The journalist and author shares her personal story and gives practical tips for helping a parent through healthcare and financial challenges.
Our guest on the podcast today is Beth Pinsker. She’s a certified financial planner and the author of a new book called My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving. Beth is also a veteran financial journalist. She’s currently a financial planning columnist at MarketWatch and has also worked at Reuters, Fidelity, and Walletpop.com. Prior to covering personal finance, she was a film critic and entertainment business reporter, writing for Entertainment Weekly, The Dallas Morning News, and many other publications. Beth received her bachelor’s degree in English from Harvard.
My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving
“I Thought My Mom Had Done all the Right Estate Planning Before She Died, but I Missed Some Important Things,” by Beth Pinsker, marketwatch.com, July 29, 2023.
“How Much Long-Term-Care Insurance Do I Need?” by Beth Pinsker, marketwatch.com, June 25, 2024.
“5 Things I Learned From Managing My Mother’s Money,” by Beth Pinsker, aarp.org, Oct. 2, 2025.
“‘It Broke Me’: Everyone Says You Need Power of Attorney, but Nobody Tells You How Hard It Is to Use,” by Beth Pinsker, marketwatch.com, July 29, 2023.
“Many of Us Come to Estate Planning Too Late. Here’s What Finally Pushed Me to Do It,” by Beth Pinsker, marketwatch.com, June 15, 2025.
“My Relative, 80, Was About to Be Scammed Out of $40,000. Here’s How I Stopped It,” by Beth Pinsker, marketwatch.com, Aug. 6, 2025.
“What Should Be in Your ‘Death’ File,” by Beth Pinsker, reuters.com, Aug. 1, 2014.
(Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.)
Christine Benz: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.
Amy Arnott: And I’m Amy Arnott, portfolio strategist for Morningstar.
Benz: Our guest on the podcast today is Beth Pinsker. She’s a certified financial planner and the author of a new book called My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving. Beth is also a veteran financial journalist. She’s currently a financial planning columnist at MarketWatch and has also worked at Reuters, Fidelity, and Walletpop.com. Prior to covering personal finance, she was a film critic and entertainment business reporter, writing for Entertainment Weekly, The Dallas Morning News, and many other publications. Beth received her bachelor’s degree in English from Harvard.
Beth, welcome to The Long View.
Beth Pinsker: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Benz: Well, we’re glad to have you here. I have to say Amy and I both really enjoyed your book and got a lot out of it. So we’re excited to talk to you about it and talk about the main takeaways. But first, let’s talk about your mom because she seems like a really inspiring person. She’s passed away, but this is about your journey with her and the last part of her life. Maybe you can just set the stage and talk about the person that she was.
Pinsker: My mom was a teacher. So the first thing she would want is for this book to come out and to help people. And she was alive when I started to write about our journey together, taking care of her finances. And she would give me story ideas, and she would talk to me about all of these things because she knew that I was writing about them and that they would help other people. And that was really the way she rolled with her life. She was a high school teacher. She helped kids not just with their schoolwork, but she coached after-school programs. She made sure that the programs were accessible to kids of all income levels, even if they couldn’t afford the travel or, we did mock trial and speech and debate, and you were supposed to be dressed appropriately. And she was always finding sport coats for the boys and dresses for the girls so that they would look appropriate when they were out there in public representing the school.
Arnott: That’s great.
Pinsker: It wasn’t a very high-income area that we came from. So there was a lot of struggling back then.
Arnott: And it sounds like your mom was a very organized person and quite scrupulous about managing her finances before she became ill. Can you talk about that?
Pinsker: Yeah, my mom was really very organized on purpose. And I think most of it came from the fact that we got audited a lot. When I was growing up, we got audited three times by the IRS. And my mom was not only terrified of the IRS, but angry at them. She did not like this process, and she was determined to never miss a step with the paperwork. So my dad was a college professor and did a lot of writing on the side. So he had his main job and a side business. And she would take a home-office deduction for him and travel deductions and wherever he went for conferences and whatnot. And every year the dining room table would get full of folders and piles of receipts, and she would go through each one. And she never lost an audit, I will say that. And my father is probably responsible for me becoming a writer, but my mother is responsible for me going into personal finance writing for sure.
Benz: So what were the first indications that you needed to get more involved in your mom’s financial life? It sounds like it was around the time that she was having a big back surgery and dealing with a lot of other health conditions. So the financial red flags or yellow flags were kind of concurrent with a lot of health issues. Can you kind of talk about that unfolding?
