00:00 The hardest question for an author and I’m going to ask you this one and force you to answer it is if people take one
00:06 thing away from your book, just one, what would you want them to take away from it? The whole reason I wrote this
00:11 book was so that people would understand why. When you get to-do list, when you get like that checklist mentality, you
00:18 go on the internet, you search for power of attorney, you get a list of instructions, but nobody ever tells you
00:24 why. I wrote this book as a story. There’s a whole narrative that I went
00:29 through. And my point was that people understand stories and that if you read
00:36 through and you know I know how people read books. I read a thousand personal finance books. You never stop and do the
00:43 things that the author has great intentions like you know stop now and think about this. And nobody ever does.
00:49 I I never do. I wanted the my book for people to be able to read through and you get to the end end of it and you
00:56 say, “Oh, wow. Now I understand why I have to do all this. I have to do all this to save whoever is going to clean
01:04 up after me when I’m gone.” The grief and the expense and the time uh it takes
01:11 to, you know, turn out the lights and shut the door on the on the way out. You can’t do that for yourself after you’re
01:16 dead, but somebody’s going to have to. Like we’re all connected to the the grid of civil society is how I put it in the
01:23 book. And somebody’s got to turn the lights out for you when you’re done. You don’t want to cause pain to anybody you
01:29 love. Get your house in order. Welcome to the Child-Free Wealth podcast
01:36 hosted by Bri and Dr. J, certified financial planner. Here we discuss life
01:41 and finances as it relates to being child-free. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes
01:47 only. Please consult your adviser before implementing any ideas heard on this podcast.
01:55 Hey, Childfree Wealth listeners. Today we’re going to dive back into that no baby step seven, planning for your
02:01 parents and how do you care for them? And I’ve got an awesome person joining us. Beth Pensker is a certified
02:08 financial planner and she’s a financial planning columnist at Market Watch. But she’s got a new book coming out called
02:13 My Mother’s Money, a guide to financial caregiving coming out in November. And we’re going to dive into like what is it
02:19 like to care for your parents and how does it work? But the other thing I want you to keep in mind are these are all the steps you need to figure out
02:25 somebody to care for you. We’ll give you information at the end, but don’t forget we’re launching our new child-free trust service. So we will be there to help you
02:31 to fill in some of these roles for those of you that don’t have somebody step in. So Beth, I read this story. I read about
02:39 your mom and I I was telling you beforehand I’ve been caring for my mother off and on since I was 16. Like
02:44 this is one of those things that just tugs at your heartstrings. Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I was
02:50 thinking about this just a second ago. People are child-free, but you you’re never parent free somehow. Like you have
02:56 to come from somewhere. And there are going to be people who brought you up in this world, whether they’re your parents
03:02 or or some other kind of guardian. And at some point the roles reverse and you
03:08 have to look after them uh or be a part of their lives in some way no matter what the relationship was when you were
03:15 growing up. It’s just something we all face. It is. And for our child-free clients,
03:20 we often get the well you don’t have kids so you can take care of mom. You know, it’s like it’s like a sentence they just finish that way.
03:27 And I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. And particularly those people who are single with no kids, it’s like oh well you can move back with mom. And it’s
03:33 like, no, I don’t necessarily have to, but it’s a choice. But it is a reality.
03:38 And the way I look at it is your parents planning or lack thereof can have more
03:44 of an impact on your own financial and life plan than your own planning. Does that make any sense? No. Absolutely. Because you can do all
03:51 the things right for yourself and then a parent needs you and suddenly your
03:56 retirement is derailed, your current spending is derailed, your time is derailed. it all goes right out the
04:02 window when somebody else needs you. So, if you’ve chosen a a life where you’re not caring for a baby or a child that’s
04:10 growing up, you know, you have the in the end the responsibility for a parent who’s sort of going in reverse. Anyway,
04:18 I I don’t know. I was talking about this with a friend the other day and I said, you know, what are your choices? You can
04:24 give your parents money or you can watch them starve. like like are those really
04:30 choices? Like I don’t understand the philosophy where like you set boundaries or you have your limits and and things
04:38 like that because what are your options? Like you have to do it like I I don’t I
04:43 don’t see any other choices in the matter. When my mom needed me, I was like um whatever like you know count me
04:49 in. See I’m going to challenge you there. Like I do think there is a limit to how much you can help other folks. This is
04:56 like put on your oxygen mask first before helping others. I mean, yes, obviously, obviously that. But in
05:02 terms of you don’t want to bankrupt yourself, but there you can get your parents into the kind of care they need
05:08 or get them the kind of care they need through services if you have to. And a lot of people I’ve talked to are
05:14 hesitant about spend down to Medicaid and things like that. And I talked to somebody for my book who is a wellto-do
05:22 financial planner, presumably wellto-do. I don’t know anything about his finances, but he had to help his parents
05:28 at the end of their lives and had to put them on Medicaid to get them into nursing homes. And that was part of the
05:36 financial caregiving he was doing was getting them, you know, into a place where they would be safe for memory care
05:42 and get them on Medicaid when the time came. do what he could in the meantime to help them till they got to that
05:49 point. I I think that’s fair. I think that, you know, there’s ways to support within what your boundaries are. You know, it’s
05:54 like my wife and I say that nobody lives with us. We couldn’t handle somebody living with us. It just doesn’t work no
05:60 matter which side of the family, but we’ll care for people in other ways. I mean, there are ways to set boundaries
06:05 to protect you, protect your life, and take care of your parents. Yeah. I have this example in my book
06:11 from a financial therapist and it was what her mother did with her grandmother, the therapist’s
06:17 grandmother. They didn’t the her mom and her grandmother didn’t have a good relationship when they were growing up and her mom didn’t want to get sucked
06:24 into her grandmother’s drama. She said, “Look, I will keep your lights on, but
06:30 that, you know, and keep you fed, but that’s that’s where I draw the line. I will take you to doctor’s appointments.
