Cameron Huddleston
I am sitting in my Home Office, in Kentucky. Richard Wexler In Kentucky, how's the weather in Kentucky in early December? Cameron Huddleston Yes. We've actually had some snow, which is a little bit unusual for us. It's not usually warm this time of year, but usually we don't get snow so. Richard Wexler And here we go. We've had a little bit of a mixture here, but I wouldn't call it real snow yet, but it's probably coming but. Great subject this morning- talking about aging adults, talking about their adult children, talking about finances. So why is it important for adult children to talk with their parents about the parents finances? Cameron Huddleston Well, I think that you and I are perfect examples of why because we both unexpectedly found ourselves in the role of caregiver. Caregiving can be expensive, both for the person who is providing the care and for the person who is receiving the care. Because if you need care and your family members cannot provide full time care for you, it can be incredibly expensive. Most people really don't have a plan for this. They don't have a plan for a long term care. They think "well, it's not going to happen to me", but there's a good chance, it will. There's a good chance that your parents are going to need long term care at some point. Research has found that those who are 65 and older, half of those people, more than half, will need some sort of long term care. It can cost, we're talking $5,000-6,000 a month, on average, for home healthcare or assisted living. If you need skilled nursing, it's twice as much and that's just, that's just the average. If you are in a place where the cost of living is higher, it's going to cost a lot more. Now, not everyone is going to need care, but most of us are going to have to get involved in our parents finances at some point. If they don't need care, they're going to die. It's a fact of life. Everyone dies. And so you're going to get involved with your parents finances and dealing with what is left behind and if you don't know what is there, if there's not something in writing, if there's not a will or a trust, then it's going to be incredibly difficult for you at a time when you are dealing with a loss of a parent and it just makes that difficult situation that much more difficult. And so that's why I think it's so important to have conversations with your parents about their finances to get an idea of what sort of estate planning documents they have, do they have a plan for long term care, where do they stand financially? How are things going? Getting this information, before you have to get involved, is going to help you have a plan to deal with those emergencies that will arise. Richard Wexler You know, this is golden information, folks that are listening to this, Cameron's talking about how she wound up in this situation. My family wound up in this situation. We talk about how it's really hard, emotionally and physically once when an older loved one needs care, and most people aren't going to get 4 like I did, and most people aren't going to have a 14 year journey like I did, but the other piece of that is it's so hard financially. We talk about this little tiny word care, and we talk about this little tiny word cost, you know, before I ask you another question, I'm older than you are. And the generation that I came from, it was really common where no information passed between the children and mom and dad, the adults, there was almost like this brick wall. You would never go and ask Dad about his finances. The generation I came from, Mom usually didn't work. She was home, so you would never go to Dad and ask "OK, so Dad, would the house cost? The mortgage. How are we doing?" I mean those those conversations really never took place. But times have changed. Are the parents finances really any of the kids business these days? Cameron Huddleston That's a great question because I think a lot of adult older adults might think, "no, my finances are not my kids business", and I get it 100% because my parents were part of the silent generation. And that, that name for that generation is so accurate, because they certainly didn't want to talk about money. My dad, more so than my mom. My dad truly considered money to be a taboo topic. My sister and I were raised to believe that you don't talk about money. It's impolite. So of course he didn't share details about his finances. My mother was more forthcoming, and I do remember after my parents got divorced and I was in college when this happened, my mother told me "you need to ask your dad what his final wishes are like, what does he want? Because he'll always joke if you ask him. What do you want? Sharpen my toes and hammer me into the ground." Richard Wexler Whoa. I have never heard that, in all the people I've talked to, I've never heard that one before. Go ahead. Cameron Huddleston So apparently that was like my dad's line. You know, if someone were to ask him, or if my mom tried to ask him when they were married. And the thing is, I was in my early 20s when I had that conversation with my mom, and I thought, well, I don't need to have this conversation with my dad now, and I didn't. My dad died at 61. I was 28. And guess what, it gets better. He was in a second marriage. He didn't have a will, and he was an attorney, so he should have known better. And I can't help but think maybe if I had, I don't know, had the nerve or just even like maybe if I just even thought to ask him, like