Pinsker: She was in charge of her whole life. She was in charge of her whole entire building’s financial situation. She was the treasurer for her condo building. She was on the ball and on top of everything. And I had no concerns about anything in her life until she had this back surgery. And she called us up and she said, we got a date for the back surgery. Can you come help? I don’t know how long I’m going to be incapacitated. It was going to be a week in the hospital and two weeks of rehab. And when she had the surgery, it was a lot harder than that. And enough time went by that not just needing to be on top immediately and write checks and all that, but like a month had gone by bills needed to be paid. I had to figure out all of that stuff because she was too incapacitated at that point to focus on it. And so I couldn’t even ask her a lot of questions, like, how do you pay your electric bill? And how does it work with the building maintenance? Is that monthly? Is that quarterly? Do you write a check? I couldn’t ask any of those questions. So I had to go to her desk and search her mail and search her computer and her phone and write everything down and figure out the inflows and outflows of her life. And that’s not easy when you’re dealing with that, when you can’t ask any questions and there’s no road map. It’s really hard.
Benz: And one other dimension of this is that you have children. And so you were multitasking with work and your children and trying to help your mom with, it sounds like the support of your brother as well.
Pinsker: So my brother has kids. Everybody is busy. We both have schedules and things we have to do. And so we hopscotched each other a lot. I would go for a week and as soon as I would leave, he would go for a week. And then, we worked it out that way for a while. But yeah, I remember there was one moment I was trying to get out of her apartment to go to the hospital for the day. But Taylor Swift tickets were on sale, and I was stuck in a queue waiting to see if I was going to be able to buy tickets for my 14-year-old daughter, which for her, this was the most important thing in the world. And I called over to my mom at the hospital and I’m like, I’m going to get there as soon as I can, but I’m stuck in this queue. And she’s like, oh, no, Taylor Swift tickets are more important than being here. Don’t worry about it. So I finished up that task for my daughter, and then I went to the hospital. And then I worked from the cafeteria and came home and did billing paperwork. It was a very intense cycle of activity.
Benz: So there are so many lessons in the book. It seems like one of the key ones from this first experience with the back surgery is not to wait until you are in some sort of health crisis to do at least kind of a partial handoff on your finances or to get that backup plan in place. Would you say that’s the case?
Pinsker: Absolutely. I’m trying to do that now with other relatives and to make sure we don’t make the same sort of mistakes we made with my mom, which weren’t really mistakes, but more like miscalculations—they didn’t really harm anything, but they just made everything harder. And the whole point of my book is look at the hard things I had to do and see if you could make your life a little less hard and for the lives of your loved ones to be a little less hard. And if you leave a road map of where you have your bills paid and where the passwords are and how to do all of the stuff that you don’t think about every day, but you just do, then you make it easier for them to come in and pick up the pieces if something should go wrong. My mom thought she had done a lot of this stuff, and she had good intentions, and she got most of the way there, but she had this little check register where she would write down the passwords so that she would remember them. And, when I would ask her, do you remember what your password is for the cable account? She would say, oh, it’s in the check register in my desk. And I would go to the check register in her desk, and it would just be squiggles to me. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. And I would go back to her, and I would say, “Can you read this for me?” And she couldn’t either at that point.
And so then you have to start jerry-rigging things. You go to the account, you say I want to reset my password. It sends a code to my mom’s phone. I’ve got to have my mom’s phone to reset the password and create a new list. It’s just heavy lifting. And if you can make that easier for somebody by being thoughtful about how you manage your affairs and how you leave things in order, that can really help. I wrote a story once called “What Should Be In Your Death File‚” or something like that. And this guy had gone to his dad’s house after he died and was expecting to find a huge mess and just like was so overwhelmed by the task. And he went to his dad’s computer and on the desktop in a Microsoft file, little icon, there was one called “Death.” And that was his death file. And he double-clicked it, and everything he needed was in that file. And he’s just like, thank goodness that he put this together for me. And right away he was like, “I need my mom to do this too before it’s too late.” Like we should all have some kind of death folder no matter how old we are.
Arnott: So what kinds of things would go in there?
Pinsker: If you’re married, you need your marriage certificate. If you’re a veteran, you need your VA discharge papers. You need a birth certificate. You need Social Security information. You need where all your bank accounts are. And even if you don’t have those things in like a computer folder, they can be in a physical folder. My estate folder with all of my information is in a little carry bag that the estate planner gave me. And I just have that on a bookshelf. And I’m like, all the important things are in here. I tuck everything in there. And if something should happen to me, somebody just has to go and lift that off the bookshelf and they’ll have a road map to everything that they need. So you have to point people in the direction where you keep things.
