About to take over paying daily bills - any advice?

rasputin

My FIL has Alzheimer's and in the past six months has become increasing unreliable in paying bills. Thankfully, my wife has financial power of attorney - its not the help it claims to be but its something.

Anyway, we need to step in but want to find a way to maintain trust. My wife spoke to him about putting bills on automatic pay and he said he thought everything was in good standing and would get back to her. This is what he does when he gets confused about such matters - delays. Its understandable but not helpful.

I'm just seeking advice on how best to handle this. I'm somewhat inclined to put a couple of bills on autopay and go from there and see how he responds. He might not notice. He might notice and be confused.

I don't think there's a right answer but I always value the experience of others.

Thanks

Emily 123

Hi rasputin,

Autopay, but reminders should be routed to your wife.

Your FIL doesn't have much short term memory now, so there's no way for him to see a bill and remember he paid it. He may not even be able to initiate the bill paying because it requires too many steps to juggle, so he puts the bill aside. As well, he might assume that things are being done as they've always been done. For example, he's always paid his bills, and will now assume he's still doing so --because he doesn't have a memory of NOT paying the bill. So when you ask him about the late bills, he's puzzled, and means to follow up...but forgets to.

At this point it's usually helpful to completely take over behind the scenes and remove the visual triggers for the confusion. In this case, any paper or email billing reminders. All that will go to your wife now. Her contact info should become the backup for all his accounts (because of forgotten passwords). It's hard to do this at first, but at some point 'out of sight = out of mind', and your FIL will rely more on visual cueing because the disease has affected his ability to make a memory.

BassetHoundAnn

Your wife should also put freezes on her dad's credit records at the three major credit bureaus, Equifax, Transunion, and Experian.

My mom grew very susceptible to employees of her bank branch and stores to talking her into applying for credit cards she didn't need.

Elders are also easy victims of identity fraud. And that can be a huge mess for the family to straighten out. A scammer could phone your FIL, give him some bogus story about being from Medicare and get him to give out his Social Security number and date of birth and that's all they would need.

You should find out what credit and bank debit cards your FIL currently has. Pulling up his credit report at the agencies will tell you what cards he has. Elders get lots of calls from scammers trying to find out their credit card numbers. So you need a plan for how to deal with the cards. Perhaps remove them? Give him one card with a very small available credit limit? Take away the bank debit card because theft from his bank account will be much harder to deal with than theft from a credit card?

Your wife should have access to all the credit card statements and a way to monitor them, as well as monitor the bank accounts and other accounts with regular bills.

It's a big job. Your wife might tell her dad that she wants to help him simplify his life and she'll take over all the paperwork and mundane chores so he doesn't have to worry about things any longer. I used to show my mom her bank account statements and list all the bills paid every week, and that seemed to assure her that her business affairs were being attended to.

M1

It was a huge help for us to have a personal relationship with an executive at my partner's bank and for me to be a signatory on her checking account, in addition to holding power of attorney for her. You might see if he is willing to add your wife, it's a pretty easy process.

Smilinpj

This point is so hard, I remember and feel for you! At first, my parents said everything was 'fine.' Most things were already autopay, but then I found out they were paying high dollars for premium movie channels/cable. They watch 3 stations and prefer antenna! I don't know how long they paid that bill, but I got it stopped. Then when I was visiting I found an old bill that hadn't been paid (they are very private and suspicious of even me snooping!) and I asked them about it. My mom (w/Alheimer's) said she didn't have to pay that bill. No reason why, just that. I tried to reason, and that was when I realized we had gone too far and she just couldn't do or be trusted to do the bills. Luckily for me, (after a disastrous fall) they moved in with us and I was able to just stop giving them the bills. Funny, when I was still working I had a woman stopping in to 'visit' while I was out. Mom saw the bill for that and unbeknownst to me called the owner of that company and said they were a rip off and there was no way she was paying that bill!

mrsabaldwin

I just did it. This was years ago before I even had a DPOA. I was at her house and I assembled all her bills, sat down at her computer and started working on it. When I was done I showed her what I did and she was actually very grateful.

concerned_sister

Interesting topic, and relevant in our family as well. There is a distinct difference between "paying all the bills", and "managing the family budget". You definitely need to find the things the are unneccessary and cut them out. I was working with SIL this week as to what their monthly budget was. Though DB is turning things over to his wife, there are still hitches. We have a family phone plan, and I get the bill and pay it each month, and the siblings contribute the correct share for their family. When emailing about this today, SIL talked about having DB (PWD) set this up as an autopay. I went ahead and sent an email suggesting this is an opportunity for DB to show SIL how to set up autopay so that this is a skill she has in the future. We spoke on the phone for a few minutes. He's been turning things over, but at the same time doesn't want to feel he's being replaced in this role. I've gently reminded him of his difficult times, and that he needs her to be able to do everything so that nothing can fall thru the cracks. His mind knows this, but it's still difficult for his emotions to accept this.

