00:00:00 Speaker 1: Welcome to Out of Money. I'm Joel, and today we're talking the money combos you need to have with your parents with Beth Pinsker. Pretty sure you've taken dance classes with like that, headmind, let's talk about the subject we're going to dicuss it. We're talking about financial caregiving. It's coming for all of us, whether we like it or not. Rich or poor, married or single, famous or anonymous. Famous people deal with this too, and at some point someone we love is likely to need us to step in to help care for them, taking them to the doctor's appointment. That's just the tip of the iceberg. We're talking about a lot more than that in today's episode, because when someone you love starts to need care, their financial life can very quickly become your financial problem too. Talking bills, bank accounts, insurance, investments, long term care. We're going we're recovering the gamut here, even the question of who gets to make decisions when that person cannot make decisions for themselves. You can put your fingers in your ears, you can hope you never have to deal with it, or you could listen to today's episode watch it on YouTube. And my guest today she spent decades writing about money. Beth Pinsker is a CFP a former MarketWatch columnist. Her book is My Mother's Journey. It's part memoir, part practical guide to navigating the financial realities of caring for an aging parent. So, Beth, thank you for joining me today on the show. 00:01:38 Speaker 2: Thank you. And I'm still at market Watch. 00:01:39 Speaker 1: So cur still okay, still at market Watch? All right, I got that one wrong. Tell me. Okay, first question I ask everybody who comes on the show, is what they like disploy John. We call it the craft beer equivalent because I like to spend money on good old craft beer. But what's that thing for you? Hey, I'm still saving thinking about my future, but I'm scourging in the here and now too. 00:01:59 Speaker 2: Well. I can't drink the craft beer because I don't have gluten. So what I splurge on is gluten free food, which is more expensive and smaller than all regular food. So my kid is upstairs right now making bagels on her day off with our very expensive gluten free flower that we import from Italy. 00:02:21 Speaker 1: Ooh okay, yeah, so smaller, more expensive, but necessary, right. 00:02:26 Speaker 2: Got to have it? Can't you eat the regular stuff? God? Have it? 00:02:29 Speaker 1: Okay, before we started recording, you let me in on some news that you have a new book coming out in twenty twenty nine where you are the guinea pig in your own retirement journey. Can you just like give us a little peek behind what you're going to do? And Yeah, what do you think that's going to look like? Because you're like a few years away from retirement, beer trying to get all your ducks in a row, right. 00:02:50 Speaker 2: Yeah, So I'm in that five year window right before retirement, which is the most important time to plan. And I thought, Okay, well, why I know, I'm going to research the heck out of that, So why don't I let people in on that as I go along? And so the book is called it's going to be called Retire with Me. That's the tentative title, and it's basically, yeah, come along on this journey with me. I don't know what stage you're in or what age you are, because it's not the same for everybody, but I'm going to show you how it all works. 00:03:20 Speaker 1: I love it. 00:03:21 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:03:22 Speaker 1: The topic that we're covering that you cover in your most recent book that is published so that people can get their hands on, right now, it's something that most people don't want to talk about. I alluded to that in the intro that you can cover your ears, and most people do. They choose to kind of avoid the topic. But every once in a while it becomes kind of popular in the American consciousness, and we see this like especially when a celebrity dies without proper planning, without a will in place, or something that Prince that happened with Prince, right, wasn't that like one of those times that galvanized people and people actually started thinking about the getting their affairs in order. 00:03:59 Speaker 2: Prince actually move the needle on online will planning services, like people thought of him as a proxy family member and they're like, oh, if that can happen to Prince, you know what's going to happen to me. And the numbers went up temporarily. 00:04:14 Speaker 1: Yeah, and it goes to show that it really can't like even the rich and the famous, the well connected, still this is one of those things that they continue to pump the ball on and not investigate. Because you mentioned even like using online wills. That has become a much bigger realm lately of being able to get services online, like planning services for your future, for your family's future. How do you feel about those services versus kind of the traditional way of going to a lawyer directly who would be able to help you plan for the future. 00:04:49 Speaker 2: Well, it hasn't moved the numbers yet, unfortunately. And the reason that you know that's true is because the top online service provider is Trust and Will, and they do an annual survey every year, and their actual survey, their latest survey, actually show the numbers going down for the number of people who have a will. Even as they sign out millions of people, it's still not enough. These are numbers that should be one hundred percent. I have this list. I keep numbers that should be one hundred percent, Like unequivocally, everybody should do this right. Every single adult human being needs a will, but only thirty percent of people have them. Every adult human being over the age of eighteen needs a power of attorney. Fifteen percent of people have that document. So we're just not doing the job on any of these things because we think it can be put off to another day, Like we know we're supposed to do it. But when you look at any of the surveys they do, or you ask anybody, they just don't want to deal with it. It's just purely procrastination. 