situation. If the mother put the money in the trust trust, then the trustee would be responsible for saying yes or no. And the mother could say to the child who wanted money, I put the money in the trust for you. It's set aside for you. But you have to go through this gatekeeper in order to get it. And that gatekeeper is not me. And that takes the responsibility off of the elderly mother's shoulders from having to say no to their child, which they didn't want to do. And trust in those circumstances can be really helpful because they can put legal parameters on the distribution of funds.

[Christine Benz]

Yeah, this seems like a good juncture to talk about the role of professional fiduciaries. In all of this, you were a trusted adult child. But not everyone has that person at their disposal. So can you talk about some of the professionals that someone might bring to bear on their own financial plans if they do need someone to look over their financial affairs as they age?

[Beth Pinsker]

Yeah, this is a booming business right now. There are so many older people and 10,000 a day are turning 65. There's the generation below them and the generation below them who don't want to be saddled with any of these responsibilities because we're all busy in our daily lives. You can basically pay for somebody to do a lot of these things, but not all of them. And I think that's the important distinction is somebody close to the person who needs help, needs to be looking over things, and needs to be legally authorized to make certain decisions. And you can't outsource all of that. Like my mother. We could hire aides for my mother to bathe her and help her in the bathroom, but she wasn't going to give any one of them her ATM card and send them to the ATM with her code to get cash for her. So I had to be the one able to authorize that sort of transaction. But you can hire bill paying services. You can hire geriatric care managers. You can hire lawyers and attorneys like trust attorneys or estate attorneys. You can hire financial advisors. They have whole categories of people who step in after death to help settle the estate. There are people that help you with the emotional side of it. There are people that help you with the financial side of it. There are people that help you with both sides of it. You can basically get any sort of coaching and help that you want for this. And my book has resources on it because they're just too many to list. But you want somebody who has some kind of certification. So for instance, if you wanted a financial advisor, it's best if you go to somebody with a fiduciary designation like a CFP or a CFA who is bound to work in your best interest. Same with a tax advisor. They have certified death doulas who will help you through the death of a loved one. They have after loss professionals who are certified to help you with the processing of an estate. There are certified bill managers that come with a certain level of security that you can trust that they're not just going to walk away with all your parents money.

[Amy Arnott]

What about people who are solo agers, people who don't have a spouse or children? What kind of steps can they take to protect themselves as they age?

[Beth Pinsker]

There are so many of that type of person in the US Right now. I think in the book the number was 22 million. There are so many people that first of all, they can help each other. But second of all, second of all, what you need to do in that circumstance and what I suggest in the book is to build a community of care around you. And you sort of need to be proactive and thoughtful about it. You need professionals, you need a financial manager, you need a lawyer, you need friends. Somebody who's going to be able to close out your connection to the grid of society when your time comes. And it's hard to think about, and a lot of people don't like to think about it, it's gonna fall on somebody, whether you're in a family situation or whether you're on your own. So you have to think about who you want that person to be. And I think for a lot of single people who are solo agers and don't have sort of a designated heir that they're working with, they need to really think about it and put these thoughts down. And for those people, a will and perhaps a trust are most important. Because if you want your to go to charity, for instance, the state is not going to do that for you. So if you do nothing and you just die, the state will either just take it if it's unclaimed funds, or they will go and search for an heir. But they won't ever know that you really wanted your money to go to your church or the school you went to, or your next door neighbor's son who was a good kid in Mojer Land lawn. They won't know that. So you have to write that down somewhere legally in order to specify those kind of wishes. And when I talk to charitable organizations or estate lawyers, they say that single adults are among the most charitable because they really have to think about this stuff ahead of time.

[Christine Benz]

So the book is mainly about financial caregiving, but being a healthcare advocate for your mom was intertwined with the financial help that you're providing. What are some best practices for adult children who might find themselves in that role of serving as a healthcare advocate? What types of paperwork do you need? What other food for thought should people bear in mind as they are thinking about being a healthcare advocate?

