FREE RESOURCE GUIDE: LINK

BETH PINSKER: EPISODE

BETH PINSKER: BOOK

TRANSCRIPT:

Colleen: Welcome back everybody we are excited to have Beth Pinsker on the show today welcome.

Beth: Hi nice to see you guys.

Colleen:  Well it’s so nice to

see you and as members of the Gen X Club and sandwich generation, Bridgett and I wish

we had gotten this book sooner because we both had and so many of our listeners

are going to say the same thing, that your book, My Mother’s Money, A Guide to

Financial Caregiving, so comprehensive, so many resources,

and it comes from your own personal experience, but your personal experience is a

story written over and over in most of our lives. So I guess my first question is,

you started the book, you divide the book up. Getting started is your

first section. What is, if you had to say to somebody who is just starting this

journey, a family member has become ill or, you know, going into surgery like your

mom, what would be the first thing you suggest that they do?

Beth: Well, I suggest that beforehand, you can’t really do anything at all to help anybody

unless you have the power of attorney and the health care proxy. And you will just

hit a brick wall if you don’t have those things. So my message in telling my story

is to get people to wake up to that fact before something bad happens. So my mom

had surgery and she was still cognizant afterwards. But she wasn’t in the mood to

  like, get up out of her hospital bed and go sign off on

paper somewhere. So we had to have all those documents ahead of time.

And it’s a good thing that we did, or we would have been very, very stuck. But my

message is to all the women out there and men also. My message is to the doers,

you know, the people in your family who do stuff, the people who assign the dishes

at Thanksgiving dinner and decide where you’re going to have the family reunion and,

you know, get everybody together and know everybody’s birthday. Those people. Those

are the ones that I’m talking to. Those are the people who are going to get called in an emergency.

Because you can trust them. They’re the people who do stuff. And so if you are

going to be the person who’s going to be called an emergency, it’s kind of on you

to reach out to everybody who you might have to take care of and say,

hey,” I can’t help you if I don’t have these things. It’s come to my attention in

the world by reading this book or by watching TV or whatever that I may have to

take care of you someday and I don’t have a power of attorney or a health care

proxy for you, in which case my life will be hell. And if you want to make my

life not be hell, and want me to be there for you to help you fill out this silly

little piece of paper and get it signed so that I can move on with my life.”

Bridgett:  Yeah. I’m looking at you, Colleen, because you’re a doer. And I mean, you know,

reading your book, so many of things that you went through. I

was just like getting almost anxious. And you are a Certified Financial Planner.

You know a lot more than your average person when it comes to this. And your

mother sounds like she was very organized as well. Yet you still had to jump

through all these hoops.

Beth: Yes. As my kids will tell you, I once packed for a

vacation with two left flip -flops and then tried to wear them on both feet,

so even the smartest people are kind of idiots about some things and

even the people who have the most book learning don’t know how to do things in

real life and this is one of those things where you can understand the mechanics of

Medicare and the Social Security System and I can quote to you the Trustees Report

of the Social Security Administration but when it comes to actually doing these

things, the functionality of doing them, it’s really hard. And you might have a big

picture discussion with your parents. What do you want? Do you have enough money?

But as I found with my mom, you know, I had never asked her and who would. How

do you pay your electric bill? Is it electronic or automatic? Like we didn’t have

that talk, but it came down to me needing to know that information really, really

quickly and at a time when she couldn’t answer. And so I had to figure it out for

myself. And those are the things that I banged my head up against, just normal,

practical, everyday things that you have to take care of for somebody else. They’re

really hard. It’s a lot of work.

Bridgett: another thing I was so surprised when I read your book, but then I actually knew this because my husband’s kind of going through this right now with his father, was just because you have a power attorney doesn’t mean you’re going to get into that checking account. Can you tell

them how that all works?

Beth: People think, I mean, I thought this too.

I thought that you had that like it was so important to have that piece of paper

and it really, really is. You really need that piece of paper properly drawn up and

signed the right way. But people think it’s like a golden ticket. Like you hold it

up in the air and you wave it around and you’re like, “I Am the Power of Attorney.

No, no. The Power of Attorney is literally a piece of paper until you take it

somewhere and do what is called get it enforced. You need to take it and get it

activated at the financial institutions. And what I found is that any institution

that my mother paid, like that she owed money to, was very happy to deal with

anybody in the universe who wanted to pay the bills. But any place where she kept

her money and you wanted or needed access to it to manage things for her, they

were like a brick wall. They wanted their own forms. They, in particular, banks in

particular, often want the person who is the primary person to come in person.