00:05:53 Speaker 1: And do people also think it's harder than it actually is. Like, That's what I'm alluding to as well, is that these online services they make it's so much easier than it used to be. There are some things, right that have become much easier in moditnor America. Creating a will is one of those things that just like the cost and the frustration level has dropped significantly, So it makes the excuses I feel like just a little less believable because it's become less difficult. 00:06:22 Speaker 2: Well, it always the equation was always the same. It costs somewhere between free and a couple hundred dollars to get your basic documents in place. If you don't have those documents, it costs your family like upwards of like fifteen twenty thousand dollars and an agonizing year plus of their lives in order to deal with the ramifications of it. So free to a couple hundred dollars versus twenty thousand dollars has always been the equation. And people still just would rather not do things today, and my job is to motivate them to see, hey, this is an emergency. This train is coming straight for you. And if you don't get some of this stuff done, you, as the person in the family who's thinking about this, you're going to be in trouble. 00:07:10 Speaker 1: I want to get to your mom's story and to your story. They're overlapping, right, But before we kind of delve into so much of what your book is about, your mom was influential in even just your interest in personal finance and kind of you going down this trajectory of writing about money for so many years. 00:07:31 Speaker 2: Yeah, people talk about their money origin stories, and mine is that my parents got audited three times while I was little, and my mom was the financial guru in our family. My father was an English professor and he couldn't even like unload the dishwasher in an effective manner. Practical life was just not his purview. So my mom took care of everything, and the irs became the bane of her existence because every time we would take a year off for one of my father's sabbaticals, we would go travel somewhere and you know, just go elsewhere. Every time we got back, he would be audited, and my mom would go insane with the paperwork, and I don't know what it is about me that remembers us, because my brother doesn't remember too much of it. But our accountant's name was mister Mester, and my mom would talk about mister Mester incessantly during tax season and gather all this paperwork, and it just consumed our lives for you know, months on end every time we had one of these. So that is how I started out thinking about money, which was like, you have to battle to keep what's yours. 00:08:47 Speaker 1: Hmmm, do you still feel that way? 00:08:50 Speaker 2: I absolutely feel that way, and I certainly felt that way. All that's how my mom operated, and when I was her proxy as the person you know she chose to take care of things for her, I knew that I had the battle for every dollar she was due. So when payments would go missing or you know, we wouldn't get reimbursed for something that we were supposed to, I knew that she would want me to fight for those So I did. 00:09:15 Speaker 1: I appreciate that because I do think that a lot of people in modern America they feel like this should be easy, and what you're saying is kind of it's kind of a battle, like even even when it comes to creating the will like that's easier, but still you got to do it. And there are all of these things where and hashtag adulting, right, that's kind of the era we live in where we've got to do some of these adulting things that like our parents' generation, your mom was doing with great effort, but it wasn't easy. And so assuming that it was easy back then and it's hard today, I think it's just it's just incorrect. Since your mom was pretty savvy with money, how did you know that you needed to get involved in her in her affairs and did it feel like you were stepping on her toes in in like this area where she had been pretty savvy for a long time. 00:10:06 Speaker 2: Definitely felt like I was stepping on her toes, for sure. So my mom had back problems a host of other things too, like you know every older person. But she went in for a back surgery in November of twenty twenty two, and we thought that this would be, you know, just a surgery, she would bounce back, she would go to rehab and then resume her life. But she needed somebody to take care of things for her, you know, while she was in the hospital, while she was in rehab and you know, she asked me to step in and do those things in an official capacity. And what happened was, as soon as she had that surgery, she started to have complications and she never fully came back online. While she was sick, she was cognizant, she just wasn't able to handle her affairs, and so she went up and down and back and forth, and you know, from a merger to emergency for about nine months, and then she went home on hospice and passed away about two weeks later. And then I started the process of, you know, settling her estate. So that whole time, while she was alive but sick, we always held out hope that she would just get better at some point and come back. And so I managed her finances under the under her watchful eye, I should say, thinking that at some point she was going to come back and be like, what the hell did you do with my money? Why did you touch this account here? Why did you move this sum of money from here to here. I wasn't worried about my brother asking any questions, or you know, anybody else in the family. I was worried about my mom. 00:11:45 Speaker 1: Why did you buy all that cryptocurrency? Death? You know, with my money. 