Benz: You had to do some detective work to get up to speed on your mom’s financial affairs. When you did that, you found that there were some warning signs that your mom had previously been incredibly detail oriented, but there were some things slipping. Can you talk about that?
Pinsker: The first night I went to go through her mail, I saw past-due notices, and they were for her long-term-care insurance and I thought that’s a big problem. She had been on claim, which means when you go on claim in long-term care, you’re not paying premiums anymore. They’re paying you, basically. They’re covering your long-term-care expenses—my mom had private aids, and they were covering part of the cost of that. But my mom had been feeling ill even before her surgery but hadn’t told anybody. And she had fallen behind on filing the paperwork for the aids that she had. And when you slip on that for 90 days, they pull your claim, and you go off claim and have your premiums due again. So she owed $5,000 or $6,000 to them and they would have cut her off if she didn’t pay that money. And that seemed like a big deal to me. That’s when you get on the phone, and I had to Federal Express them a check the next day from my own account because I didn’t have access yet at that point to her accounts. And so then all of a sudden, I’m paying, $5,000 or $6,000 out of my account, not sure, but pretty sure that I was going to get it back, but not completely sure. And then I had to start going through and compiling three or four months worth of paperwork of the charges that the aids had racked up and all their claims need to be recertified. They had to file new W-9s, I had to get a new certification from the doctor that she was disabled. And it was just, it was so much paperwork.
I mean, I literally cried every day. I couldn’t fill out this paperwork. And no wonder she couldn’t do it. If you’re not feeling well, it involved organizing paper statements, you had to write in little boxes, all the hours of the aids, and then you had to have a copy of the process check from the bank account, which involved cutting and pasting them onto new pieces of paper so they were organized by caregiver. And it was intense. And no wonder she didn’t want to do it. But what that did was create a past-due situation and that needed to be solved immediately. And once we solved it, they sent us the money back. But we had to FedEx it to them and then they regular mailed it back. The whole system is just ridiculous. But that was a big warning sign that something hadn’t been going right in the first place before her surgery. And then she had the surgery and things just kept going wrong and wrong after that. And the more we went down the rabbit hole, the crazier things got.
Arnott: Well, we have some more questions about long-term care. But before that, Beth, I wanted to ask, it seems like anyone in your situation is trying to strike a balance where you want to help your parent or other loved one maintain their independence for as long as possible. And, also recognizing that some of these financial management tasks are a good exercise for your brain. And at the same time, you want to make sure that they don’t run into big, scary problems. So do you have any advice on how people strike the right balance there?
Pinsker: It can be hard. It’s sort of like the old dilemma of when do you take the car keys away? So it’s a hard emotional thing. And with the bills, the first thing with something like the life insurance or the long-term-care insurance, you can be what’s called a trusted contact. And when you put a trusted contact on those accounts, if you get past-due notices, they send a duplicate past-due notice to whoever it is that you’ve identified. When my mom got those past-due notices, my brother also got one. And he’s like, “Hey, don’t we have to get on top of this?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’m on it. Don’t worry.” I just got a notice from my long-term-care insurance that I need to update my trusted contact because my trusted contact is my mother. And that wouldn’t work out so well with me if something happened because she’s no longer there. So you’ve got to keep on top of these things.
You can do that for a brokerage account. And then if your elderly mother calls up her broker at Schwab or Fidelity or Vanguard and says, “I want to take out $5,000 and put it in gift cards.” They can say, “Maybe we should call your trusted contact before we put through that transaction and alert them that you’re making a large withdrawal, and trying to put it in a denomination that’s very familiar in scams.” And they’re trained on their end at the brokerage firms to look for that sort of cognitive decline or potential elder abuse. And they can flag the trusted contact if they see something that’s amiss. When you’re talking about bills and other things, this is where the power of attorney comes in really handy. You can be power of attorney on somebody’s account and just get it set up that way, even if you don’t need it right away. So we’re trying to do this now with other relatives.
Just get it in place so that when the time comes, you have access, and you don’t have to worry about it. Power of attorney doesn’t really give the other person, the person who is the power of attorney, doesn’t really mean they have to do anything. It just means they’re able to do something if it’s needed. And so it’s a helpful thing to have on file. And if you go ahead and do that, then it’s in place for when you need it. It works for my purposes. In my estimation, it works better than having somebody to be joint on the account, which most people default to. It’s like, oh, mom’s getting old. Somebody should be joint on her account. That causes some problems that a lot of people don’t think about. One is those assets in your parents’ accounts count toward your assets. So I’m in the middle of college for my kids, and I have to fill out financial aid forms all the time. And if I was joint on a parent’s account, I would have to count those as my assets. And I was never really sure what my mom was going to have in those accounts. So I didn’t really want to do that step. If you’re getting divorced and you’re splitting up assets. If you have creditors, all of those things can be complicated when you’re joint on somebody else’s account. And the other thing is, if you have siblings and only one of you is a joint signer on your parent’s account, there can be hard feelings with the other siblings.