06:36 You will not live here.” You know, like she put in place, you know, what she would do and was very clear about it.
06:41 And she had to do that for her own mental sanity cuz like not all parents were perfect and not all children were
06:47 perfect and not all relationships are the best even later in life. And people still need care and you have to, you
06:54 know, cross that bridge when when you come to it. And no care situation also stays the same. So I talked to one man
06:60 who uh was caring for his father and they had a terrible relationship when he was growing up. He would get beaten. His
07:06 father was unstable. He was a Vietnam war veteran with PTSD. And then his
07:12 father hit the dementia stage and he changed as a human being. And he was no longer the, you know, combative negative
07:19 force. And the the man had grown up and he had had his troubles, but he was, you know, in a different place in his life.
07:26 And so when he took over caring for his father, they had a different relationship. It was like a whole new thing. It It changes over time.
07:33 It does. And I think there’s a role reversal that is is hard, you know, where you go from being the kid to being
07:39 the parent of your parent, which sounds weird, but that kind of is what you’re doing. It is. And I hated it. I got to tell
07:44 you, that was like the worst part for me because my mom my mom didn’t have any cognitive problems. She had a spinal
07:52 problem and she got spine surgery and then got an infection and then went downhill from there. And so she had her
07:59 faculties the whole time but was basically bedritten and in pain and kept
08:04 having complications. I just wanted her to be in charge. She was the most competent, functional, rational human
08:12 being I’ I’ve ever encountered in my life. And I was just used to seeding all authority to her cuz she was better at
08:18 everything. And if you had a question about anything, you could just call her up and she would know the answer. And it
08:24 was really hard for me to be the one pulling the strings and making the decisions, not having her to ask
08:31 questions to all the time because she wasn’t feeling well that particular day or was cloudy from the medicine or or
08:38 what have you. And I really didn’t like that. And the biggest place where that
08:44 impacted me was with the caregivers because I hated being the boss of them. I hated I hated managing the staff. I
08:52 know on previous podcasts you’ve talked about hiring a care manager. I wish we would have had the funds to do that. We
08:58 never even really looked into it cuz I just assumed that we couldn’t afford it. But I really didn’t want to be handling
09:04 the schedule and the personalities and the I mean there was a rivalry between
09:10 our caregivers. They were all fighting for like power and it just got overwhelming and they all got burned out
09:17 and I just I didn’t like that whole management process and I would have liked to have had somebody else manage
09:22 that and my mom was very good at managing a household and could have managed them but she was caught in the
09:28 emotional drama of it all too. They had a fight one day. She had a fight with one of the caregivers one day about
09:33 whether she could lie down after she had eaten in her hospital bed. And the
09:38 caregiver wanted her to sit up for a certain amount of time to help her digestion. And my mom wanted to lie down
09:43 and they were literally going at it like screaming at each other. And I walk in and I’m like, “What the hell is going on
09:49 here?” And then I had to like sit each of them in separate rooms till they cooled off and then go talk to each one
09:55 separately and then go back and forth and negotiate, you know, a settlement between the two of how we would go
10:00 forward with the sitting up or lying down after meals. It was not at all what I wanted to be doing.