00:11:50 Speaker 2: Yeah. So the book opens with my mom calling me and somebody, one of the aids had brought the mail and there was a credit card bill in there, and there it showed some charge from the cable company for like twelve ninety nine, and she's like, did you rent a movie? Did your brother rent a movie? Or is this a mistake? Because that actually happened to her quite a few times in the building, the cable would get switched and we get build for somebody else's you know, movie rental, and she wanted me to call the cable company and find out what movie it was. And I'm like, oh my god, this is a can of worms. You know, my brother's been staying there. I don't want to know. And so she was that like she was that careful about things that, like she noticed from her hospital bed that one of me or my brother had charged a movie to her cable account. 00:12:41 Speaker 1: Amazing. I mean, so she was vigilant and for a while this was kind of a you managing co managing essentially your mom's finances. This makes me wonder and just like when it makes me like my kid, my thirteen year od, we're getting closer to even just like thinking about college is kind of weird to even think about. But you start to have those conversations when, which feels earlier than ever? When do you start to have conversations with a parent about their finances? There's got to be a time that's too soon, right, So when is kind of that like goldilocks right time to begin having conversations about your parents' finances. 00:13:19 Speaker 2: I think there's ever a time that's too early. I mean, I have an estate planning binder upstairs, and I make sure everybody in the household, you know, I quiz them regularly, you know, like I have an estate binder. Do you know where it is? Tell me you remember where it is? And right now, because I'm divorced and I am not currently remarried, although by the time this comes out, that's that's the next book. But my twenty year old is currently my power of attorney because my mom was my power of attorney for me for everything, and my executor and my trustee and all of those things. I leaned on my mom because that's who, you know, That's who my closest you know, competent relative was. And so now it's my twenty year old son. And so it it is on me as a human being to make sure that my finances are understandable to a twenty year old human being. And my mom organized her life in the same way. She's like, somebody might have to take over for me someday. She was at that point when I took over. She was my dad was gone, so he had been gone for five years and he didn't do anything anyway, So like it was all just in her head, and she knew that she had to create a system that somebody else could come in and find stuff. So like, I went to the bank one day to adjust something with the titling of the bank accounts, and I needed to put my hands on my dad's death certificate. I'm like, where the hell am I going to find my dad's death certificate? 00:14:54 Speaker 1: And I built the line of credit. 00:14:57 Speaker 2: No, the home equity line of credit was los So this was this was a good example of my mom doing something. I go back to the desk and I look at you know, I start looking in her file cabinet and there's a folder mark death certificates and my dad's death certificate in it. It was in there, and it took me three seconds later on we found out that there were things that she didn't take care of. We went to sell her apartment, and the you know, two days before closing, which was an all cash deal, like threading a very tiny needle to get this all done, the title attorney calls and says, what about this home equity line of credit your mom had? I'm like, oh, what home equity line of credit? And by that point, of course, she's really gone and I can't ask her, and I've got boxes of papers I haven't looked through and access to her email account, and I have to start detective work. I had to put aside everything that was going on in my own life until I could solve this problem, or else we couldn't close the on the sell of the apartment, and so I had to start throwing every search term I could into her AOL account to try to find out if she had ever taken out a home equity line of credit on her partner. And it turns out that she had back in twenty eighteen or twenty twenty fourteen, when my dad first got sick, and she had run into problems with money and wasn't sure when he was incapacitated if she was going to have to if she was going to have access to the money she needed. So she started the process of taking out a home equity line of credit so that she could have money, and it turns out that she didn't need it, and she never took any money out, So all of this work was to close a home equity line of credit that had a zero balance, But the whole sale would have been stopped if I wouldn't have been able to unravel it. And part of the problem was that the bank it was listed as being at was the was not the bank she took it out at, so that bank had been sold and then sold again, and so there was no account number that I had that was associated with the actual one that was on file at that particular moment. So it's just layers and layers and layers of work to get to this. So like this would have been very helpful for me and my mom to have had a conversation about or for there to have been some notation of it somewhere in her files, but she forgot, so it was nothing for her and she didn't remember. 