[Beth Pinsker]

The first thing I learned was that every medical decision was actually a financial decision. I thought, you know, going into it that, you know, making medical decisions for my mom was all about, you know, okay, does she need the second surgery? You know, how much pain support should she get you Know that sort of thing. But all of those things, it all comes down to, you know, how Medicare counts things and how the billing goes. And it gets really complicated. And so the thing you need most is that person health insurance information, whether they're on Medicare or if they're younger than that, whatever medical insurance they do have. And you need a copy of the card. You need to know what kind of supplement plan they're on, whether they're on Medicare Advantage or whether they're on a Medigap plan. You need to know what their drug coverage is. You need to know how those things get paid and when they get paid to make sure that nothing lapses. And you need to know your loved one's health history. My mom had this great cheat sheet, which is hard for me to say, but her cheat sheet was one page back and front that she kept folded up in her wallet. She gave it to the caregivers, she gave it to me. It had everything that a doctor would ask if she were incapacitated and needed care. And it was just so helpful to me. And I replicated that in the back of the book. It had her medications and her doses surgery she ever had in her entire life, you know, going back to the 1950s. It had all her doctors names and addresses. And my mom had so many things wrong with her. She had like literally a specialist for every body part that she had. And so there are a lot of doctors to coordinate. And that list just made it extremely helpful to me. And we were very efficient when we would go into a care setting because I knew everything that she needed to say to the doctors and that helped her get better care. You know, there was a copy of her Medicare card attached. You know, she had a one page sheet where all of her identification was photocopied front and back. And she just made that really easy. And so when it came time for the harder decisions, like they were always trying to kick her out of whatever care situation she was in. So she's in the hospital, they wanted to move her to rehab. If she was in rehab, they wanted to move her home. And you have to know what your rights are in that situation too. Just like at the bank, you have to know what you are entitled to so you can know what to fight for. And we had to fight a lot. We had to negotiate, we had to file appeals, we had to do all sorts of jumping through hoops in order to keep her where we thought she should be at that particular moment. Moment. And that all started with knowing what our rights were.

[Amy Arnott]

Yeah, I was surprised to read that even though your mom did have both Medicare and long term care insurance, you still had to go through all these battles to get her the care that she needed. What were some of the key issues that you had to deal with there?

[Beth Pinsker]

I think the main one, I think a lot of caregivers go through this too, is having to humanize your loved one, your sick loved one in that care setting. Because with older people especially, they just assume that they're done and they write them off. And my mom didn't have dementia of any sort. When she started this illness, she was fully superhumanly intellectual. She was on the ball, you know, but in the hospital setting, she appeared like a confused, frail, old person with dementia. And so they didn't really see that that was caused by her illness and by the medications interacting with each other. And there was this one time where she started to speak in Yiddish to the caregiver. And I flagged it for the doctor. I was like, she's speaking Yiddish. I think something's wrong. And they're like, oh, no. People with cognitive decline, sometimes they switch to other languages. And I'm like, no, she doesn't even speak Yiddish. She speaks a little bit of. They didn't want to hear it. They didn't want to hear that my father knew Yiddish, but my mother didn't. And I'm like, no, seriously, something's wrong. Well, there was something wrong. She had a sodium imbalance that was causing a cognitive problem. And once they figured it out, she was all mentally alert again, but they were just ready to be like, oh, no, she's got dementia. And what's one of those things is you gotta be there. You gotta be there every day. You gotta be there when the doctors come. You have to keep asserting your loved one's humanness to them. I kept showing them pictures of her when she was younger. Even pictures of her, like, six months or two months before the surgery, of her walking around and joking and talking. And I'm like, this is my mom. You know, this is what she was, you know, six weeks ago. You know, we want that person back.