With power of attorney, there’s a fiduciary duty. There’s oversight. And you can hold that power of attorney to account for what they’ve done. If you’re a joint signer, you have free access to the account. You can take money in and out at will. And if there are siblings involved and there are bad feelings, that can be a big family problem.
Benz: Yeah, those are all good points. So you want to be an authorized user potentially on the everyday bills so you can pay bills for your loved one. A trusted person for financial accounts. It’s debatable whether you want to be a joint signer. I was a joint signer for my parents, and it worked out fine, but it does seem like the family dynamics are important there. Let’s talk about power of attorney, which your mom had gone ahead and drafted that documentation. But when push came to shove, it sounds like it was a little bit touch and go in terms of your ability to actually use that power of attorney. So can you talk about that?
Pinsker: Yeah, power of attorney is, it sounds great. You really need it. I think it’s the most important document that you need in your arsenal as an adult human being, but it’s really hard to use at a bank. I found it easier to use power of attorney in any relationship where my mom was the one who owed the money to the other person. The credit card companies, anything she was paying a bill to was happy to accept money from anybody. They didn’t really care. But the banks and the brokerages and anywhere where they were holding money and they were worried about you taking it when you shouldn’t, they’re really sticklers for their own paperwork, for certified paper. They really want to be sure that you’re supposed to be on the account and that you have the person’s authorization. And they generally want to see that person come in and say affirmatively, in person, as a well human being, that yes, they authorized you to be on the account.
It was too late for us. My mom was already sick at that point. She was in the hospital. She couldn’t walk. So I went to the hospital with these forms that I knew were legal and good. And I went to the bank with these forms, and they said, no, they just shook their heads at me. And it was this whole long saga of me standing there saying, you have to take these forms and them shaking their heads. We just went back and forth. And I think a lot of people give up. And what I was trying to do with that part of the book was to tell people that you have to know your rights, so you know when to stand your ground. And if you know your rights and you know that this is legal and this is how you need to proceed, then you will find your way to the answer. I was able to get power of attorney at the bank for my mother. It just was crushingly the heart. It took a lot of sitting there making appointments, sitting through hours of appointments. But I think in total it was like six hours of sitting opposite this woman at this desk over the course of two or three times.
And we finally got it done. But that’s still less than it would be if I didn’t have the documents, which I would have had to go to court. That would have cost about $18,000 is the going rate now to go to probate court to get power of attorney enforced at a bank without power of attorney, like to be legally named as the guardian for my mother would have taken $18,000 in legal fees and probably six months to a year of time. My mom didn’t have that much time. She would have been gone by that point. So, we’re lucky that she had that document.
Benz: Well, that was one thing I really liked about the book, Beth, was that you delve into aspects of being a financial caregiver that weren’t your family’s experience. So you delved into the specifics of conservatorship and guardianship. You didn’t just stick with your own situation. I wanted to ask a process question. The book is so detailed about your specific experiences as you were trying to help with various healthcare and financial matters. Were you taking notes or journaling or something to keep track of everything that was going on?
Pinsker: I keep a journal. I was writing about this stuff—my day job is as a retirement columnist at MarketWatch. And so I was writing about some of this stuff while it was happening. And so I had the notes from those times, but really, I’ve just been trained as a reporter my whole life. I just remember stuff, but you have to keep notes while you’re doing this stuff anyway. All of it has to be documented. All of the financial stuff, you have to keep really good records and I have folders and folders and folders of this stuff. But really, it came down to for me just being really engaged in it. I just threw myself into the management of this because I was trying to do what my mother would have done for herself. And I took that very seriously, out of respect for her, out of respect for the way that she lived her life and was very careful and thoughtful about things. And I wanted to step into her shoes, not just to get the job done, but to do it the way that she would have done it for herself.
Benz: Yeah, it was quite moving to me in that respect. It sounded like it was just a terrible time for you. But it was obvious that you were honoring her with your actions and with your diligence on all of these different matters. I wanted to go back to this idea of scams, which you mentioned earlier, and we know that a lot of older adults can fall into scams—not just older adults, people can fall into scams. So if we’re talking to older adults in our lives about how to protect themselves or any red flags when they’re dealing with various entities, are there a top few that you can tick off that we can share with older adults to say, OK, if someone says this, it’s time to get off the phone or whatever the case might be?