00:17:30 Speaker 1: Yeah, and that seems like an insignificant thing, Like if I could see the same thing happening with my parents right where they would not think tell me, hey, we've got a home equal welne of credit, but we didn't, you know, draw down on it and so don't worry about it. Like that just seems like one of those conversations you wouldn't even bring up because it's miniscule in its size and scope. So what does it look like then, if we're having conversations with our parents ahead of time, we're starting to have these conversations early so we don't end up in irksome situation where we're flying blind right as they start to encounter health issues. What should those conversations look like? And then also should we be pushing our parents to do more planning ahead of time to essentially help us out as their kids, because a lot of people listening to this to this show are probably in their thirties and forties and they're starting to have these like, hey, my parents, they're may be not as quick as they used to be, or maybe they are going through something right now, and it feels were like, I don't know how long much longer we're going to have with them? What should those conversations look like? 00:18:32 Speaker 2: I wish my mom had said to me when my dad first got sick, you know, I'm worried about having access to money. I'm thinking about taking on a home equity loan. And maybe I would have said, you know, that doesn't sound like a great idea. If you need a float loan, maybe I could help you, and then we would have had a conversation about it, and then years later it would have triggered it. I would have remembered, like even something as simple as that. But I think that a lot of people just don't have any conversations like that about their parents with their parents. Like I wish we would have had the relationship where she would have talked those things through with me. But in twenty fourteen, you know, I wasn't a CFP yet, you know, like maybe she didn't think I knew anything about it. She just thought of me as you know, her kid, and not having any you know, anything to offer to that conversation. But it's those little things that just sounding off against each other. Just having normal talk about what's going on in your life can have so much information layered into it. You know. The celebrity I think of with this is Gene Hackman. Gene Hackman had a trust, he had a will, he had all the proper paperwork. What he didn't have was enough people in his life. He didn't have people checking in on him. He didn't have anybody who would notice he was gone and hadn't called or contacted, you know, for ten days, and he's lying on the kitchen floor. We need people in our lives, and I think a lot of us think we can do it on our own, or if it's fine, if it's going on in our heads, but we need other people. We need to be connected, We need to tell them what's going on, and we need to include them in things. You know. I know of a case where, uh, the mom was getting older and she you know, wanted to handle things on her own, and she didn't want her kids involved. And she ended up underpaying her taxes one year, which isn't a big deal, except she didn't deal with it, and the you know, tax debt grew and grew and grew, and by the time she admitted it to her kids, she owed over one hundred thousand dollars and they're going to put a lien on her house because the irs can do that, and therefore the kids weren't going to be able to sell it or you know, take care of it because they would have this lean. So the kids ended up responsible for paying off the irs because the mom didn't have the cash to do it. And then you think, okay, well, if they would have just had a conversation about this the very first notice that the mom got, the kids could have you know, hired a proper accountant, gotten either the amount reduced or on a payment plan of some sort, and they could have helped at that moment. And you know, instead of one hundred and whatever thousand dollars, it could have been you know, twenty thousand dollars. So you know, but the mom wanted to save face in a way, you know, like she wasn't ready to admit that she had made any mistake or needed any help, and you know, ego gets in the way. 00:21:38 Speaker 1: So it sounds like one of the pieces of advice you're giving is the kid in the situation should not expect their parent to be forthcoming with everything and to say, here's a list of all my accounts, and here's a list of the money mistakes I've made, and here like part of that is just relational checking in on a regular bay and asking questions and just kind of being there for them and then maybe some of these things will will come up as you as you stay involved. 00:22:09 Speaker 2: Yeah, they lie like teenagers hiding pot in their bedrooms. No, it seriously is. It's reverse parenting, and it's very uncomfortable. I looked up to my mother. I respected her. There is no way I thought I was capable of doing anything better than her. But you get in this position and it's really just a hard go for both sides. But if you want to keep them safe, you have to do it just like you have to do it. Like you think less about that when your kid's thirteen or fifteen or whatever and you're trying to make decisions as a parent that might not be popular in your house, but they're meant to keep people safe. So if you think that your parent is getting into, for instance, credit card debt, and you ask them about it and they say, oh, no, no, everything's fine. You got to take a look at a bill, right, And I've had people asking you, well, isn't that prying? It feels weird. I'm like, you wouldn't hesitate if it was a fifteen year old child and they were using your credit card and you were going to end up, you know, responsible for that bill. Someday you would just go into their room and look at whatever you needed to look at. But with your parents, you know, you're gonna have to step over a line. At some point, you're gonna have to take away the car keys. You're gonna have to check credit card bills. You're gonna like, you know, there's one relative we have that like, he keeps getting lured into scams and at some point we're gonna have to take away his phone, you know, like you just you gotta you know, gird yourself and you have to step up and do some of these stuff. Aging is not pretty and it's hard stuff. But what my mantra is, we do hard stuff for people we love. You are capable of enormously complicated and difficult things when it's done out of love. And so anybody who thinks, oh this is too hard, this is to you