“Oh by the way, you are my Power of Attorney.” Ever been in that situation? I have been, to my well prepared grandmother. I wish everyone knew how to handle being a Power of Attorney. It is on my heart to have these tough conversations now while there is time to take action and be prepared.
Are You Up For It?
My grandmother added me as a co-signer to all of her accounts. The banker warned that by doing that I could clean out her accounts the next day. She had a lot of trust in me and wanted things to be easy for me to help her. She had a red folder on how to run her finances and end of life wishes, where’s your red folder? And before I knew it Organize 365® had grown, accounts and credit cards had been opened but Greg wasn’t on those accounts. I’m living till 100, but if I need him to take over finances while I recover from surgery or something, I want him to be able to do it without additional stress. So he took time one day so I could get him added to everything. So what do you do?
As the Power of Attorney, you are taking care of their CFO responsibilities. One tell-tale sign that it’s time to help your loved one is seeing a pile of unopened mail. This is your heads up to figure out if funds are getting low or they just don’t have the cognitive capacity to process the bills. Once you are their Power of attorney, I would plan on 30 – 90 minutes, weekly, to dedicate to their finances. Where are the bills? How do they get paid? It would also be very helpful for you to get the Sunday Basket®. Start to keep all of their stuff in one place. If they have a laptop you could even keep that in there along with their Financial Binder. You need a designated space for this role.
Get the Binder
I’m urging you to get the Financial Binder to assist you in managing someone else’s finances as their Power of Attorney. The binder is great to document things like all of the bank accounts, credit cards, loans, people who assist in financial matters, or even insurance pay schedules. I created the Financial Binder as a result of being my dad’s Power of Attorney and eventually the executor of his estate. I wished I’d had a workbook to tell me if I was doing this job well. I want you to know what to do as well as you are doing it well.
Communication
If there are multiple people caring for your loved one, you’ll want to have good communication. Heck these products can help you solo too, to lighten your cognitive load. Even if it’s just communication to yourself. It’s called Power of Attorney but should be called Power of Household because you are essentially taking over the financial running of their home and expenses of their life including groceries and “outings”. I talked about the 2 1/ year calendar and how you could use it to track annual tasks or track bills you paid so you can start a playbook of sorts for yourself to know when that bill will reoccur. There’s a monthly tear pad you can use too. There are two pages for each month. The first is the month at a snap shot and the second a way to break down the monthly tasks, delegate who will do them or if they were completed.
There can be multiple Power of Attorneys and there is a variety of the type of Power of Attorneys with different liberties. When the person you have been caring for passes, so do your Power of Attorney privileges. Then the executor takes over. When it comes to an executor of an estate, there should be one. And we’ll talk about that next week.
EPISODE RESOURCES:
- The Sunday Basket®
- The Paper Solution® (where you can find the Financial Binder)
- The Paper Solution® Shop – 2 1/1 year Calendar and Tear pads
- Sign Up for the Organize 365® Newsletter
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