Pinsker: Yeah, if they ask for weird payment of any kind, nothing you do should have to involve a gift card, a prepaid debit card, crypto, or cash. Those are just like absolutely, no, hang up the phone. My mom gave differently, though. When I went to start to go through her papers, she was giving to every politician in the country. I swear to God, whatever email she got soliciting her for political money—and she was liberal, so they were all Democrats—but anybody who asked her for money, she gave it to them and she just was supporting so many politicians, which is lovely. But it gets out of control. And, when you start to look at the amount of money that she was giving. And another person I talked to who was a gerontologist, who studies this stuff for a living and is an expert in scams and elder fraud, went to her dad’s place to help him. And found that he had stacks and stacks of calendars from the different charities he was giving to.
So some of this is not nefarious at all. It’s not somebody trying to bilk a parent, an elderly person out of money, but you get on a list, and you keep getting solicited. And if the person has any sort of cognitive decline, they’re not going to have a measure for how much they’ve given away or how many causes they’ve given to. Whereas in their earlier days, they might have said, “OK, I gave to three politicians. It’s not very effective for me to give to 27.” They’re just going to keep doing it because they’re going to have forgotten or lost track of how much they’ve already given. And some people will give to anybody who asks them without even thinking about it. My mother also was prone to giving gifts to the caregivers. So I would see checks written out for their hours. But then I would see just other checks written out. I was like, well, what’s this for? Why are you giving this caregiver $50? And why did you give the other caregiver $150, just on a whim? And some people get carried away with that. Some caregivers will take advantage and tens of thousands of dollars go out the window.
Benz: I was wondering, Beth, in a case of a relative who was recently scammed, the scammer was saying, don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell your brother or your grandson or whatever. Do you think that’s a red flag that older adults should take to heart as well if someone is saying to you, don’t tell anyone about this?
Pinsker: Absolutely. We just went through that in my family, too. Somebody was calling an elderly relative, and they said, don’t tell anybody. But his wife got a little freaked out and called her son who called me. And we got the whole thing shut down. But yeah, secrecy is a big part of this. There’s a lot of shame involved also. And one of the things about being power of attorney or being on the account is you can just keep an eye on things. You don’t have to talk to them about it. If you have power of attorney and you have digital access to their bank accounts, you can look at the statements every once in a while. Do a spot check the way you would with a young adult who’s first learning how to use a credit card. I have my young adults as authorized users on my credit card. I can see what they’re spending and when somebody gets older and starts to have some cognitive decline or some other concerns, you might want to just keep a spot check on things. Just every once in a while, look at those statements and see what they’re spending their money on and ask questions if you have to. But at some point somebody in the book was talking about this, and like, you need boots on the ground at some point, like they’re not always going to tell you the truth, they might be keeping secrets. You got to look at some point.
Arnott: We’ve also seen data suggesting that most financial fraud involving older adults is perpetrated by close family members. What are some of the best practices for protecting against that type of risk?
Pinsker: I think oversight is a good one for that too. Power of attorney, as I said before, there’s a fiduciary duty to it. There’s accountability with it. And so if you have two siblings, or multiple siblings, or an aunt or an uncle, whoever it is who jumps in, they can take that power of attorney to court and get them removed, or the person who has authorized them can get them removed. There are some checks and balances there. If you just have free reign in somebody’s account, then you’re counting on their goodwill and not everybody’s a good person. And so you have to be cautious about who you trust. There’s a lot of families where there’s substance abuse or mental health issues. And that’s where trusts can come in really handy because trusts will lock down the assets and parameters on who can take the money and when and who’s in charge of who can take the money and when. And that can be really helpful in situations. I know I suggested once a while ago for a letter writer into MarketWatch that one sibling was trying to close off access to their mom’s funds for another sibling. And the mom actually wanted to close off that access too but didn’t have the heart to say no to the other sibling.
And anytime that sibling would ask for something, she would just end up giving it to them. And I suggested a trust in that situation. If the mother put the money in the trust, then the trustee would be responsible for saying yes or no. And the mother could say to the child who wanted money, I put the money in the trust for you. It’s set aside for you, but you have to go through this gatekeeper in order to get it. And that gatekeeper is not me. And that takes the responsibility off of the elderly mother’s shoulders from having to say no to their child, which they didn’t want to do. And trusts in those circumstances can be really helpful because they can put legal parameters on the distribution of funds.