10:06 Yeah. By the way, I don’t think anyone wants to be doing it. And we do encourage if you have the resources to
10:11 build a care team around it, you know, and this is one of those where it gets interesting. We’ll often suggest to our
10:17 clients that they hire an aging care manager to take care of their parents, to be their eyes and ears, to be that
10:24 person to do the fights, to to be there for them, even if they have to pay for it out of pocket, just because of the
10:30 amount of like stress and other things, which is exactly what you’re talking about. Yeah. I wonder how that works when
10:35 you’re a solo aer manager for yourself. If there’s any sort of cognitive decline
10:40 involved, how do you manage that once the cognitive decline sets in? Yeah, that’s actually why we’re launching the service child free trust. So we are serv
10:48 we’ve partnered with a trust company and we’re going to serve as child free people’s medical power attorney,
10:53 financial power attorney, executive and trustee so that we are the one managing the agent care manager based on the solo
11:00 person’s you know plan. So they set the plan this is our care plan. that’s what we want and then we’re the ones there
11:07 managing the care manager and the care managers are really good at advocating for you where you know that is part of
11:13 their skill set which is exactly what you just had to say what you were doing for your mom right
11:18 like that’s the hard part is like if you don’t have somebody do it for you who does it right and I think that’s where planning
11:24 people don’t like to think about this sort of thing until it’s too late but if you don’t think through all of the
11:31 operations while you’re mentally able and you’re aging solo, there’s nobody to
11:37 make those decisions for you and get really stuck and then you become a ward of the state. Like I don’t know I you
11:44 really have to think about these things ahead of time. And one thing that’s always u I wrote a story about this earlier this year is that the most
11:51 charitable people are single women. Mhm. Because they are forced to think about
11:58 the rest of their lives while they’re still able to. And once you start thinking about, you know, what’s going
12:04 to become of me, you know, your charitable instincts kick in. You you realize that you have to say something
12:10 on paper if you want to give money away to particular causes before you die
12:15 because it doesn’t happen by default. So single women are the best at at thinking ahead in that circumstance. And I think
12:23 that’s really admirable. I think the headline of that piece was something like single cat ladies are going to save the world because that’s a a a core
12:30 demographic of our country right now. You know, is women who are aging alone because their partners or whoever was
12:37 taking care of them has gone ahead of them and women have longevity and that’s
12:42 where people are going to end up whether they were previously married or not. It’s just the way demographics are
12:48 going. It is I mean about 25% of the US are child-free and about onethird of child-free folks will never marry and
12:54 then you get the ones that are widowed or or separated or whatever else it is. So it’s a huge issue and it all gets
13:02 kind of smooshed together you know so like with this discussion around caring for your parents like well you know you’re single no kids you can move in
13:09 with mom and I that is just such a hard choice to make. Did you end up living
13:15 with your mom for this? I wanted to my boyfriend and I started look at places
13:20 to move her to in New York because it I just couldn’t go back and forth anymore.
13:26 And because my mom didn’t have a real diagnosis or anything in particular that
13:31 was wrong after the surgery, it was just like one catastrophe after the another. We thought she was eventually going to
13:37 get better and live a long time. She was only 76 and so we had no idea how to
13:43 plan because we didn’t know what the trajectory of the illness was. if she had had cancer or another thing with a
13:49 terminal diagnosis, we might have been like, “Okay, you’ve got 6 months left to live. Let’s do it this way.” But we had
13:55 no idea. She could have lived another 20 years. You know, we we don’t know. And we didn’t know at that point. And
14:01 couldn’t keep going back and forth. I have a job. I’ I’ve got kids. You know, I I needed her to be in a place where I
14:08 could, you know, have more better access to her. So, we went to look at apartments in New York that could fit
14:15 the, you know, five of us in some sort of logical arrangement. And then she
14:20 said no to that. And then I looked uh then she got sicker and I looked into nursing homes where I could bring her. I
14:27 was like, “Okay, well, how about we set you up in either an apartment by yourself with a caregiver where it’s
14:32 nearby and has an elevator or I’ll find a nursing home where you could go uh that’s nearby.” And I found one right on
14:39 the grounds of my daughter’s high school. And I’m like, my daughter can go to school and then walk over and sit
14:45 with you in the afternoon and you can help her with her homework and then I’ll come over and give everybody dinner and then we’ll go, you know, I’ll take my
14:51 kid home for the evening. I I thought it was the most ideal situation. And then my mom was like, “Nah, I don’t want to
14:57 go anywhere.” You I think she knew what was happening. You know, I wasn’t living in her body and I didn’t know how, you
15:04 know, how it was going to go, but I think she did. and she just sort of put her foot on the the break for a while
15:10 and then by the time we got around to talking about it again it was you know hospice and and you know it went pretty
15:18 quickly. I think that the whole living together thing, I mean, my my stories
15:23 and and things that I’ I’ve covered in the past and people I’ve talked to like that hasn’t gone well in a permanent
15:30 sense. Like people have had their parent come and live with them and then, you know, if it’s a memory care situation or
