I am not a Lawyer, but I play one Online!

 

Just kidding, of course! Please do not take any of this as legal advice. I am just a concerned son who hopes to help (or even just commiserate) with others who are parenting their parents.  I also see much of what we could accomplish for my parents as a direct result of my experience as a Project Manager and Consultant so that is why I am sharing it here.  

Regarding Lawyers, get a good one! We were incredibly lucky to have found a wonderful and talented one who has been kind enough to walk us through this “Candy Land” journey of law/insurance/tax/estate planning/ etc.…  (Email me if you want me to make an introduction). They also set up all the appropriate Power of Attorney, Living Wills, Health Care Proxy, and Authorization for Release of Protected Health Information. Without these documents managing anything for my parents would have been close to impossible. If you haven’t done all this yet, you need to get started as soon as possible and hopefully, before your parents are in any way incapacitated.  

Now, Let's start with how we started. I am a Project manager so, of course, everything starts with creating a Spreadsheet. Our Spreadsheet had several “tabs”: Accounts, Dad’s Doctors, Mom’s Doctors, Dad’s Meds, Mom’s Meds, and then a calendar to track all the appointments, due dates, etc. Your Spreadsheet “Should you choose to accept this Mission” will differ based on your parent's situation.

Let's look at each of our tabs separately:

Accounts: Lists sources of income, bills, debts, memberships, charities, etc. along with the associated websites, and account numbers (Note: Be cautious to protect the Passwords and IDs separately.)

Doctors Tabs: Listed all the doctors’ addresses, phone numbers, specialties, a Notes Section, and a “Next Steps” to track upcoming appointments, fasting requirements, etc.

The Meds Tabs list each Med, dosage, what condition it treats, who prescribed it, and instructions (Take with Food, take first this in the morning, etc.)

The Calendar is self-explanatory …. And lastly, there was the Forecast Tab. If you follow this Blog I will be doing an entire posting regarding Cash Forecasting. Stay Tuned for that!

With the Spreadsheet in place, the structure was there but now we needed to execute! We started setting up all the accounts online (with Autopay if possible). To do this efficiently, we got a third cell phone for the sole purpose of pointing all accounts to that one centralized phone, to be used for multifactor authentication, and to stop salespeople from calling the house (more on this later).

We also created new email addresses for each of them and set up all accounts to communicate with those email addresses that we manage.

It took many months to get all of this set up, but it was well worth the effort and now managing their monthly bookkeeping takes minutes.  

 

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