my mom suggested, that I do, if I asked him, "dad. You know what? Do you have a will. What are your wishes so that we can honor them?" If I had asked that question, maybe he would have been prompted to say, "yeah, I think I need to put this writing. I'm an attorney. This is what I tell my clients to do all the time..." But he didn't. And then, of course because he's in a second marriage, it made things awkward. It could have been a lot worse because my family got along, but if you don't have family members who get along, or of course if there's a lot of money involved, people get greedy really fast and there can be a lot of fighting. I think a lot of times people don't want to think about their own mortality, and they don't think that their kids need to know about their finances. But if you approach it from a place of love and compassion, telling your parents "Look, you worked hard all your life to save money, to have a secure retirement, to take care of us when we were growing up. And I want to be able to repay that generosity that you showed us, me, my siblings. And to do that I need some information. I want to be able to to honor your wishes, but I need to know those wishes if something happens and for whatever reason, you're not able to manage your finances on your own because of a health issue, or anything. I need to know how you would like your finances managed. I don't want to make a mistake with your money, and I think the point that you're trying to make is I want to honor your wishes and I don't want to take away control from you. In fact, I'm trying to give you control. I want you to tell me exactly what you want so that I can follow through on those wishes. Richard Wexler And that's fantastic and that's excellent advice, you know, and I talk to people, I'm not an expert in the financial industry like you are, but I talk to people about this subject matter all the time and we talk about consequences of it. You've kind of talked about that a little bit, but I mean, if you don't have this conversation, what potential consequences are out there maybe for the older loved ones, maybe for the adult children? Could you talk about that. Cameron Huddleston Sure. So let me give you a good example from my book. I interviewed a man named Doug Nordman, and his father lived in Colorado, and Doug was in Hawaii. While Doug was visiting his dad once, he noticed that there were perhaps some potential early warning signs of memory loss. Not enough to really scare him, but he did say something to his father about "Dad, have you named a power of attorney? Have you named someone to make financial decisions for you if you can't..." His Dad pretty much just brushed him off. No, whatever, don't worry about it, no, you don't need to worry about that. Well, Doug told me he wished he had pushed his father on that. "No, dad, let's talk about this." You know, he should have insisted that his dad make sure that document was in place, because then not too long after that, he gets a call, it's the middle of the night and his dad's in the emergency room. He has a bleeding ulcer. He has to fly from Hawaii to Colorado. His dad, he does have dementia at this point and it has progressed. They want to, after this surgery, move him into rehabilitation at a nursing home. The bills are coming in and Doug can't pay the bills because Doug was never named his dad's power of attorney. And so Doug ends up spending nine months and more than $10,000 going through the legal process, the court process to be named his dad's conservator. And then he has to go through background checks. I mean it's quite the process and the process of being named someone's conservator is essentially, putting your loved one on trial. To prove that you're no longer competent, you've got to get doctors there to testify. It's really a horrible situation for families. Once you're named conservator, then you're filing an annual report with the court on how you manage your loved ones finances. If his father had simply named him power of attorney, there wouldn't have been that $10,000 cost. Doug would not have given up nine months of his life trying to be named his Dad's conservator. He also wouldn't have had to file annual reports with the court with how he was managing his Dad's finances. As power of attorney, you don't have to file reports with anyone; of course you have a fiduciary responsibility to manage that person's finances in their best interest, but this could be avoided by having these conversations. Making sure your parents have essential legal documents in place to name someone they trust to make financial decisions for them if they can't. To name a healthcare proxy to make medical decisions for them. To make sure they have that will and/or that trust that spells out who gets what when they die, because if they don't, state law determines who gets your assets. And you also need an advanced directive or what's called a living will that spells out what sort of end of life medical treatment you do or do not want so that your family doesn't have to decide whether to keep you on life support, they know what your wishes are. And these conversations also allow you to have plans. When my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, we quickly scrambled to update her legal documents. She was still competent enough to sign them, she was in the very, very early stage. But I found myself having to play detective to get the information I needed about her finances. And that wasn't