The whole point of having those documents is that you have them for emergencies when

that person can’t be there. And so, it’s sort of at counter purposes with the whole

notion that you have an assigned Power of Attorney. If you have to go with

them in person, how is that functional to a human being who’s got a sick parent?

You know, It doesn’t make any sense. It’s mind -boggling. My boyfriend got jammed up

trying to be his parents’ Power of Attorney because he was mailing off the documents

as required. And one of the institutions wanted the original.

Well, he’s got six different institutions he’s working with. How is he supposed to

mail originals to each of them? Then it got rejected after he sent the originals

because everybody else accepted them, this one bank was relenting he sent the

originals and then they dinged it because the seal of the notary was not raised,

you could not feel bumps on it they’re just looking for anything to say no.

Colleen:  and you know you talk in the book about the different types of power of attorneys because people think, I get a power of attorney and I have control over everything, but

there’s one for medical, one for financial. And then what I thought was really

important for people to know is that if you don’t have that power of attorney and

your family member becomes incapacitated, then you have to look for a guardianship,

which is even more complicated. Can you talk about that?

Beth: So much more complicated.

If you do not have those documents or those documents are not valid, which happens

to a lot of people. You have it, but it’s old, or it’s for a different state. Or,

you know, you’re the third person mentioned it and everybody else above is dead and,

you know, it’s sketchy and the bank won’t take it. Or they named two people on the

form as Co -Powers of Attorney and one is dead and one isn’t. You know, like there

are all sorts of reasons why your documents might not be accepted. You have to go

to court. There is no other solution. The answer from the institutions will be no,

and it will be a hard no. It will be like, you know, Fort Knox, you can’t get in

kind of stuff. And you’re going to have to go to court, and that means hiring a

lawyer, and that means hearings and evidence, and you’re going to have to show up

at multiple hearings, and you’re going to be named, eventually named guardian.

It’s going to cost you maybe $20 ,000 in the end. But you’re going to have to keep

reporting into the court because once that guardianship process is started with a

person who’s incapacitated, it doesn’t end until they die. So you are on the hook

for receipts and follow -ups and all sorts of things for,

you know, the rest of that person’s time.

Bridgett:  And not to mention, in many cases, so many of us, we don’t live near that person.

I mean, we don’t live near my father -in -law. Colleen, for right now, isn’t living

near her mother. It’s very difficult to deal with these things just all over.

And then you don’t have quick access to this money when bills need to be paid.

Beth: Exactly. That’s what happened to me. I needed to pay a bill for my mom that was

$6 ,800 and it needed to be paid immediately and it needed to be FedExed out.

And I had not gone to the bank. This was three weeks into being a caregiver. She

had surgery and then she had complications and she was in the hospital for

longer than we thought. We thought she’d be like right back. You know, she had back

surgery. She’s 76. There was no reason why we would assume that this was a,

a bad deal. And, you know, I was sorting through her desk and there was

a past due insurance premium for her long -term care insurance, which is a really

big deal. And so I had to take that money out of my own account.

The average a caregiver spends out of pocket in a year is a little over $7 ,000

according to AARP. I was at that limit at,

I was at that, you know, that amount in one month, in three weeks, basically. I

had to put that money out of my own pocket. Now, it was, I figured it was

going to get reimbursed. It did eventually come back to me once we sorted out all

the paperwork, but it was three or four months later, you know, and it didn’t come

back FedEx. Exactly.

Colleen: You know, along those lines of what you were saying, I think it’s important. Some

of the statistics, you have so much in the book, but some of the statistics in the

book, you’re saying that 60 % of the 48 million caregivers work, which is important

to note. And like you said, the typical annual out of pocket is over 7 ,000.

And then you also talk about the fact that 14%, which is 37 million,

provide unpaid elder care.

This really provokes us to think about things that we hadn’t before. So along those lines

that,  a lot of us work, it’s important to create a care schedule, which

you don’t think ahead of time to do something like that.

Beth: No, no, you should see my spreadsheet. It’s, it’s the most obsessive.

I would almost like worry about myself, my past self, looking at the spreadsheet now

because I had four caregivers working 24 -7 shifts,

you know, like covering 24 -7, but they didn’t work steady hours. It wasn’t like

because they’re human beings. They’ve got stuff. So they

didn’t always work like 8 to 8, and then the next one works the overnight 8 to 8.