know, I don't have time for this right now. If you think, okay, if I don't go get this power of attorney, my kids are going to suffer. That is a message that parents get that makes them act right, like, my kids are going to get hurt if I don't do this. It's not for yourself, you will do it for them. 00:24:35 Speaker 1: I like that we do hard things for people we love, and we are going to talk more about the details of how to do some of these things for the people we love right after this. All right, we're back still talking with Beth Pinsker. We're talking about my mother's money, and we're talking about how to have good conversations with the people that you love, hard conversations so that ultimately you're not facing just the overwhelming realities of helping your loved ones with their finances. And one of the things that you said Bet in the book, which kind of I didn't know how to take this, I'm curious to hear you elaborate on it. You said you had book smarts when you needed street smarts. So that's some of the stuff you kind of knew in your head, but you, I guess when it came to the realities of navigating this world of your mom's finances, you felt ill prepared. What's what's the difference. 00:25:30 Speaker 2: The things that you read that you learn as a financial planner and the things that you read when you're trying to educate yourself on these things are all very cursory. They are all like, you know, Medicare covers one hundred days of inpatient you know, in patient needs or ninety days of sixty days of inpatient needs, ninety days of outpatient or inpatient rehab. Right, you read that, and that's that's all you're going to get out there in the union first, Like my story is okay, that's the rule book. You know, real life is somewhere else, right, real life is. Yes, you know Medicare will cover one hundred days in the rehab facility, but they won't. Right, even Mitch McConnell got kicked out before the end of one hundred days. They you get what the doctor says you need to get, and everything else is a negotiation. 00:26:27 Speaker 1: So you talk about in the book having to appeal, having to push back. This is again we're kind of the beginning of our conversation. You had to have some fight in you to say no, this is what we need. 00:26:38 Speaker 2: There's a lot of catch twenty twos in the system. For instance, with my mom, if she would have gone to rehab and done well, they would have said, oh great, you got better, you can go home now. But my mom went into rehab and she didn't do so well, and you would think, okay, Well, that logically, in my head means okay, she needs to stay longer, right, she needs more time in rehab, but no, in the Medicare system for rehab, that also means we can't help you anymore. You need to go home. So whatever way you cut it with Medicare, it's you're either you're better and you can go home, or you're not better and you need to go home. And I don't understand it, but that's the way the system works, and so I want I needed to fight that for my mom because we weren't ready for her to have any other choices but staying there. And I knew we had, you know, legally one hundred days if we could convince them to let her have her hundred days. So we filed these two official appeals and we won them, and then they were going to run her discharge. Every week they had a meeting in the rehab place and then they set people up for discharge. So they did this two weeks in a row, and then before the third week, I went to the CEO of the company and I wrote them a letter and I'm like, your people in the rehab center are trying to kick my mom out and she needs stay. Her doctor says she needs to stay. Can you do something about this? And the whole letter is in the book because I think people, you know, I'm a writer by by profession, right, I can write a good letter, and I put the whole letter in there. Me and my editor, you know, went back and forth about it, but we decided to put the letter in there because you know, if you're trying to write a letter that's effective in these circumstances, you got to get it all right. You know, you have to be nice and persuasive and have your fact straight, and you can't yell and you can't give them anything to argue with. So, like we left that letter in there because we thought it might help people to see the whole thing. But then they stopped trying to discharge her. And the only reason she went out of there is because she got an infection and she went to the hospital and then from there she was like I'm done, and she went home on hospice. So she would have gotten her she was at like, you know, eighty or something, eighty days at that point, Like she would have made it the whole hundred days. But you know, people in that situation get like little infections, like she had a urinary tract infection, Like old people get urinary tract infections, and it can be terminal. And so you know, you got to be watching out for these things always and you know, advocating constantly. So it just it makes it a full time job to be like you're not even the hands on caregiver. You're not the nurse who's sitting there, you know, changing bed sheets and things, but you're still twenty four to seven in it. 00:29:43 Speaker 1: Yeah, just the just the financial side of it alone and pushing back right when they're not getting the treatment they need or yeah, like that's that makes sense, Like you be looking out for her was a was a full time job, one of the things. And I saw this recent survey that more young people are using their own retirement funds to help pay for medical necessities for their loved ones, for their parents. Where do you draw the line when it comes to using your own resources versus like trying to navigate the system, trying to navigate medicare or whether your parent has a long term care plan in place, or just using their retirement funds. I mean where does the money come from and how? Yeah, especially what if they have limited