15:36 whatever, it’s it’s too hard and you end up putting them in a facility. I had one friend who was the youngest of I think
15:42 seven brothers and sisters and he got not the short straw like he was like
15:48 I’ll retire and I’ll go live with mom and I will be her caretaker like I’ll
15:53 take early retirement and I’ll go and do it and he went down there and he had a heart attack and he died and he
15:58 predesceased her and I just thought that’s sad. He was expecting to fulfill his familial duty and then like enjoy
16:04 his retirement and it all got cut short and that to me I don’t know about that
16:10 like that’s a hard decision to make and you’re giving up a lot. Yeah. And I think if you plan ahead
16:16 there’s ways to do it. You know a lot of the work now done with like accessory dwelling units other things like where
16:21 mom can have her own place behind you or dad or whatever else it is and you guys
16:26 still have your independence. There’s some ways to do it. What I always watch out for is, “Hey, mom slipped and fell,
16:33 broke her hip, moves in with you while she’s rehabbing.” And then you get like a year later and you’re like, “Mom, are
16:39 you ever going to move back out?” Like, you’re fine now. Mom’s like, “This is great. Like, I’m loving this.” Like, and
16:47 and it’s like, I don’t plan on you living with me for the next 20 years. This was like a six-month thing. Not
16:52 like, it’s hard to plan. It is very hard to plan. You never know
16:58 what the next turn is. You know, things change constantly. Um, and I I can’t
17:04 emphasize that enough because the the more you plan, the more things change. It’s just you have to keep on your toes.
17:11 You have to have options, which is where savings comes into play because you really do need a really robust emergency
17:18 fund. You need to be planning for sickness and for death and you need to
17:24 just have enough on hand and enough flexibility to keep all your options open.
17:29 Yeah. And I think this is where suggest for our clients while your parents are healthy to do what we call a parent
17:35 checkup, which is like what is their financial situation? Do they have long-term care insurance? What are their
17:41 means? And what we find is that when you dive in with your parents, they’re either broker than you thought or richer than
17:47 you thought. there’s like nobody in the middle. Like I mean like you look at this aging population it is split
17:54 and then you can make some decisions about what you can do versus not. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. And I the the part of
18:01 my book that most people have been interested in is the part about power of attorney and how that plays in uh versus
18:08 joint accounts versus being joint on somebody’s deed. like all the decisions you make about financial access before
18:15 somebody gets sick and dies. I don’t think people realize I don’t know like how many people you deal with realize
18:22 that like you know I give you power of attorney like you sign the even when you get to the point where people download
18:28 the form or or get it from a lawyer and they sign it. They think that they have declared that person the power of
18:33 attorney and all you have to be is like uh on the phone with somebody and you say, “Hey, I’m power of attorney for my
18:38 mother and that’s the end of the story.” That’s like the beginning of the story and it’s a bad nightmare, you know,
18:44 horror story and I was just going through this with my, you know, with my boyfriend’s parents and I did it for
18:51 myself. I didn’t even understand how it worked. You go to the bank to set it up, you know, like you have to take that
18:58 power of attorney document. It’s just pieces of paper until you take it to the
19:03 institution you want to interact with and then you have to follow their rules. And all of their rules are different.
19:08 The banking system is just a mess with this stuff and it takes multiple
19:14 appointments on multiple days and multiple steps and you know you’re mailing documents to PO boxes that you
19:21 know boyfriend went to take the the power of attorney to the post office and they told him that the PO box that he
19:27 addressed it to didn’t even exist. And it’s just so many hoops. It’s so much
19:32 easier if you can walk in with the person that you want to take care of and get that power of attorney enacted
19:39 because they are much much better with you. I went without my mom cuz she was already sick and I needed access to her
19:45 main checking account. They literally just said no to me. If you don’t know your rights, you don’t know when to
19:51 stand your ground and you’re going to get pushed around. And so I said, “No, this is a perfectly legitimate power of
19:58 attorney and you have to accept it.” And I interviewed one lawyer for my book who had to sue a bank in order to get them
20:04 to accept the power of attorney. And it’s a hard road and but you just have to be like, “No, I this is absolutely
20:11 what I need to do. It’s legal. It’s fine. You need to eventually take it. So, I’m just going to stay here until
20:18 you take it.” But that’s only if you’re right. This is where like planning comes in. If you are not right, if you do not
20:25 have a proper power of attorney, if your parents wrote out the power of attorney uh in Pennsylvania and they now live in
20:31 Florida, if they wrote it out 15 years ago when they did their will and it’s no longer valid because the state rules
20:37 have changed, if you’re not possessing of that proper document, they won’t talk
20:43 to you and they will be relentlessly stubborn about it the same way that you have to be. And you’re wrong. Like
20:50 you’re in the wrong. you’re going to have to do something to fix it. And that something that you have to do is go to
20:55 court in order to get named guardian of your parent. And I’ve been told in my
21:01 for my book, the reporting I did, the going rate for that is about $18,000. Yeah, it’s not cheap.