Like nothing in real life works out that way.

Bridgett:  we’re running into that as well with our father, my father -in

-law, he has Alzheimer’s, and he is now in a home. But that was a whole big thing.

Thankfully, when my husband previously was visiting, they went to the bank with him while he could

still go to the bank and did become a signature on his,

on his bank account. But he has had a lot of issues and we have to have people

sitting with him while he’s in the nursing home and boy does that add up!  You have great resources in the back of your book too and different things like reverse budgeting.

Beth: Yes. Reverse budgeting to see what you can afford because we

thought he had enough money for things. And that money’s going to be dwindling

really fast. I was surprised when my mom was sick. I was surprised that she needed

somebody to sit with her when she was in the hospital, even when she was in the

ICU. Like you would think, my vision of the ICU was just like constant hands -on

care like there’s somebody with you all the time and it wasn’t like that at all

and I was very very surprised by that. The care was completely

fine, it’s just not what I expected. Like we she was scared first of all and she

didn’t want to be alone and when you’re dealing with an older person who’s

scared like you what are you going to say to that? You know, like they need

some help. The second thing is, is my mom was so incapacitated from the surgeries

that she had that she couldn’t even ring the call button.

Her arm was swollen and she couldn’t ring the button. So, you have

somebody who’s scared and alone and can’t even ring the call button or lift a

glass to her mouth to get a drink of water. You can’t leave that kind of person

alone for five seconds. That’s like an infant that you can’t leave  unattended.

Colleen: Right, true. I wanted to follow, you know, the second and third parts of your book

are cost of care and how to make the money last. And I think for a lot of

people, that is the biggest issue that they face is they either,

very few, I don’t know how many, but I don’t think a lot of people have long -term

health care. So you’re getting a sick parent that does not have long -term health

care. So you can’t afford to have somebody because it’s very expensive to have

people. I mean, I know because we’re experiencing it now. Just getting,

for my mom, the approval for her long -term health care, which she has been paying

an exorbitant amount for decades, just to get approval took forever. So you’re having

these people who don’t have long -term health care. Then you’re getting into the

Medicare and the Medicaid. So many parts of your book break it down into

understandable and digestible pieces, which I think is really important for people who

are feeling overwhelmed. So if you have somebody that has a parent who is ill and they’re

going through their, because they may not have even gone through their documents to

know what they have, and they’re discovering that, okay, we don’t have long -term

health care. What would you suggest would be the first step for them?

Beth: The first step is to see how much money the parents, the parent, the person who’s sick, does have because that’s the money you want to spend first. It’s very hard to spend out of your own pocket. I mean, that $7 ,000 that people spend out of their pocket

is largely on incidentals. There are very few people who can afford to take on like

the full -time home health care of a loved one out of their own pocket unless

they’re significantly wealthy. That’s, that’s a hard cost. That’s going to

ruin your retirement. That’s what safety nets in the federal government are for. That’s why, you know, most of the cost of anybody in

nursing care in America is paid for by Medicaid. You want to spend your loved ones

assets down as far as you have to. They can go to zero. They can go,

you know, in some cases past zero.

You wanna spend down their money to zero and then you want to go to the federal

safety nets. So their money comes first and that’s why you want to take a look at

what they have. You want to try to preserve it for as long as possible, but their

money is their money. You want to spend it on them. You don’t want to like preserve

it too much, which is why the whole, I called my book My Mother’s Money because

there’s this line that you’re walking the entire time that you’re handling the money

where like, am I spending too much or am I spending too little? You know, like

you’re trying to walk right down the middle because you don’t want them to not have

something that they need and can afford, you know, only to have the money left over

after they die and you think there, you sit there and you think, oh, you know, why

do I have this money? I should have, you know, mom should have had an extra hour

of nursing care per week, you know, or whatever it is. So like, your emotions are

all mixed up in it the entire time. It’s impossible to separate it. And this is

where good family communication needs to come into play. You need to know

what your parent or your loved one wants. You need to know what they’re expecting.

Not everybody has great relationships.

You know, like family dynamics are hard. You need to be on board, you know, with

the siblings, with the aunts and uncles. Like everybody needs to be on the same

page or at least tolerate the same page. Like, even if you’re not fully on board,

like, you have to be able to fall somewhere in the range of, I can live with

this.