Benz: This seems like a good juncture to talk about the role of professional fiduciaries. You were a trusted adult child, but not everyone has that person at their disposal. So can you talk about some of the professionals that someone might bring to bear on their own financial plans if they do need someone to look over their financial affairs as they age?
Pinsker: This is a booming business right now. There are so many older people and 10,000 a day are turning 65. There’s the generation below them and the generation below them who don’t want to be saddled with any of these responsibilities because we’re all busy in our daily lives. You can basically pay for somebody to do a lot of these things, but not all of them. And I think that’s the important distinction is somebody close to the person who needs help, needs to be looking over things and needs to be legally authorized to make certain decisions. And you can’t outsource all of that. Like my mother, we could hire aides for my mother to bathe her and help her in the bathroom, but she wasn’t going to give any one of them her ATM card and send them to the ATM with her code to get cash for her. So I had to be the one able to authorize that sort of transaction. But you can hire bill-paying services. You can hire geriatric care managers. You can hire lawyers and attorneys like trust attorneys or estate attorneys. You can hire financial advisors. They have whole categories of people who step in after death to help settle the estate. There are people that help you with the emotional side of it. There are people that help you with the financial side of it. There are people that help you with both sides of it. You can basically get any sort of coaching and help that you want for this.
And my book has resources on it because there are just too many to list. But you want somebody who has some kind of certification. So for instance, if you wanted a financial advisor, it’s best if you go to somebody with a fiduciary designation like a CFP or a CFA who is bound to work in your best interest. Same with a tax advisor. They have certified death doulas who will help you through the death of a loved one. They have after-loss professionals who are certified to help you with the processing of an estate. There are certified bill managers that come with a certain level of security that you can trust that they’re not just going to walk away with all your parents’ money.
Arnott: What about people who are solo agers, people who don’t have a spouse or children? What kind of steps can they take to protect themselves as they age?
Pinsker: There are so many that type of person in the US right now. I think in the book, the number was 22 million. There are so many people that, first of all, they can help each other. But second of all, what you need to do in that circumstance, what I suggest in the book is to build a community of care around you and you need to be proactive and thoughtful about it. You need professionals, you need a financial manager, you need a lawyer, you need friends, somebody who’s going to be able to close out your connection to the grid of society when your time comes. And it’s hard to think about and a lot of people don’t like to think about it. It’s going to fall on somebody, whether you’re in a family situation or whether you’re on your own. So you have to think about who you want that person to be. And I think for a lot of single people who are solo-agers and don’t have a designated heir that they’re working with, they need to really think about it and put these thoughts down.
And for those people, a will and perhaps a trust are most important because if you want your assets to go to charity, for instance, the state is not going to do that for you. So if you do nothing and you just die, the state will either just take it if it’s unclaimed funds or they will go and search for an heir, but they won’t ever know that you really wanted your money to go to your church or the school you went to or your next-door neighbor’s son who was a good kid and mowed your lawn. They won’t know that. So you have to write that down somewhere legally in order to specify those kind of wishes. And when I talk to charitable organizations or estate lawyers, they say that single adults are among the most charitable because they really have to think about this stuff ahead of time.
Benz: So the book is mainly about financial caregiving, but being a healthcare advocate for your mom was intertwined with the financial help that you’re providing. What are some best practices for adult children who might find themselves in that role of serving as a healthcare advocate? What types of paperwork do you need? What other food for thought should people bear in mind as they are thinking about being a healthcare advocate?
Pinsker: The first thing I learned was that every medical decision was actually a financial decision. I thought, going into it, making medical decisions for my mom was all about, OK, does she need the second surgery? How much pain support should she get? That sort of thing. But all of those things, it all comes down to how Medicare counts things and how the billing goes. And it gets really complicated. And so the thing you need most is that person’s health insurance information, whether they’re on Medicare or if they’re younger than that, whatever medical insurance they do have. And you need a copy of the card. You need to know what kind of supplement plan they’re on, whether they’re on Medicare Advantage or whether they’re on a Medigap plan. You need to know what their drug coverage is. You need to know how those things get paid and when they get paid to make sure that nothing lapses. And you need to know your loved one’s health history.
My mom had this great cheat sheet, which is hard for me to say, but her cheat sheet was one page back and front that she kept folded up in her wallet. She gave it to the caregivers. She gave it to me. It had everything that a doctor would ask if she were incapacitated and needed care. And it was just so helpful to me. And I replicated that in the back of the book. It had her medications and her doses. It had every surgery she ever had in her entire life, going back to the 1950s. It had all her doctors’ names and addresses. And my mom had so many things wrong with her. She had literally a specialist for every body part that she had. And so there were a lot of doctors to coordinate. And that list just made it extremely helpful to me. And we were very efficient when we would go into a care setting, because I knew everything that she needed to say to the doctors. And that helped her get better care. There was a copy of her Medicare card attached. She had a one-page sheet where all of her identification was photocopied front and back.