fun, you know, digging through her stuff because she was already forgetting things. We did not have a conversation about what sort of care she wanted before she needed that care, before she was already experiencing cognitive decline. So again, I was making a lot of decisions for her and I hated being in that position and I could have avoided that if I simply talked to her before there were any memory issues to figure out what her wishes were and how we would pay for care, making sure all those documents were updated, again before there was an emergency. Richard Wexler This is again amazing advice, folks. You know folks, we're almost 17 minutes into this conversation and I'm going to bring up that 4 letter word that I know you guys hate, called PLAN, and what Cameron's talking about is so important. I mean little simple things that aren't simple, and they're really bad when a parent, when something happens to them from a mental perspective, they get Alzheimer's, they get dementia, maybe they have a bad fall. The conversation you thought you'd have someday, as she's talking about, about their finances and care and what they want and where they want to live and who they want taking care of them- and all these questions that are really important and all of a sudden you can't have that conversation, because for all these different reasons they can't respond correctly. So it is so important, I bring this up on every conversation, we have to plan and really try to get the people that are listening and who you share this episode with and please do, to really understand how important that is. You know, Cameron, not all of us, but a lot of us have brothers and sisters. Should should the brothers and sisters be involved in the conversations as well? Cameron Huddleston Yes, they should, and I usually suggest that people talk with their siblings before talking to their parents, so that all of you can get on the same page. You can decide who's going to initiate the conversation. Is it one of you or all of you? When are you going to have the conversation? And please don't do it during the middle of a holiday meal, even though everyone might be there together at the table, there might be other people who don't need to be part of the conversation. So don't do it during a holiday meal. You and your siblings can also have a conversation about what role each of you is willing to play in your parents financial lives, in providing care if they need care- kind of come to an agreement before. Now, if you do have a sibling who's going to sabotage the conversation in any way, and I'm not talking about a sibling that you just don't necessarily get along with, I'm talking about someone that perhaps they have their own mental health issues, they have some sort of criminal history, they have substance abuse issues that would make it difficult to have a calm conversation with them. I say in those situations it's okay to use your best judgment if you think that they should not be involved. But other siblings, put aside your past grievances come together have this conversation so that you can go to mom and dad as a united group so that they don't see that you're fighting about this, that you're united and your wish is to help out mom and dad. Richard Wexler Wow and wow. I mean, I say wow a lot but this is great information. You know, you talk about don't have this conversation during a holiday dinner. Is there a good time, a better time to have this conversation with your parents? Cameron Huddleston Certainly, you want to do it at a time when you don't have to rush, when there's not the additional stress of the holidays. So let's say you and your siblings only come together during the holidays. What you could do is use that opportunity to let your parents know that you want to have a conversation at some point and let them decide on the time - "mom and dad when would be a good time for you to sit down and talk with us? We just want to have a conversation to get some information." Put the ball in their court, but but don't let them back out...No. We don't have... Yes, let's let's put a time on the calendar now. You know, put it in writing so that they can't, you know, worm their way out of it. And so then maybe it's not in person, if you can do it in a person that's great, but maybe it's over a FaceTime, or you know, a phone call. If you have to, and people need to realize this is not just one conversation, this is a series of conversations. Certainly if you have a parent who's starting to show some signs of cognitive decline, it's better to have the conversation in the morning when they're going to be more alert, don't wait until the end of the day. That's something you need to keep in mind too. If you have a parent who is living on their own, and perhaps the other parent has passed away, or divorced, and there is that cognitive decline. That's the one instance where you've got to get involved right away. Like you, you cannot let anymore time go by without starting to really get involved with their finances, because otherwise they're going to be making mistakes. They're risk of fraud and exploitation and you don't want that to happen. Richard Wexler Some fantastic advice. A lot of the questions I get, whether I'm speaking to someone online or I've done a lot of public events like you have and people ask me, OK, I get this idea of this conversation. Do you have any examples of the best way to start the conversation with your loved ones? Cameron Huddleston