means, it can't afford some of the care that they need. 00:30:32 Speaker 2: Yeah, I like to draw the line. You know, it's best case scenario to draw the line before you put your own money in the pod, because at that point you're just perpetuating then the cycle of need. Like if you spend your retirement on your parents, then your kids are going to have to spend it their retirement on you. So at some point somebody's got to say, you know, I don't have it to put in the pot, and we're just going to have to to, you know, make use of what we can. So there are federal safety nets, and you know, people think of medicaid as you know for the indigen but fifty percent of all the people in nursing homes, or more than fifty percent, are using medicaid as their form of payment. The cost is just so catastrophic for nursing care for any length of time that you just you know, no family has it, And if you were to put your own money in and say I'll take care of mom, you don't know where the finish line is, so you don't know how much of your resources, you're committing. I have an example in the book. A woman and her husband were paying for the mother to be in nursing care and it was all hunky dory and everybody was happy until the couple got divorced, and then the ex husband didn't want to keep kicking in for his want his ex wife's mom to be in nursing care, so you know, and the woman didn't have enough money on her own to support her mother in that nursing home, which was fifteen thousand dollars a month, so she said, okay, well I will my mother has nothing, I'll get her put on Medicaid. Well, the nursing home she was in didn't take Medicaid, so she had to move her to another nursing home that did take Medicaid. And you know, this is the situations that people get in. She could not afford it herself. Fifteen thousand dollars a month for some interminal amount of time is too much money to commit. So her mother, you know, she just had to move her. And this is how you know it's a middle class, even upper middle class, you know, all the way down to the end of the spectrum. You know, if you're really rich and you have the funds and it's not going to affect you at all. Yeah, put mom in the writs and you know, have a have a butler, you know, but if your resources are constrained in any way, you need to rely on their money first, then federal safety nets. 00:33:12 Speaker 1: How big of a necessity is long term care insurance? Because in recent years we've seen the cost of premium skyrocket and so my grandma has a long term care insurance policy. It but this is because she bought it many, many, many decades ago. And if I'm thinking about whether I get one or not, like the financial stakes have changed, right, So how should we think about long term care right now? 00:33:39 Speaker 2: So this is another on my list of numbers. It should be one hundred percent. Everybody should have some sort of long term care backup system in place. Nobody does. So, you know, upwards of like three percent of people have some sort of long traditional long term care insurance policy. And that's just a miniscule fraction of you know, this the population that's going to need long term care. Seventy percent of us are going to have a care need at some point in the future. You have to have a plan now, most people's plan in their heads is Medicare. This is what you ask people, what's your plan for long term care? And they say Medicare, and you know, people like me say, oh my god, that's not a plan because Medicare doesn't cover long term care. So you know, like you need another plan besides that, so you can save the money yourself, or you could have an insurance policy. And these days they have traditional long term care insurance policies, which are too expensive for most people to afford, and then they have hybrid policies, which are life insurance combined with long term care insurance. At the end of the day, if you don't use the long term care and s in a hybrid policy, your heiress will get some sort of death benefit. But if you need some sort of care in the meantime, you will have built up like a cash value, whole life value to your life insurance and you can use that for long term care. Those policies are also expensive. Most of them require a lump sum to be put down on the order of one hundred thousand dollars and then you wait thirty years to see if you're going to need it. I talked to a claims representative somebody not a claims representative, but somebody who works with claims to try to get help families process them. And she hasn't actually worked with any hybrid long term care insurance claims because they're too new. Nobody who has bought one of those policies has reached the age where they need the care in her experience, so those policies are kind of untested. What happened with the traditional law term insurance policies that my mom has and that your grandma has are that they priced them in such a way that they bankrupted the companies, so that when my mom went on claim, her company was bankrupt, and I was dealing with the receivership because big insurance companies like that have their own insurance for you know, for paying out claims. So she got the money for her claim, but there was no infrastructure. There was no you know, web interface where I could upload the receipts and stuff like that, so it was very very tedious. 00:36:36 Speaker 1: What of the you mentioned, like saving and investing enough to like self insurre, Like, what level do you have to achieve in terms of nest egg and wealth building to say I can I don't need the insurance. I can do this on my own a lot. 00:36:53 Speaker 2: You know, think about today's cost is a you know for you know, you'll look at you can look at national averages and I'll tell you it's much lower. But I'll tell you in personal experience and in talking to people constantly about this, Uh, if you want to go to a nice place, it's about fifteen thousand dollars a month. And if you want full time care at home, it's going to run you about that. 00:37:14 Speaker 1: And the average person will need how many months in a long term care facility? 