And she just made that really easy. And so when it came time for the harder decisions, they were always trying to kick her out of whatever care situation she was in. So she is in the hospital, they wanted to move her to rehab. If she was in rehab, they wanted to move her home. And you have to know what your rights are in that situation too, just like at the bank. You have to know what you are entitled to so you can know what to fight for. And we had to fight a lot. We had to negotiate. We had to file appeals. We had to do all sorts of jumping through hoops in order to keep her where we thought she should be at that particular moment. And that all started with knowing what our rights were.
Arnott: I was surprised to read that even though your mom did have both Medicare and long-term-care insurance, you still had to go through all these battles to get her the care that she needed. What were some of the key issues that you had to deal with there?
Pinsker: I think the main one, I think a lot of caregivers go through this too, is having to humanize your loved one, your sick loved one, in that care setting. Because with older people especially, they just assume that they’re done. And they write them off. And my mom didn’t have dementia of any sort when she started this illness. She was fully super humanly intellectual. She was on the ball. But in the hospital setting, she appeared like a confused, frail, old person with dementia. And so they didn’t really see that was caused by her illness and by the medications interacting with each other. And there was this one time where she started to speak in Yiddish to the caregiver. And I flagged it for the doctor. I was like, she’s speaking Yiddish. I think something’s wrong. And they’re like, “Oh, no, people with cognitive decline, sometimes they switch to other languages.” And I’m like, “No, she doesn’t even speak Yiddish. She speaks a little bit of …” They didn’t want to hear it.
They didn’t want to hear that my father knew Yiddish, but my mother didn’t. And I’m like, no, seriously, something’s wrong. Well, there was something wrong. She had a sodium imbalance that was causing a cognitive problem. And once they figured it out, she was all mentally alert again. But they were just ready to be like, oh, no, she’s got dementia. What’s one of those things is you got to be there. You got to be there every day. You got to be there when the doctors come. You have to keep asserting your loved ones’ humanness to them. I kept showing them pictures of her when she was younger. Even pictures of her like six months or two months before the surgery of her walking around and joking and talking. And I’m like, this is my mom. This is what she was six weeks ago. We want that person back.
Benz: That’s such a good piece of advice, Beth. I wanted to follow up on the whole long-term-care thing. Your mom had long-term-care insurance. It sounds like you have long-term-care insurance. Do you feel like in hindsight, despite all the paperwork and the battling, that was a good decision for her to have long-term-care insurance?
Pinsker: I think it was a great decision for her to have long-term-care insurance. And in the book, I go through the exact math of it. Because I think for most people, most people are looking for a return on investment on long-term-care insurance in a way that you really can’t get that out of insurance. The best kind of insurance is insurance you never need. Like you don’t want your house to burn down. And at the end of living in your house, you’re not really disappointed that your house never burned down and you never had to use your insurance. But for some reason, people are upset at the end of long-term-care insurance if they never used it. And I just find that a little odd because that means you had a better outcome. Long-term-care insurance is for sick people. And if you have to use it, it’s not great because you’re sick. And so you’re better off having long-term-care insurance and never using it.
But for some reason, people want a return on investment on it. My mom got out of it more than she put in, but only because she died young. She was only 76 and her illness went pretty fast. And if she had paid in longer because she was healthy and she was still paying premiums, that math might not have worked out the same way. But the key thing about the long-term-care insurance for me as a caregiver was that it made my mom feel like she was financially able to have the help she needed in the house, which meant that I didn’t have to go and be that help for her. So the key for us was she couldn’t even get to the mailbox in the lobby of her building to get the mail on some days. And she’s like, OK, I need some help. And so she started with a part-time aid, a couple hours a day. And she only allowed herself to do that because the long-term-care insurance would cover it. And for me, that was relieving because one, she wasn’t going to go broke that way. But two, that she had help and she needed help. And she felt confident that she could afford it and go ahead and get it. And that probably prevented her from falling or burning herself in the kitchen or not eating right because she couldn’t get out to the supermarket to get nutritious food.