Bridgett: Yes, it’s, it’s so dynamics are so hard. And you have your brother.

And it sounds like you all did a great job with that communication. And that

doesn’t always happen.

You know, look, I’m, I’m from a large family, really like 12 kids. Luckily, my

parents, neither one of them had to go into a nursing home. I have a sister that

was a nurse and thank God, she took care of my mother in her last year of life,

she moved in with her and took care of her, which we paid her from my

mom’s money, we paid her to do that. However,

we have a brother and he is in a nursing home with MS. I have another

sister that’s a CPA, and thank God for her, that she worked it out for my brother with my

mother’s inheritance. He was able to get into a good nursing home. Then the money

went down and now he’s on Medicaid. But like what happened during COVID,

they gave out extra money to people and it knocked his checking account above $2

,000, so my sister had to deal with that.  I’m fortunate to have those people in my

life that are experts in those areas. And it’s still hard. It is still very,

very difficult. But what your book also prompted me to do some things now. I’m 58 years old,  and  even though I do have a will, it set things in motion. You put in there the percentage of people that don’t have a will and how difficult that is and setting up trust.

After I got a finished readind your book, I’m like, I think we need to put one

of our children on our signature on a checking account. But also you have to be

careful. You have to be careful that there are trustworthy people. And then even the

part where you said about your iPhone after you die, like I immediately put it on a Legacy person.

Colleen: That was a great addition, actually, that you added about the

Beth:  you guys are success stories for me.

Colleen: And there’s more to do.  I mean, when you’re dealing with a loved

one who’s ill, you’re just trying to process that. And when it’s your parent who is

always taking care of you, it’s a really big, ‘mind you know what”, when all of a

sudden you have to take care of them. And they’re, like you said, there are bills

that you don’t know how to get paid, they’re suddenly insecure about what they’re

doing. So you want to make them feel safe. And then you’re like, well, does she have Medicare or he have Medicare? Medicare doesn’t cover stuff

like that, which a lot of people think, oh, I’ll just get a nurse from Medicare.

No, no, no, no, they don’t do that. So your book is about being proactive and

finding out the list of nursing homes in your local area, finding out all the

paperwork that your parents have, because it’s so important that when this time

comes, and we all experience it, that at least you’re not having to deal with

trying to recreate what’s going on in the world. Because  the average

person does not know in a sandwich generation about long -term health care, about

assisted living facilities, about nursing homes, private versus public.

How important was it for you in this book to break down all of that stuff?

Beth: That’s the only way people can understand it, I think. You know, but what I want to do

is normalize it down to the fact that, like, you know, I have a kid who’s about

to turn 18 in two weeks. The first thing we’re going to do is march down to the

notary and signed power of attorney and health care proxies.

That’s the way it should be. Like, there should be certain things like,

oh, okay, you need a shingle shot at 50, and you need a colonoscopy now at, what,

45? I don’t know, I don’t know the new age. And, you know, annual mammograms. Like,

everybody needs these documents as soon as they turn 18. Like just start then,

like all of your kids and your college kids and young adults. Like just everybody

needs them. I’m a single, you know, a divorced woman. I have a boyfriend, but I’m

not remarried. I need these documents. Nobody can act on my behalf if I get sick

because I am a single human being in the legal and medical infrastructure.

What I wanted to do was sort of wake people up to the why of all of this and the why of all of this is that we don’t want our loved ones to have to do hard things. They’re going to do them, we’re all going to do them.

This stuff is hard. We’re talking about it like it’s the hardest thing in the

Universe but you know what we all do it anyway right. If it were

something we could get out of, we would get out of it, but even the richest people

can’t get out of it because even the richest people have parents and loved ones

and those loved ones want to put a name on the form that they trust and that name

on the form even if you’re you know you know, uh Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift for instance,

spent last summer taking care of her dad and talked about it. You know,

when Taylor Swift’s dad goes to fill out legal forms, who is he going to put? He’s

going to put his closest loved one.

So, you know, like you can’t buy your way out of this stuff. We’re all going to

do it. And the job is to make it as least bad as we can for other people.

Bridgett:  Exactly, I mean I think I need to do that the next

time both my children are in town. They’re both single, they’re

in their 30s, we need to talk to them about you know get these forms filled out

and just take care of all of that and even the fact like wills even for

need to have so.