21:06 It’s not cheap. It takes hours preparation, uh, paperwork, you need a
21:12 lawyer, you need to go to probate court, it takes a while, depending on your state, to get even get a hearing. Then
21:17 you got to go to multiple hearings and then you got to go to follow-up hearings because once you’re named guardian, it
21:23 doesn’t stop. You have to go for follow-up visits because it’s a fiduciary responsibility and you know,
21:29 you’re held to account you as a guardian. You have to provide updates to the court and all of those you have to
21:35 bring a lawyer to. So that’s more time for a lawyer who’s charging probably $300 an hour depending on where you
21:41 live. In New York, it’s going to be much, much more than that. And it’s emotionally draining. Probate court is
21:47 no place that you want to be. It’s just not. Especially when you have a sick person that you’re you’re trying to
21:53 help. The same goes for yourself. If you’re planning, if you’re on your own and you’re planning on what you’re going
22:00 to do to care for yourself if you would get sick or anything would happen to you, you need to make sure that you’ve
22:06 gone to the bank and got your power of attorney to un to to accept their
22:12 rights, their responsibilities, and you know, enact them with the financial institutions and make sure they
22:18 understand what it is they’re doing and what they need to do. And that’s where like a a professional trust service
22:23 would come in handy because you don’t know when that’s going to happen. I I
22:30 have a friend who’s asking me to be that person for her. I’m her youngest friend. I have other friends who are older and
22:37 they’ve named other older people as their power of attorney. And it’s like a crapshoot who’s going to die first, you
22:43 know, like you don’t know. Hey listeners, we have some exciting
22:48 news to share with you. This podcast is getting a new name and a refresh hosting lineup. Beginning January 1st, the show
22:54 will relaunch as Child-free Life by Design, brought to you by Childfree Insights. You’re still going to hear
22:60 from the hosts you know, and we’re also going to be introducing new voices with expertise in different areas of the
23:05 child-free experience. Our mission is the same, to give you clear, practical guidance to help you build the
23:11 child-free life you want. And this change lets us serve you even better. Nothing is going to change on your end.
23:18 Stay subscribed and the new episodes will continue to land right in your feed. We can’t wait to share what’s coming in the new year.
23:26 Yeah, I’m a big fan of hiring professional teams to do this for you. You know, in California, Arizona, they
23:32 have professional fiduciaries who can do this. They will do the medical part, financial part, all that. In other areas, you might be looking at
23:38 independent trustees or trust companies. The problem is you need assets to do that. You know, it’s one of those issues
23:43 when we were designing Childfree Trust is how to figure out how to make it accessible to people like us, you know,
23:50 normal people that don’t have millions of dollars and it’s a challenge cuz the system’s all built for you got a lot of
23:56 money because it’s a giant pain. Like it really is. And when the first step with
24:02 your parents is to get all their paperwork in place, you know, their power attorney, estate paperwork, their their will, their medical pattern,
24:08 financial power attorney, their trust, whatever. If you can get the assets named in a trust and you’re the trustee,
24:14 banks can’t fight you then. Like it’s you’re just managing a trust. Not a big deal. But you are a legal fiduciary.
24:20 These are the tradeoffs. But you don’t think about it’s too too late. And my nightmare scenario is either your
24:26 parents don’t have paperwork and you they’re cognitive decline. That’s a nightmare. You’re now in the guardian
24:31 world. Yeah. Or they have the paperwork, but it’s in the safe deposit box. And the safe
24:36 deposit box has the document that says you can get in the safe deposit box. Yeah. Yeah. I have I have a big warning
24:42 sign in my book about that. Like don’t put important papers in the safe deposit box. Yeah. I mean, I want you to have a copy
24:48 on your phone at all times because if you get a call at 3:00 in the morning from a hospital, I want you to be able to fax them over a copy because
24:54 hospitals still fax. Like or I I have a whole section there’s another step. Uh I have a whole section in my
24:60 book about naming a beneficiary for your phone. Mhm. Um somebody needs to know your phone
25:05 code. If you’re a single adult, somebody else might not know your phone code. Um, and there’s a setting in in inside your
25:12 settings on your phone, whether you have Apple or Android, where you can name a beneficiary to your phone like you would
25:17 a financial account. It’s called a legacy contact. And if you don’t have
25:23 that legacy contact named and your phone is locked when when something happens to you, you can’t break another person
25:29 can’t break in there. The FBI couldn’t break in there. And so you really need um it’s a 30-second fix to opening up
25:37 the the keys to your life. You need that phone for so many things when you’re trying to help somebody. Two-factor
25:43 authentication, the apps they were using. You know, you might even just want access to their photos that they
25:49 had taken throughout their life. You need that phone. If everybody’s phone is their life now, and that legacy contact
25:57 is an important step in that process cuz like, okay, great. You have a copy on your phone, but what if I can’t get into
26:02 your phone? You need keys to to everything. Yeah. You know, this is why I recommend things like the knockbox for your
26:08 parents so you have everything. You know everything about them. And like some parents are like, I don’t want to give you the information. I’m like, okay,
26:14 tell you what, mom. At least give me a copy of the estate paperwork and then put the rest in this knockbox. Put it on
26:20 your desk where I know where it is. If I have to, I’ll fly to your house and get it. I hate that solution, but it’s
26:27 better than not having the paperwork. When we had a family member pass recently, it took me three days full-time to find all their stuff in
26:34 their office now. And I know what I’m looking for. Like, this is something I talk about. And I took me three days. I
26:39 couldn’t imagine where you would start as just somebody who hasn’t been in the financial world.