00:37:20 Speaker 2: Well, this is a thing nobody really knows, okay, And you're never going to be able to get an answer to that question because it's one of life's greatest unknowns. Like nobody can tell you when you're going to die or how or how long you're going to be sick. So you can only pinpoint with some level of you know, actuarial preciseness. You know what's in your family, you know how long did your parents live, you know what's your cholesterol? Right now? You know you can only and and then you start to think, okay, well, once I get sick, then I maybe, you know, maybe can pinpoint with more accuracy, like my mom got really we could pinpoint with some accuracy that if we had three years of money left that was going to be enough. She was never going to make it, you know, any further than that. But you know, my parents both died when they were seventy six. My dad was older than my mom, so he died first at seventy six, and then my mom died at seventy six. And so when I look at my life, I'm like, if I'm going to die at seventy six, this is why I'm going to retire early. Like why am I going to work until I'm seventy and then die at seventy six? But I have a long term gar insurance policy, so if I get sick, you know I will be covered. But I bought my policy when I was thirty because we thought, uh, my grandfather had dementia, and my mom got her policy because my grandfather had dementia, and so we all just sort of got policies at the same time. But now we think my grandfather was played college football in the days where they were leather helm and then was a professional wrestler, So we're not sure if his dementia was caused by blows to the head, or it's inheritable. Okay, so, but it's better to be cautious. 00:39:12 Speaker 1: One of the other things you talk about all quite a bit in the book. You stress the need for a power of attorney and you actually I was fascinated by this. How some institutions don't respect the power of attorney the way they're supposed to. And this goes back to fighting. You had to fight and push for some of these institutions to respect the power of attorney you had in place. Why is that such an important document? How? Yeah, what do people need to know about it? 00:39:40 Speaker 2: So they don't fight it because they don't believe in it. They fight it because they're trying to protect their customers. So it really is just a case of them being extremely, extremely cautious to prevent fraud, right, So you can't fault them for that, but it does make the consumer experience very, very fraud because nine times out of ten, what I've heard from people is they go to the bank with the power of attorney form and the bank says no, Like their first answer is just a routine No. I have not heard anybody who just walked in with the power of attorney and like they're like, yeah, sure, stamp, You're good to go. I had trouble. My significant other had trouble. Like everybody I know that I've interviewed and talked to about this has had a problem with it. One lawyer I talked to had to sue a bank to get them to accept her client's power of attorney that she had written her like she had done the documents herself. She's a qualified, you know, elder law at turning with a specialty in this. 00:40:44 Speaker 1: Lawsuit. I guess yeah. 00:40:45 Speaker 2: She's like, they're like, you're gonna have to file a lawsuit. She's like, I can do that. And they won, you know are They settled right after that because they knew she was serious. But this is where my whole journey turning this into a book really started is because I had written, you know, a column or two a out my mom and taking care of her, and then I wrote this this power of attorney article and it became like the most well read thing I've ever written in my life, and I've written a lot of articles, and so I knew that there was just this hunger and this frustration with the system and what we don't know. And if there are that many people out there googling power of attorney, you know, why aren't there more people filling out the stupid form? Because you know, I make everybody do it. I just did it when my daughter turned eighteen, because you know, she's going off to college. She needs a power of attorney. It took five minutes, you know, we downloaded it, we walked it over to the notary. You know, it cost four dollars for that part of it. It costs you know, under one hundred dollars for the It was power of attorney, healthcare proxy hip authorization and both in New York and the state where she's are in college, and you know, it was under one hundred dollars, you know, and now she can go away to school and I don't have to worry if you know, whatever happens to kids at school that they end up in you know, the hospital, that they won't call and not give me any information. 00:42:17 Speaker 1: Yeah, now that's helpful to know and to make that a priority. A few more questions I want to get to with you, Beth, including I want to talk about digital accounts and how to make sure we're taking the right steps on that. So we'll get to a few questions on that right after this, all right, we'll still talking about navigating these money conversations with your parents with my new friend Beth Pinsker. And that the the other thing that struck me that I this is like the one of the big things I took action on what in my own life reading your book and kind of digging into this was the kind of the digital account stuff and I hadn't set up some of that stuff, and I knew I needed to, but we need to help our parents do this. And one of the things that I don't know how I was oblivious to this, but the legacy contact your on your phone to set someone else up so they can get into your phone. And you've talked about how frustrating that can be for people if their loved one passes away or cannot open their phone and they can't get into They're trusted loved ones can't get into their phone. 