Sure, there are a variety of ways you can do it. So, if you're still relatively young and you're listening to this, and by relatively young, I mean 20s, 30s, maybe even early 40s, you can get away with going to your parents and asking for advice because that avoids the rule reversal, something like. "Hey, mom and dad, now that I have kids and I'm married, should I have life insurance?" Their response is going to give you clues to what sort of planning they've done, they might say yes, of course, you need life insurance, or they might say I don't know, I never bothered with it. And then you keep asking more questions or you ask them, hey, do I need a will or ask them about saving for retirement. Another thing that you can do is share a story. This works great if you are in midlife in your 40s or in your 50s because I I can guarantee that you know someone who's already had to get involved with their parents finances or care and so you can share a cautionary tale about something that went wrong with someone you know, because they didn't have these conversations, or something that went right. Perhaps a friend whose parent passed away and they had had these conversations. Their parent had all the estate planning documents in place, and it may have made a difficult time easier because there was a plan. So stories are a great way to start these conversations. You could talk about your own financial or state planning experience if you just happen to have a will, a power of attorney, healthcare power of attorney drafted, you could let your parents know that you've got these documents and where they're located. And then, oh, by the way, mom and dad, where are your estate planning documents? Need to know in case there's an emergency. It's not going to do anyone any good if we don't know where these documents are. So there are a couple different ways that you can have the conversation naturally. Richard Wexler And again, that's fantastic advice because that's a question that I get all the time. I don't know what percentage of people want to have this conversation. I wish it was 100% of people that have older loved ones, parents, grandparents, etc. But that's great advice on how to start the conversation. Let's say let's say the adult children want to have it. How much detail do they need to go in depth about their parents finances? What do they really need to know? Cameron Huddleston The more information you can get, the better. Of course, that's going to depend on how willing your parents are to share the details of their finances. At the least, you do need to find out do they have those essential estate planning documents:
Richard Wexler Again, folks, this is fantastic information that Cameron's been giving out and I really hope you're listening and really hope you pass this on to other folks in your life/ As we get ready to wrap this up, I do kind of have a final question. So what happens you go to your parents, you go to the grandparents, whomever you're trying to speak with and they just don't want to talk. Cameron Huddleston Don't give up. Richard Wexler Great advice. Cameron Huddleston Seriously, seriously, sometimes it can take several attempts to get your older loved one to start feeling comfort sharing information with you. I have a friend, she's actually a financial advisor, it took her years to get her mom to even admit that she had estate planning documents. But she didn't give up. She kept trying. Try different approaches. If you've tried several approaches, you've been at it for a few years now and they're unwilling to talk, again, ask them to write the information down. You could get a third party involved. Maybe that means reaching out to a family friend. Someone at their place of worship, or an unbiased third party if they have a financial advisor, you could reach out to the financial advisor and ask him or her to encourage your parents to share some information with you. Maybe it's even reaching out to their family doctor and asking their doctor to start, you know to say something about, hey, do you have a plan for long term care? Your kids know what your plan is? getting that third party involved can sometimes do the trick. Richard Wexler I totally, totally agree and just a lot of fantastic information. I mean, this is so important. Again, when we started talking about these little tiny words, cost and care. Care is going to happen to most of us. Some of us may be lucky, and it may be a few hours, others it may be years. And we know it's really expensive. And I don't foresee that changing in the near future. It's probably only going to get more expensive. So really, understanding what your parents have done, what they have, what they don't have, do you folks as the adult children need to contribute? We're seeing that more and more. Do your siblings need to contribute? These conversations are so important. As we do get ready to wrap up, Cameron is their contact information you would like to give out if people want to connect with you. Cameron Huddleston Sure, the best way to connect with me is to go to my website which is www.cameronhuddleston.com. Richard Wexler Perfect, that is fantastic And as always, folks, if you wanna connect with me, you'd like to be a guest, have a conversation on the podcast, you have comments, you have questions, the e-mail once again: [email protected]. So as I say on every episode, folks, until we meet again, have yourself an awesome day.
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