26:45 I interviewed somebody for my book, a financial planner, whose father died unexpectedly, and she needed this birth
26:50 certificate, and it was a multi-state journey to try to find his birth certificate. and she found it in a
26:57 relative’s attic tucked in a bin in an attic inside her father’s baby book.
27:06 That’s where she I believe it. You know, somebody else found like a box of files in somebody’s garage under a
27:13 tarp in the back in the in the bed of a flatbed truck. Like I mean, come on. You know, like I call it the the death file.
27:20 I did a story uh years ago when I was at Reuters and this man’s father had died
27:26 and he didn’t know where anything was. He didn’t know anything he needed to know. He went to his dad’s computer and
27:31 opened, you know, opened up the the the desktop and there was a little Microsoft
27:37 file folder with death written in capital letters. And he double clicked and everything he needed was in there or
27:43 there were directions in there to to where to find it. And he was like, “Oh, thank God.” And he turned to his mother
27:49 and he’s like, “And now you need to do this because I don’t know where any of your stuff is.” And we all need something like that. You need to
27:56 assemble those things and have it. I have it. When I got my estate plan done, the estate lawyer put everything in a
28:04 little tote bag with his like logo on it and his phone number. And I just kept
28:09 that tote bag on my bookshelf. And I stuff everything. Like when you do the legacy contact for your phone, there’s a
28:14 print out. You print it out. It’s got a QR code on it. You know, it’s like if the person who’s the legacy contact just
28:22 scans that QR code, it gives them the instructions what they need to do. So, I tuck that in there. I tuck my important
28:28 passwords in there. You know, anything, any important papers, I just tuck into that canvas tote bag. I tell my kids and
28:35 my partner like, if you need anything ever, if I’m ever sick, that’s that’s
28:41 where it all is. Call the number on the bag. He’ll help you out. Yeah. We we call it an I love you file,
28:47 but I get the concept. Um, you know, like we’re just trying to be a little nice about it. So, I I don’t know about
28:52 you, but I was an author and uh my book came out beginning of this year and I had to have the book to them about 18
28:58 months before like it printed. Is there some type of time of frame for you like that?
29:03 Yeah, it it had to lock down Yeah. about six months beforehand and the world is
29:08 constantly changing and I was allowed to break into it for to change a few things but I got advice from from Reit Seth who
29:18 told me his first edition of I will teach you to be rich included a lot of
29:23 specific banking interest rate information and he totally totally
29:28 regretted it and so when he did the update 10 years later he learned to
29:34 write around a lot of those things and I did that in my book. I was like this book is very specific to the year that I
29:40 was caring for my mother. It left open the answers for the future and even the
29:46 resources. Like I had to go into the resource section and take out links that
29:51 were killed because the new administration came in and they you know I had links to the CFPB, the Consumer
29:59 Financial Protection Board and you know they’re dismantling links and so any I had to go in and and take stuff out but
30:06 the rules were always changing. The thresholds were changing. The estate tax exemption level changes. the Medicaid
30:13 asset limit changes like all of these things change and the experience um
30:18 changes. I will say that in the atmosphere that I wrote the book in was
30:24 one in which you know Medicaid was a limited program in terms of availability
30:30 and access and Medicare didn’t cover you know hearing aids and dental and vision
30:38 and if Kla Harris’s administration had come in some of those things might have changed right when the book was coming
30:44 out and I wouldn’t have been able to update them but those situations I think are only going going to go the other
30:49 way. Like all those costs, the asset limit is just going to get actually lower than $2,000 for Medicaid, not
30:57 higher than $2,000 somehow. I think that all of the things I said in the book are just going to be harder in the coming
31:03 years. Medicaid eligibility, banking regulation, fraud protections,
31:10 long-term care insurance solveny, like all of those things are just going to be brutal for, you know, the next couple of
31:17 years. uh social security, you know, you name it. Like all of it, it’s just going to be for the next couple of years and
31:24 then the future is unknown. You know, we have no idea what will happen next. Yeah. And I want to call out the chapter
31:30 on Medicaid. So, this is one of those that I’ve been researching quite a bit and Justice and Aging just put out a
31:35 good report looking at the Medicaid cuts that just happened. And when I say just happened, we’re recording this in August
31:40 of 2025. Who knows, you’re listening to this a few years later, it might be a different answer. But one of the things that was interesting as they’re laying
31:47 it out is Medicaid eligibility is going to get cut. The funding is going to get cut heavy. The Medicaid at home programs
31:53 which you mentioned are likely the first to get cut to the point where to me I
31:59 currently think Medicaid cannot be relied on as a stop gap for both your
32:05 personal and your your family members, you know, safety and security. What do you think about that?