Beth: For 30 -year -olds, for sure. If they have anything, I mean, they

could probably get by, if they don’t own property, they could probably get by with

just beneficiary designations. You know, just make sure on their 401K from work and

their life insurance from work, that they have, you know, on their bank accounts and

all of that, that they have a beneficiary name should they die or something happened

to them. But,

you know, a will would only need to come into play for, like, their social media

accounts and who they want to take control of their, you know, their stuff,

basically.

Because you will have a heck of a time, you know, getting access to that sort of

stuff, especially for younger people, I would say the primary concern I would have

for them would be if they own any cryptocurrency.

Bridgett: Yeah, that was another thing you had in there that I thought, I didn’t even think I don’t own any that. But, you

know, a lot of younger people do own that.

Colleen: And you really break all of that down

in the book, Section 4 is sending up the estate, which is kind of what we’ve gone

into. And you, you know, again, a lot of us until we experience it, don’t even

realize there’s funeral costs. Oh, So you’re sitting there going, what do you mean?

It’s $10 ,000 to bury me, my parent.

  You know, have a gift your parents can give you is to have that already done, already have it scheduled. And the life insurance

and death benefits because a lot of people don’t realize you’re divorced, but you

could still get your social, you know, the death benefits from your ex. You really break down all of this and it makes it seem less overwhelming

because  first you’re trying to take care of and again burning through

the money which you were talking about before, people don’t realize that a parent can

live a lot longer than they think so someone like for example my mother has

dementia, but her body is healthy for the most part, so you have to be aware that

their money could run out at a certain point. And that’s when you were saying

getting the federal funds invested. So it’s important to understand that you might,

like you said, budget your way into a corner here because there’s still a lot, but

you’ve used up all their money.

Beth: Yeah. It’s a really tough thing to

keep track of, to see the big picture. What I tried to do with my story was walk

through, you know, what it feels like to live through this, step by step, month by

month, you know, the trajectory that I went through was rather quick, right? I went

through it in like a little over a year. So people can follow a story that happens

in that time frame. So I wanted to give people a sense of like, okay, here’s what

you need to know to live through this sort of universal life cycle event and get

ready on the front side of it the best you can so that you can get through it as

easy as possible. And if you can do that, if you can be woken up to that, then

everybody in your family and your future self is going to thank you very much.

I mean, my mother did so many more things than her parents did. And it made life

so much easier for me. And I plan to do whatever I can for my kids to make sure

that, you know, they don’t have to do, you know, any of the stuff I found hardest

for my mom,

which means, you know, erasing, they’re going to be able to press more buttons and

just erase things rather than throw out like an entire apartment’s contents of stuff.

My mom had so many knickknacks and things. Like it was

overwhelming. My entire presence is mostly digital at this point. And they’ll be able

to like put it on a drive like this big.

Bridgett: Yeah, that was another thing too. And it

got me thinking too. Like, oh my goodness. I’ve got so much stuff that they are

not going to want. And I don’t want it now half of it,

more than half of it, but I don’t even want it now. And that was another part

too, that right now we are just revising our will, really just making it more current and up to date. And when you talk about,

you know, trying to avoid probate. Can you explain that? Like,

why maybe having a trust, if you’re trying to gift your house or thing would be

better than having it go to probate.

Beth: Well, so this is the best way I can explain

the house thing. I talked to somebody recently whose mother died the month before my

mother. My mother left me and my brother her apartment in a trust. She went to the

lawyer after my father died and she got a trust set up for the house,

it was an apartment, so for the condo. And it cost about thousand dollars for her

to do that but when she died it became mine and my brothers immediately.

It was summer in Florida and we had a very short window in which to put it up

for sale or we were going to miss the selling season, you know every real

estate market is different. That particular market had a late fall,

and an early fall selling season. If you didn’t get it done then, it wasn’t

going to happen. We needed a cash deal, you know, it was very specific. So we got

down there way too soon for my emotional needs. And we cleaned out the apartment

and we put it up for sale.

And we sold it. So my mom died the 1st of July and we did the closing before the

end of September.

This person I was talking to, her mom died in May of that year, so a little bit

before my mom. She left her house in a will to this person.

It took from May until October for the will to get processed by the probate courts

because you have to file a will. Like it is nothing on its

own, just like the power of attorney. You have to take it to the court and the

court has to authorize whoever its named to be executor to,

you know, do whatever it is that they’re allowed to do, which is sell a property.

