Financially scary

Preaching to the choir. This sort of thing happens on a smaller scale to a lot of people. The NYT did a piece a while back that suggested that poor financial decisions are often a first symptom of dementia.

Mom managed the monthly expenses for their day-to-day and both homes; dad managed the investments. He managed to day trade away $360K day trading before he forgot his passwords and eventually lost the ability to use tech of any kind. You don't get a do over. That loss meant a MCF vs extensive care for him and later for my mom.

I'm going to say the quiet part out loud. Dementia is expensive in all manner of ways. Day to day expensive. With Dad Buzzed, as he started to struggle with tech, he bought more laptops asserting the problem was "they don't make 'em like they used to". When I cleaned out his house in MD to stage it, I found 6 perfectly good practically unused, albeit out-of-day laptops bought 2007-2009. Joke's on me; a few months after he died in 2018 I was helping mom set up her financials and found 5 individual internet security suites on auto-renew ranging from $99 to $499/year. He bought a Ford Taurus for MSRP while my mom was in the hospital to surprise her on the way home. He fried the electrical harness on mom's vintage MGB jumping it. He bought random pay-per-view items while watching TV. One month he ordered Season Ticket for both NHL and NBA (neither a sport he ever watched), Guardians of the Galaxy and subscribed to Stingray Karaoke. I guess that's why they're call "parental controls". Earlier this year, I found a monthly charge on a Visa mom doesn't typically use. It turned out to be insurance on a flip phone dad bought in 2005.

HB