32:10 I think that’s absolutely the case. I think uh one fact I came across when I was writing the book that I think a lot of people do not know about is that to
32:18 when you’re thinking about a facility that is uh mixed pay by which I mean it’s got private pay and it also accepts
32:25 Medicaid. A lot of private pay institutions now will no longer accept Medicaid and so when you run out of the
32:31 ability to pay in those in in a private pay facility they want you to leave. Um, and I think more and more of them will
32:38 not accept Medicaid at all because the payment reimbursement rate is going to go too low. I say in the book, the
32:44 facility where my grandmother went no longer takes Medicaid at all. She was able to age in place in the assisted
32:51 living where she was for 12 years because she was able to spend down her assets and then go on Medicaid. and they
32:57 had a bed for her and she was charming and lovely and she negotiated herself a bed in the in the Medicaid nursing part
33:04 that you know saved my parents from having to pay for her to have full-time
33:09 nursing care and that would have been really expensive for them but that facility no longer even takes Medicaid so that wouldn’t even be an option there
33:16 and then there are facilities that the mixed pay facilities they all have like a 2 to fouryear buyin now that a lot of
33:23 people are not aware of you need to they want you to commit commit to paying for 2 to four years, sometimes even longer,
33:30 and maybe those windows will extend before they will think about letting you
33:35 switch to a Medicaid payment. Somebody needs to have the resources. Now, usually what’ll happen is you sell your parents’ house, they live off of that
33:41 money to pay down those 2 to four years, and then the facility actually helps you transition to Medicaid, and then
33:48 Medicaid starts paying. But they also did something. One of the things that they did recently was there used to be a
33:55 Medicaid look back period. So the date you apply to Medicaid is like your day
34:01 one date. It it might take 6 months to a year for your application to be approved, but they will backdate the
34:08 payments to the facility to that application date. They used to give you 3 months prior to that also, and now
34:14 they’ve cut that back to 30 days. Think about it. If you are paying for your parent to be in that facility and it’s
34:20 $12,000 a month, you’re suddenly $24,000 less out of your pocket like like you’ve
34:26 got to pay $24,000 more suddenly just because of one little governmental
34:31 change. That’s a lot that would bankrupt you. It’s huge. And Beth, I’m going to ask
34:36 you kind of one off-the-wall question a little bit out of your book, but I want to see what you think. I introduced Beth and she’s a CFP, but she also writes
34:43 about all different topics. And my advice now to individuals, so you know,
34:49 to my clients, child-free folks, is that you’re not ready to retire until you have a plan in place for your long-term
34:55 care, either self-insure or insurance or insurance. You need to have a solution before you retire because that is going
35:03 to be the biggest single expense in retirement. What do you think about that? Absolutely. I have a long-term care
35:08 insurance policy. I got it when I was in my 30s. It was like a group work insurance policy and I was convinced to
35:15 get it because uh my mother already had a long-term care insurance policy and she got that because um her brother got
35:23 sick and my grandfather had Alzheimer’s and she was afraid of what would happen
35:29 to her and so she was 50some when she got a policy. She I go through all of the math in my book of what she paid,
35:36 the exact amounts, the exact amount she got back out, the the, you know, the amount that we were out of pocket on it,
35:42 like all the math of it that people worry about cuz for some reason people want there to be a return on investment
35:48 on long-term care insurance. And I always say to them, you know, at the end of the time you’re living in your house,
35:54 if it hasn’t burned down, do you really regret all the money you spent on spend on home insurance? like they’re they’re
36:01 like upset they didn’t get sick in or they they didn’t get sick enough in order to use their long-term care
36:07 insurance and somehow that makes the long-term care insurance a waste. No, it’s for your protection. The most
36:13 important thing about the long-term care insurance for my mother was that it allowed her the mental uh leap to get
36:21 help at home. She was like, I I have the long-term care insurance policy. I’m delaying getting help, but if I think I
36:28 need it and now I have that long-term care insurance and so I can pay for it. If she didn’t have that long-term care
36:34 insurance, she would have never gotten help. She would have fallen and broken her hip and died 10 year like before that. Like the help, it lengthened her