[Christine Benz]

That's such a good piece of advice. Beth. I wanted to follow up on the whole long term care thing. Your mom had long term care insurance. It sounds like you have long term care insurance. Do you feel like in hindsight, despite all the paperwork and the, you know, the battling, that that was a good decision for her to have long care insurance?

[Beth Pinsker]

I think it was a great decision for her to have long term care insurance. And in the book, I go through the exact math of it because I think for most people, most people are looking for a return on investment on long term care insurance in a way that you really can't get that out of insurance. The best kind of insurance is insurance you never need. You don't want your house to burn down, and at the end of living in your house, you're not really disappointed that your house never burned down and you never had to use your insurance. But for some reason, people are upset at the end of long term care insurance if they never used it. And I just find that a little odd because that means you had a better outcome. Long term care insurance is for sick people, and if you have to use it, it's not great because you're sick. And so you're better off having long term care insurance and never using it. But for some reason, people want a return on investment on it. My mom got out of it more than she put in, but only because she d. She was only 76 and her illness went pretty fast. And if she had paid in longer because she was healthy and she was still paying premiums, that math might not have worked out the same way. But the key thing about the long term care insurance for me as a caregiver was that it made my mom feel like she was financially able to have the help she needed in the house house, which meant that I didn't have to go and be that help for her. So the key for us was she couldn't even get to the mailbox in the lobby of her building to get the mail on some days. And she's like, okay, I need some help. And so she started with a part time aid, you know, a couple hours a day. And she only allowed herself to do that because the long term care insurance would cut. And for me that was relieving because one, she wasn't going to go broke that way, but two, that she had help and she needed help and she felt confident that she could afford it and go ahead and get it. And that probably prevented her from falling or burning herself in the kitchen or not eating right because she couldn't get out to the supermarket to get nutritious food. So for me, that was the key part. In the end, we ended up getting quite a bit of money, but it still cost us a significant amount out of pocket because of the way that long term care insurance works. It only covers a certain amount per day and we were paying more than that. So every day we were kind of in the hole on It. And secondly, it didn't cover the private aids when my mom was in institutional care settings. So when my mom was in the hospital or she was in rehab being covered by Medicare, the long term care insurance wouldn't cover the private aides that sat with her. And you might think, okay, that's a little overkill. You don't need private aids when you're in the icu. But if you've ever been in a hospital or any sort of nursing home and your loved one needs something and the nurse has seven other patients that they're taking care of, you see the need really fast for having somebody sitting there next to your loved one. My mom couldn't even lift her water bottle, and if she had to wait for a nurse to come, it would have been a disaster for her. So I was very grateful for those aides. They kept her going and kept her company, and she was less scared and she was just altogether more comfortable. And so whatever we paid for them, you know, I'm glad for what we spent.

[Amy Arnott]

The book makes it very clear that your whole journey with your mom was a very emotional ordeal and you did a huge amount of work to help her. And I'm curious if you found writing the book sort of cathartic after going through that process.

[Beth Pinsker]

Oh, definitely. It was a way to keep her with me for like a whole extra year and even more now that I'm constantly talking about it. But I wasn't ready after she died to let her go. And doing the book was almost like talking to her because most of the book is just me and her. This was the stuff that we, the two of us, experienced together. And really nobody else experienced those things. My brother had his own relationship with her and his own time with her. But this time during her illness, when I was helping her with these finances, that was just me and her. It was just us. So it almost felt like a dialogue with her. And it was really great to experience that, you know, that part of it with her also, you know, I just kept her around a little bit longer.

[Christine Benz]

How did working on the book change your attitudes about how you wish to age and how you want to interact with your kids as you age.