So it took from May to October before she was authorized to sell the property. Then

she could clean it out and put it on the market. And then it took time from there

to sell it. And by the time there was a problem with selling or whatever. So it

took over a year for her to sell that property. She needed a lawyer to go to the

probate court.

She had to pay the taxes and the insurance and the mortgage the entire time that

she was holding onto that property was now her responsibility. So it cost a ton

more than the $4 ,000 my mother spent on the trust to pass the property immediately

to me and my brother. That’s the difference. That’s the only real way I can explain

it to people is, if you pass this in a will, there’s going to be a time

delay. If time is not your problem or you’re just moving into the house and you’re

keeping it and time doesn’t matter to you, then a will is fine for that sort of

thing.

If you have any sort of time essence where that delay is going to cost you several

thousand dollars a month in carrying costs, then it’s worth it for you to get the

trust up front. Like you do the math for you, but the will, which seems less to

do,

is going to cost you more in the end, most likely. And if you do nothing, if the

person dies with property and you want that property or you’re expecting to sell

that property, add another year onto that. Like, if you, if you get,

if you get a property from somebody who’s died and they didn’t have a will or any

sort of documentation, that whole process just starts three steps back. And you have

to go to court to establish yourself as the person and other people could come out

of the woodwork, siblings or half siblings, you know, just look up Prince.

Bridgett: Oh, yeah. Yes, you referenced that. And, I mean, somebody tried to fake owning Graceland recently, you know, tried to steal Graceland.

Colleen: And debtors and collectors and all

those fun people start coming out of the woodwork as well. I think before we even

get to the estate, I think it’s important to talk about family dynamic.

Actively figure out who’s like, I know you said whoever is responsible the most

Responsible but you have emotions now. Who’s going to take care of the parent the

best. How do you coordinate that so it’s not just an

absolute like free fall for everybody when it happens.

Beth:  yeah so this is more a psychology question than a financial question and it depends on what you’re dealing

with. I know a lot of people talk to me about having one sibling who is in the

throes of an addiction of some kind or has a mental health problem or is it

disabled or, you know, some way, sometimes they just have somebody in the family

who’s, you know, let’s say jerk, you know, like we all have those people in our

families. And if you are tasked with making a decision with those.

Now oftentimes, parents are involved in enabling the sibling who is

causing the problems and is they’re emotionally you know beholden to them or

financially they would never cut them out of the will. There are people who will, like, put somebody in the will one day and then say,

I’m going to take you out of the will and then put them back.

You know, a trust can help with that situation. Like, you know, I’ve told,

you know,  I’ve given this advice out before to people. And it’s just general

educational advice. But a trust can solve a lot of those dilemmas for you. If you

want to say, you know, if you are the parent in a position that somebody’s tugging

on your emotions to give them money, if you put the money in a trust and have a

trustee over that, then you divorce yourself of the responsibility of making that

decision. You’re like, okay, but I would love to give you money, but the money’s in

a trust and you’re going to have to go talk to the trust lawyer. and the trust

lawyer is going to have no problem saying no.

So sometimes you can, if you can get the parent who’s in charge to do that, if

you have the financial responsibility now and you can do that to cut off whatever

siblings are causing problems, you can do that. You can also just sort of prepare

yourself mentally to know what your boundaries are and set very clear boundaries.

There are ways to, you know,

make sure that you’re communicating only by email or only non -verbally,

so you don’t get into endless discussions with people. You have

group -shared documents so that you don’t have to communicate so often with people.

Like I went through a very bad acrimonia’s divorce. Like, I would treat

any family member like that, you know, if you guys have heard the term gray rock,

you know, where you only communicate in very short,

very tightly edited communications where you don’t allow somebody to have emotional

access to you when they’re being bad about it.  I would recommend that kind of strategy with your siblings, you know, like,

it doesn’t always work because people are jerks, but, you know, you could do your

best to set your own limits for things.

Bridgett: And you have a documented. If it’s in

writing or a text or anything, it’s documented. Another thing we were talking about

the estate and something that you brought up was filing that final tax return.

Oh, my goodness, that was eye -opening. I did not

realize the whole, like, the day they die, you know, that day,

how things, certain things stop that day.  If your parent died, like, I don’t know, January 1st at 12:01 a .m.,

You know, are you on the hook for that year? You know, that’s, yeah, that that was

very eye -opening. Can you talk about, you know, I know where you, you saw it from

TikTok and just talk about a little bit about that.