36:42 life and lengthened her enjoyment of her life. And the long-term care insurance allowed her the mental ability to to
36:50 make that decision. And it allowed me the freedom then of not having to go and take care of her earlier because she was
36:56 able to pay for the help that she needed. And it started slow, you know, like 4 hours a day, you know, a couple
37:02 days a week and then it ramped up as she needed more, but it was still work that I didn’t have to do and that was
37:09 important to me. So that long-term care insurance helped our whole family. Yeah. And the way I look at it, because
37:14 I’ve heard people the same kind of question, what if I don’t use it? My argument is about a third of people die in their sleep and just won’t need
37:20 long-term care ever. It’s the number varies depending on you and your life, but close enough. And I go, “Hey, if
37:26 you’re in the one-third that dies peacefully in your sleep and never needs long-term care, you won.” Yeah. Like, you won the game. And and people
37:33 go, “Well, I didn’t spend the money.” I’m like, “Doesn’t matter. Quality of life, you won.” And they’re like, “Huh?”
37:40 But they get there eventually. All right. The hardest question for an author and I’m going to ask you this one and force you to answer it is if people
37:47 take one thing away from your book, just one, what would you want them to take away from it? The whole reason I wrote
37:53 this book was so that people would understand why. When you get to-do list, when you get like that checklist
37:59 mentality, you go on the internet, you search for power of attorney, you get a list of instructions, but nobody ever
38:06 tells you why. I wrote this book as a story. There’s a whole narrative that I
38:11 went through. And my point was that people understand stories and that if
38:17 you read through and you know, I know how people read books. I read a thousand personal finance books. You never stop
38:24 and do the things that the author has great intentions like, you know, stop now and think about this. And nobody
38:31 ever does. I I never do. I wanted the my book for people to be able to read through and you get to the end end of it
38:38 and you say, “Oh, wow. Now I understand why I have to do all this. I have to do
38:43 all this to save whoever is going to clean up after me when I’m gone.” The
38:49 grief and the expense and the time uh it takes to, you know, turn out the lights
38:54 and shut the door on the on the way out. You can’t do that for yourself after you’re dead, but somebody’s going to
39:00 have to. Like we’re all connected to the the grid of civil society is how I put it in the book. And somebody’s got to
39:07 turn the lights out for you when you’re done. You don’t want to cause pain to anybody you love. Get your house in
39:12 order. Yeah, that’s great. And the book comes out uh in November. So tell us kind of
39:18 where do we get it and all the details kind of where to find you. You’ll be able to find it at any major
39:24 book seller and the ebook, too. Um and you can find it through my website. It’s just bethpins.com. I’m all over the
39:31 internet just as my name on all the social media and you know I write three times a week at marketwatch. So I’m I’m
39:37 always out there and easy to find. If you have any follow-up questions for me, there’s a page on my website to ask me a
39:43 question and I’ll be answering those questions in blog posts and in video posts. Yeah. So the book is my mother’s money
39:50 and I’m asking my staff to add it in as a resource. you’ll we’ll link to it in the notes, but I’m asking my staff to
39:56 add as a resource for anytime our clients are starting to look at this plan for parents, but also for the folks
40:02 that are trying to figure out their own care plan of like what does it take, you know, and what we find is people often
40:07 when they’re caring for their parents start thinking about themselves and this becomes that balancing act. But to me, it’s a good guide about like what is it
40:15 like? And until you’ve been through it, it makes no sense. Once you’ve been through it, you’ll read best book and go, I wish I had this before. like you
40:22 know you’re trying to figure out how do I deal with Medicaid and how do I do this and like all of these things and it’s in the book pick it up and we all
40:30 will have to deal with this some way it might be not your parents it might be a friend it might be others you’re caring for and we also have to figure out for
40:36 ourselves great book great to have you on Beth and I appreciate you being here thank you very much
40:42 if you enjoyed the show please consider leaving a rating or review we’d love to keep the conversation going please let
40:48 us know your thoughts wherever comments are available or email us at media@childfreewealth.com.
40:54 To stay uptodate, find and follow childfreealth on social media. If you’re interested in working with us, learn
41:00 more by visiting our website, childfreewealth.com. We’ll see you next time.