So for me, that was the key part. In the end, we ended up getting quite a bit of money, but it still cost us a significant amount out of pocket because of the way that long-term-care insurance works. It only covers a certain amount per day, and we were paying more than that. So every day we were kind of in the hole on it. And secondly, it didn’t cover the private aids when my mom was in institutional care settings. So when my mom was in the hospital or she was in rehab being covered by Medicare, the long-term-care insurance wouldn’t cover the private aids that sat with her. And you might think, OK, that’s a little overkill. You don’t need private aids when you’re in the ICU. But if you’ve ever been in a hospital or any sort of nursing home and your loved one needs something and the nurse has seven other patients that they’re taking care of, you see the need really fast for having somebody sitting there next to your loved one. My mom couldn’t even lift her water bottle. And if she had to wait for a nurse to come, it would have been a disaster for her. So I was very grateful for those aids. They kept her going and kept her company and she was less scared. And she was just altogether more comfortable. And so whatever we paid for them, I’m glad for what we spent.
Arnott: The book makes it very clear that your whole journey with your mom was a very emotional ordeal and you did a huge amount of work to help her. And I’m curious if you found writing the book cathartic after going through that process?
Pinsker: Oh, definitely. It was a way to keep her with me for like a whole extra year and even more now that I’m constantly talking about it. But I wasn’t ready after she died to let her go, and doing the book was almost like talking to her because most of the book is just me and her. This was the stuff that the two of us experienced together and really nobody else experienced those things. My brother had his own relationship with her and his own time with her. But this time during her illness when I was helping her with these finances, that was just me and her. It was just us. And so it almost felt like a dialogue with her. And it was really great to experience that part of it with her also. I just kept her around a little bit longer.
Benz: How did working on the book change your attitudes about how you wish to age and how you want to interact with your kids as you age?
Pinsker: So much. I want to throw out everything in my house. Sometimes my boyfriend will buy something, and I’ll be like, somebody’s going to throw that out when we’re dead and we should just throw it out now. It drives me crazy. It’s like I want to get rid of everything. I look at every piece of paper as something that like, oh my God, somebody’s going to have to deal with this at some point. I don’t want it here. I’m just much more clean about everything, much more careful and thoughtful about all of it. And it’s also made me see that sometimes people save for a rainy day or save for their retirement. And we get a lot of letters from readers at MarketWatch who are having trouble spending. And both of my parents died when they were 76. My dad was five years older. So they died five years apart, but both were 76. And that’s young. And I’m way too close to that right now. And I think, hopefully I’ll live longer than that, but I want to enjoy my life now, I don’t want to wait for a rainy day. And I think that has changed a lot of my attitude. And it’s probably why I made the leap and wanted to write a book about this. I’m a journalist, we all want to write books. That’s sort of the pinnacle of what we’re all supposed to be doing, and I hadn’t done it yet. And, so it’s like, there’s no tomorrow. It’s today. And I’ve definitely been living my life a lot more like that now since I went through this experience with both of my parents. There’s life to be lived right now.
And I think that’s a lot of what we all should be focused on. But, the planning aspect of it is because I don’t want any of the hard things I have to do to be something my kids have to do for me. So I want to make their lives as easy as possible. And I want my life to be as easy as possible. And these things seem hard to do ahead of time, but they’re much easier to do ahead of time than they are to do after the fact. And so, if downloading a power of attorney form and getting it notarized takes me 25 minutes, it’s worth my time. Because that means that somebody doesn’t have to go to court if something happens to me. And I think that calculus is worth it. And I’m doing all of my stuff like that now. Like get it done now. Get it done. Take care of it. And just focus on having fun and enjoying the situation I’m in.
Arnott: You include a list of resources toward the end of the book. And you also have a bunch of quotes from different experts that you’ve interviewed throughout the book. But I’m curious if you had to narrow things down to a short list of writers or bloggers or podcasts that you think are especially helpful, what would those be?
Pinsker: My main thing is real people. I get inspired and I get information from the real things that people are going through. And I think other people can learn from those too. And, the information you get online, I would caution people to stay away from AI because these things are complicated and it’s easy to get messed up. They’ll tell you to do some tax thing and if it’s wrong, you’re in a rut there. But understanding what real people go through is what I want to do. I like to look at Instagram feeds of other caregivers, or other social media feeds of what people are going through. And I get inspiration from those.
Benz: Well, Beth, we have so enjoyed talking with you. Congratulations on the book. Thank you so much for being here.
Pinsker: Thank you.
Arnott: Thanks, Beth. We really enjoyed talking with you.
Benz: Thank you for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can follow me on social media at @Christine_Benz on X or Christine Benz on LinkedIn.
Arnott: And at Amy Arnott on LinkedIn.
Benz: George Castady is our engineer for the podcast and Kari Greczek produces the show notes each week.
Finally, we’d love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at TheLongView@Morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks for joining us.
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