H1235

My mom allowed me to come in and help with bills early on. I filled out the checks and she signed. Then I suggested paying online through her bank and she was ok with that. She would just give me the bills when I went to visit and I would bring them home and pay online. Eventually I found I wasn’t getting all the bills. I created online accounts for everything but then there was a change in insurance coverage and she never gave it to me. It wasn’t a bill, but it definitely should have been addressed. It made a lot of work for me. After moving in with my brother she has insisted she needs to look through all her mail and decide what I get. After a year of that and her refusal to let me deposit her income tax refund check, I changed the address to my house for everything. The only thing she gets now is junk mail. We will see how that goes. I hope she will just be happy going through junk mail but I don’t know.

So my warning is to be careful of the odd things your not expecting. Something that needs a signature, a change in coverage or a form that needs to be filled out for something.

Jackie_K

@rasputin We also just went through this, and I would agree with the others - just make the changes and don't indulge the delay tactics.

My mom has been pretty good about staying on top of her bills, but we've had a few situations where she's paid bills multiple times because she forgot that she already mailed a check. We also had a particularly nightmarish period where she was locking herself out of her online bank account daily and calling me as her on-call tech support to fix it! It was aggravating to call the bank, then have to dial her in because they needed her permission to let me re-set it, then have to explain to the bank why she was so confused… even worse was when they had to send security codes to her phone; she just doesn't get the concept and it turned into a whole thing every single time. These security protocols are definitely NOT made with PWD in mind, that is for sure!

It's taken some time to get into all of her accounts and get the POA on file where it's needed for me to access them, but now I'm just moving everything to autopay and listing my contact information so that she doesn't get distracted by any communications. When she was still receiving the bills and alerts, it was causing a ton of confusion, so definitely make sure you route all communication to you.

My mom did ask me to give her updates whenever I pay a bill, but I am just taking the route of answering questions whenever she has them. Outside of that truthfully, she just forgets about it.

@BassetHoundAnn, I never thought about putting a freeze on the credit report agencies, that is an excellent idea. My mom has fallen victim to scammers (I get SO livid every time I think about it) and this can be a huge liability (luckily, I already had the POA in place when this happened, and her credit card was really helpful with getting the charges reversed). There was one scammer who was harassing her for months but there was nothing we could do about it. It is disgusting that people take advantage in this way.

psg712

Whew, this is a tough one that touches almost all of us who care for LO with dementia. I had my mom's mail forwarded to my address after I saw in her band statement thst she had written 80 checks in one month! Most were to organizations who solicited by mail. She was very angry when she found out (from a mail carrier who didn't know what was going on), but I stood my ground. Unfortunately she still fell for a few phone scams, including one where she agreed to purchase $900 in Target gift cards and turn them over to some unknown person. Also several home warranty "renewals" that took months to get cancelled. Yes, it is scary and disgusting to think about how the elderly are marked for this kind of thing.

easy23

I put all the bills on paperless, autopay. My DH never noticed they were missing.

Stan2

I put all of our bills on autopay, my DW who was a bookkeeper all of her life and did all the financials for our home , our business and two other businesses will only occasionally ask about one bill or another and when I tell her it's autopay she says OK good.

She's happy and much less stress for me.

concerned_sister

Rasputin, re, "Anyway, we need to step in but want to find a way to maintain trust. My wife spoke to him about putting bills on automatic pay and he said he thought everything was in good standing and would get back to her." There was a line I used today with DB that seemed to work pretty well. "I realize this may feel early to you, but we can't do this when it's a week too late."

Today we continued the exercise of addressing the bills that were on autopay - but to a credit card. He was still able to identify the websites he used, though needed me to do phone calls as needed, or to make the changes on line where appropriate.

catminor

Hi Rasputin,

I understand your concern of maintaining trust. Likely, if your wife took the POA papers to your FIL bank and became co-signatory on the accounts, your FIL wouldn't even notice the difference. For what it's worth, my LO was strongly resistant initially, even though she actually asked me for help. About 3 months after I took over, she admitted she felt relieved. The trust came quickly when she saw everything was getting paid and was free from worrying about it anymore.

Here's the steps I took to effectively take over responsibility for my LO bills and finances:

1. Audited 1 year of bank account statements and made a notebook with all active bills by name, payment date. I then cross checked each one with the account Bill Pay to track due dates and whether it was a monthly, quarterly, or annual bill.
2. Added all existing online usernames & passwords that were already setup to the notebook tracker.
3. Went to the bank(s) with POA papers and got added as co-signatory and ordered paper checks sent to me.
4. Then I began cleaning it all up; updating each account mailing address, setting up usernames & passwords for bills that had been manual. The USPS address change did not catch everything; quite a few I had to call. A few I still have to track myself even now, because the address change didn't even get done. The notebook tracker saved me completely for those.
5. A year later, I literally just this week finally deleted accounts no longer needed on Bill Pay on the checking account.

There was a bunch of other steps, but you get the picture. Not gonna say it was easy; it stressed me out for a while. Hopefully your FIL finances aren't as complicated as my LO are.

It's a process. That notebook and the bank statements audit made it much easier for me to wrap my head around everything.

I hope you find an effective way to accomplish it for your FIL!

Warmly,

Cat