Beth: They lost their mom way too young. There are these, you

know, I don’t know if your listeners know, but there are these two sisters on

TikTok and they made this video, Confessions to their Mom One Year after She Died.

And their first confession was, oops, we didn’t know we were supposed to file taxes

for you. Sorry. And I’m like, they’re young. How would you guess that if nobody talked about and nobody told you?

Like, it’s very confusing. So, you know, like it’s an advanced financial task to

file a deceased person’s tax returns and then whatever else is required,

a state tax returns. And, you know, there’s the tax return for the part of the

year they’re alive and the tax return for the part of the year they’re dead. And

then the successive years that they’re dead if there’s you know if their accounts

are still open if they’re still an open estate or still an open trust it can get

very complicated and you know I certainly sought out professional help for that. I

wasn’t going to tackle that sort of thing by myself. I hired a tax attorney not

a tax attorney, but a tax professional who knew what she was doing to do that. That’s specialized knowledge and that’s where it’s worth paying

some money.  It’s not an enormous amount of money to get a debt tax return done

it’s so much easier than doing it yourself and then you’ll know it’s done

properly and if they come looking for you after the fact then you’ll know that

you’re you’ll be backed up by somebody who knows what they’re talking about.

Colleen:  yeah I think also the book has so much information but if you just get the book for the resource guide at the end like that’s well worth the money, because most people are like “okay  I get it, that I should do this where do I start.   You have letters, you have forms you have all of

these things,  it’s so helpful and comprehensive my last question was

really that, and I think it’s important for a lot of people. Bridgett brought about

long -term health care.

And you talk about hybrids, that there are some hybrid policies. Because some people

just simply can’t afford to do loan. So can you talk a little bit about the

hybrid?

Beth: So hybrid pairs life insurance of some sort, or an annuity these days,

some sort of insurance product with long -term care insurance. And basically what

you’re doing is you’re using the death benefit that would go to your heirs to pay

for long -term care insurance. You still have to go

through the same hoops of getting qualified for the claim and all of that. But you

can use like the same pool of money for two purposes. If you use it for long -term

care insurance, the debt benefit will be less for the people you leave behind

but they won’t have to pay for your long -term care. So, you know,

it’s just, it’s a way of combining those two things. The thing people seem to like

the least about long -term care insurance is you paid and paid and paid. And then

if you either didn’t get sick or died too fast, you didn’t feel like you got your

return on your investment and people don’t like that. I don’t understand that

because, like, I drive my car around with insurance on it and I’m really glad not

to use it. Like, I’m really glad not to file a car insurance claim.

I’m glad my house doesn’t burn down. So I have long -term care insurance. If I

never get sick or never use it because I die without getting a prolonged illness,

I would be satisfied with that result. But a lot of people don’t look at it that

way. And so the long -term care insurance policy is the kind that I have weren’t

economical. They weren’t sustainable. People were getting out more than they put in.

And the companies, you know, are going out of business. Like you can’t get a policy

like that anymore. So this is one way that the industry has figured out to offer

people something. And in this circumstance, something is better than nothing because

it’s just so catastrophically expensive.

Bridgett: That’s true. Yeah. I believe that’s similar. John and I bought long -term health care

last year. And I think you had an example in the book. We paid a lot up front

for it. Just experiencing what his father is going through.

We want to make things as easy as possible for our children. So using the resources

in your book and you have things listed out. It is really nice. That is such a

great resource and I’m going back through it.

Beth:  Thank you. And I’ll say that

for people who have a verified purchase of the book or are subscribers to my

newsletter, I’m offering a free PDF download of the resource guide. So a lot of

people have found that they, you know, they have the book and they’re going through

the workbook in the back, but they need more than one copy of it. And so having a

PDF is helpful in that case. And I’m happy to provide it for people if they’ve

already got the book somehow.

Bridgett: And it’s on your website? Yeah. So there’s a button

there to just to email me or subscribe to the website, subscribe to the newsletter.

And, yeah, I just email it out to people.

Bridgett: Well, we’ll make sure we put a link to

your website in our show notes.

Colleen: Yeah, absolutely. Beth, thank you so much for coming

on. This book is just an invaluable resource and we’ll have the links in our show

notes. But we appreciate all the information and your time talking to us.

Beth: Thank you

so much.