[Beth Pinsker]

So much? I want to throw out everything in life. My. My house. Sometimes my boyfriend will buy something and I'll be like, somebody's gonna throw that out when we're dead, and we should just throw it out now. It drives me crazy. It's like I want to get rid of everything. I look at every piece of paper as something that like, oh, my God, somebody's gonna have to deal with this at some point. I don't want it here. I'm just much more clean about everything, much more careful and, you know, thoughtful about all of it. And it's also made me see that, like, sometimes people save for a rainy day or save for their retirement. And we get a lot of letters from readers at MarketWatch who are having trouble spending. And, you know, both of my parents died when they were 76. My dad was five years older, so they died five years apart, but both were 76. And that's young, and I'm way too close to that right now. And I think, you know, if. Hopefully I'll live longer than that. But I want to enjoy my life now. You know, I don't want to wait for a rainy day. And I think that has changed a lot of my attitudes, probably why I made the leap and, you know, wanted to write a book about this. I'm a journalist. You know, we all want to write books. That's, you know, sort of the pinnacle of, you know, what we're all supposed to be doing. And I hadn't done it. And, you know, so it's like, there's no tomorrow, it's today. And I've definitely been living my life a lot more like that now, you know, since I went through this experience with both of my parents. You know, there's life to be lived right now. And I think that's a lot of what we all should be focused on. But, you know, the planning aspect of it is because, you know, I just. I don't want any of the hard things I have to do to be something my kids have to do for me. So I want to make their lives as easy as possible, and I want my life to be as easy as possible. And these things seem hard to do ahead of time, but they're much easier to do ahead of time than they are to do after the fact. And so if downloading a power of attorney form and getting notarized takes me 25 minutes, it's worth my time, because that means that somebody doesn't have to go to court, you know, if something happens to me. And I think that that calculus is worth it. And, you know, I'm doing all of my stuff like that now. Like, get it done now, get it done, take care of it, and just focus on, you know, having fun and enjoying, you know, the situation I'm in.

[Amy Arnott]

You include a list of resources toward the end of the book, and you also have a bunch of quotes from different experts that you've interviewed throughout the book. But I'm curious if you had to narrow things down to kind of short list of writers or bloggers or podcasts that you think are especially helpful, what would those be?

[Beth Pinsker]

I actually my main thing is real people. I get inspired and I get information from the real things that people are going through and I think other people can learn from those too. And the information you get online. I would caution people to stay away from AI because these things are complicated and it's easy to get messed up. They'll tell you to do some tax thing and if it's wrong, you're in a rut there. But understanding what real people go through is what I want to do. So I like to look at Instagram feeds of other caregivers or other social media feeds of what people are going through. And you know, I get inspiration from those.

[Christine Benz]

Well Beth, we have so enjoyed talking with you. Congratulations. Congratulations on the book. Thank you so much for being here.

[Beth Pinsker]

Thank you.

[Amy Arnott]

Thanks Beth. We really enjoyed talking with you.

[Christine Benz]

Thank you for joining us on the long view. If you could please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, you can follow me on social media media at ChristineBenz on X orristinebenz on LinkedIn and @Amyarnot on LinkedIn. George Cassidy is our engineer for the podcast and Carrie Gretchik produces the Show Notes each week. Finally, we'd love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email [e-mail] until until next time. Thanks for joining us.

[Disclosure Announcer]

This recording is for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice. Opinions expressed are as of the date of recording and are subject to change without notice. The views and opinions of guests on this program are not necessarily those of Morningstar, Inc. And its affiliates, which together we refer to as Morningstar. Morningstar is not affiliated with guests or their business affiliates unless otherwise stated. Morningstar does not guarantee the accuracy or the completeness of the data presented herein. This recording is for informational purposes only and the information, data analysis or opinion it includes or their use should not be considered investment or tax advice and therefore is not an offer to buy or sell a security. Morningstar shall not be responsible for any trading decisions, decision, damages or other losses resulting from or related to the information, data analyses or opinions, or their use. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. All investments are subject to investment risk, including possible loss of principle. Individuals should seriously consider if an investment is suitable for them by referencing their own financial position, investment objectives, and risk profile. Before before making any investment decision, please consult a tax and or financial professional for advice specific to your individual circumstances.

[Beth Pinsker]

Sam.