00:43:28 Speaker 2: It's heartbreaking. But a lot of people go into this whole universe of care thinking that they can talk their way into anything, and it's just hubrius, Like, you can't talk your way into anything anymore. You cannot fake being another human being online anymore. There are stops in place, there's two factor, there's signature verification. You know, they're just you're gonna run into a brick wall at some time, and the very first brick wall you're likely to face is the phone screen with the pass code on it. And with your parents, it's especially frustrating because I hear from a lot of people and you know, they'll say, oh, I know my mom's past code, Well you know it today. My mom was really on the ball, but like she could do stuff to her phone and get it locked, and she had no idea what she had done. So you know your mom's phone code today, she might not know it tomorrow, she might do something change it whatever. You know, she talks to some technician on the phone and boom, you're locked out. If you do not have that phone, not only is it a nostalgia thing, because there might be pictures and you know, things that you want. You absolutely need that phone for two factor, because if you like, I tried to log onto my mom's bank account on her desktop and it wanted two factor for her phone, and so I, you know, took possession of her phone and it with me, and so whenever you know, I needed to get into something, I could two factor it and have it sent to my mom's phone. And after a while, when it was clear that she wasn't, you know, sort of coming back to anything anytime soon, I just changed over all of her accounts to my name and my phone number so that if anything needed to be too factored, it would go to me, and eventually I could let her phone go. I kept her phone open for a year after she died. I didn't know who was going to text, not knowing that she was dead. I didn't know what I was going to need to look up. I didn't know, you know, some random account was going to pop out of nowhere and I was going to have to get into it, and I was going to have to find something and need her phone. So I paid for phone service on her phone for a year, just to make sure that. 00:45:48 Speaker 1: That good thing cheap. 00:45:49 Speaker 2: Now. Yeah, so I you know the phone, You know, the person uses apps, they have texts, they have their phone contacts, they have you know you they're already logged in in some cases and you can just press the button you know, you just need to have access. 00:46:09 Speaker 1: To that is setting up the legacy contact, which you can do kind of in the settings that's on Apples at least, I'm sure Android. 00:46:16 Speaker 2: I have the instructions for the Android in the book too. Everything you know between the two universes has different names, but there is a way on all phones to name you know, a trusted contact or somebody who can present identification, and Apple spits out a QR code and you put that in with all your important documents, and if something happens to you, they scan the QR code and they authenticate themselves, and then they will give you access to the phone. 00:46:48 Speaker 1: What did caring for your mom teach you that you didn't or you couldn't have learned from being a financial planner helping other people? What? What about going through this process says like change the way you think about financial planning in general. 00:47:05 Speaker 2: The biggest thing that changed for me is that big question of what are we doing all of this for money? Like it seems like we spend a lot of time in our working lives like collecting money and collecting money and collecting money, and then we never figure out what we're going to do with it. And for me, that has changed my whole philosophy of what I want to do with my life and how I want to live it and you know, very much more, not just live for today in some sort of hedonistic way. Because the first thing I did was write a book, you know, to try to help people, you know, like I felt the need to, you know, because I have this expertise, and I have the lived experience, and I have the ability to articulate it in a way that can grab attention. I felt I needed to put those things together to help people. So it's not just about going off and living on the beach and playing golf, like, it's about really living with purpose and intention and getting the most out of everything. Like I just want to experience things and get joy from them when I can, you know, and that's what money's for for me. 00:48:21 Speaker 1: Not so would your advice, I'm sorry, I would your advice change to others and to your kids then, even on how they think about money. Has it like elicited some conversations between between you and your kids. 00:48:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean we have, uh, you know a little bit like when my daughter was choosing colleges and she was worried about how much it was all going to cost, you know, and she lost both of her you know, all four grandparents are gone now, and so they all of them were educators, you know, and college for their grandkids was probably the you know, their goal in life was to make sure that the next generations got educated, right like, that's that's all of them. And so, you know, there was money for college suddenly, you know, when we were going to struggle without it, and she's like, but I don't want to spend that, you know, I don't feel worthy of that, and I'm like, no, absolutely, that is what it's for, you know, like you could do no greater You could give no greater joy to my mother than that her money helped her grandkids go to college. 00:49:36 Speaker 1: That's amazing, that's beautiful. The book is my mother's money. Beth, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I really appreciate it. 00:49:44 Speaker 2: Thank you.