@rhandco Sorry for your loss. Good luck with the estate. Please continue to post about the journey. To everyone who has been through this, please keep me posted about the “I wish I had done …” before they died. I have some of my parent’s accounts set for TOD. One large account wasn’t comfortable with doing this due to my parent’s dementia and that plus their condo (if they aren’t both in a nursing home by then) will go to probate.
Also, I have a nephew asking for money for grad school. Anyone have advice? When I took my parent’s car keys away about 10 months ago, I took possession of their approximately $15K car. It seems fair that I give my niece and nephew (50% inheritors of their estate since my brother’s death) either half the value of the car ($3500 each) from my account or the total value of the car ($7500 apiece) from their account. I know about Medicaid look-back. I can’t forsee a scenario in which they will run out of money before 5 years. They have enough even with gifting $15K.
Re the Medallion signature stamp. After my 2 banks and brokerage refused to issue the stamp, Chase Bank provided the stamp for me in the midwest (all I had was 2 cosigned safe deposit boxes with my deceased parents), my sister on the the west coast (she had an account), and my brother in another midwest state who had no accounts with Chase. There is a lot of liability for the bank with the signature guarantee. We needed it for the reissue of 2 stocks, reissue of I-bonds and EE bonds, about $500K total.
I was so grateful to Chase that I moved my business and brokerage accounts to them. I am actually very pleased with the customer service they have provided in the last 2 years!
@dentmom… go you!! congratulations, it is good to get through it.
@psychmomma … hire someone else if you can afford it all all! seriously was the best money we spent. We had an estate sale team go in and sort and price and eventually have the estate sale. It took the two of them 3 months to sort it all out enough to sell. Places to look for people who do that are: some service organizations such as vetereans groups will do it and split any proceeds 50/50 (our professionals were more in our favor, plus one used to run an antique store which made her pricing great). But if your folks stuff is mostly junk, then it is no loss for the 50/50. Also you can ask your attorney or actually the attorney in parents town who the attorney is who handles estates for people who become wards of the courts. This happens every where and those attorneys go get houses cleaned out and sold to provide something for the people who can’t do it themselves and who have no one. They can tell you who you might hire. For some cleaning out of trash, I also hired a lady who cleaned out for a property manager. Often tenants abandon so much stuff! And she was honest and very hard working.
@Gtalum, I vote giving the kids something from the estate now rather than later, if you are sure parents can afford it. My dad has been gifting his grandkids any spare cash he builds up so it doesn’t have to go into his estate. And he enjoys knowing how they spend it. He also has no true expenses since he lives with my brother. He gives my brother his pension money for “rent”, which is fine with me. Oh and the tax guy said it isn’t “rent” that is income to my brother … it is “sharing in household expenses”. Dad couldn’t deduct the rent anyway so that worked out great.
Thanks for the condolences, I did try my best. I’m not a medical doctor unfortunately
I’m the executor, that is, I will be soon.
Anyway, I’m trying to get a lawyer to help me, and that hasn’t been easy. Our state has probate for anyone other than a spouse dying and leaving all to their spouse. I have to get a lawyer before probate, or at least should from what I understand.
A neat thing is that the county surrogate’s have special evening hours, with the added bonus of not being at the courthouse. I’ll definitely take advantage of that!
I am hoping the bank will do well by us; he was just over their special client amount, which luckily isn’t net, it’s investments only (he has big loans). I hope the medallion thing won’t be an issue.
As for stuff, I’m thinking about a storage unit for some of it, but I know from selling my house that some realtors think furnished looks better for home shoppers. The storage unit was big when we moved, I think we would have gone crazy with two people working and trying to sell our house, nevermind a bunch of kids…
I had a thought though - how do you know if someone had a safety deposit box? Is there usually some kind of receipt or paperwork? There is some expensive jewelry missing, hopefully it is deposited.
I am guessing that you usually get a safe deposit box where you have an account, also. When finding our parents ones and aunt that we were executor for, we followed the bank accounts. Now, that said, we were very luck to find some random keys that were the right ones. We went to the bank and asked what they looked like. One was completely different than you would expect. We first went there, as executor we showed them our documents and asked if she had a safe deposit box.
The medallion signature was required for several documents to close them. I used the bankers at our bank to do this.
@zeebmom , I am so sorry your OS is being a pill. I haven’t any advice, just sympathy. My mom’s sibling did the same thing when Grandma died… demanded the car and then sued because he didn’t get money even though Grandma had given him bunches. Plus for the 10 years Mom lived with Grandma and took care of her through Alzheimers… he visited twice (both times to get money). Even nicer (NOT) his daughter tried to reopen the estate 7 years after it was settled because she said Grandma had promised her some diamond earrings… my Mom said to ask her father for them and the lawyer said go away (for $300). So in a sense … it never ends!
For the Safe Deposit box, it is NOT safe to assume that it would be at a bank where you have other accounts. At least we don’t. Our major bank is a credit union which doesn’t have safe deposit boxes. Our other band we keep for convenient travel debit card also doesn’t have boxes. So we have a box at a bank we rarely even go into… yes we had to have an account there, but it has $400 in it and we just redeposit the yearly box fee so there are no monthly statements. (they give statements when there is activity other than the interest). So you might have to wait a year and look for statements (although I am not saying not to ask the banks you have to deal with anyway).
In our case we just 6 months ago added our kids as signatories on it. And our son put his car title in it. And last week he asked where the key was… but he actually guess it was (gasp) in the key drawer. He was asking what it looked like and it is the old fashion big skeleton key thing . Kids could find it because it is still in its little Bank of the West envelope saying Keep your safe deposit box key safe.
Or some people switch banks but leave the box where it was.
Also, don’t forget to check unclaimed property. Missingmoney.com is one. Check all possible names (Mary Jones, Mary Jones Smith, MJ Smith, etc.) Do it for yourself, too.
Oh my! My son took a key that me and my siblings used to play with as kids, and it looked like an old-fashioned fake key! But I don’t recall it ever being in a bank envelope.
That missingmoney.com site is pretty neat. You used to have to go state by state to search.
My mom returned home from rehab yesterday afternoon. The pt/rehab staff was against it but her insurance said to discharge. We won the first appeal but three days later had to appeal again and lost that one. Mom was so depressed and wanted to leave so badly we decided against the reconsideration process, which could have taken up to 14 days (and mom would have to pay for it if appeal was again denied).
This is going to be really hard. She can stand with assistance and can walk using a walker with assistance. She can’t clean, change, wipe, or dress herself (pants, socks, shoes). She is almost completely incontinent. She can feed herself but can’t make food.
I have been on the website agingcare and am learning some helpful things in navigating adult care. I didn’t realize how easy I had it with toddlers.
Was at a women’s health talk last night given by an OT who now works in nutrition. She said that every day w/o doing the PT/OT things from rehab (and staying in bed) will set one back 2 weeks. At home, push to stay very active on all the exercises/tasks learned in rehab.
Also talked about a book, written by a pharmacist, about how people over 70 metabolize meds differently. The book is:
The Merck Manual of Health & Aging: The comprehensive guide to the changes and challenges of aging-for older adults and those who care for and about them Paperback – November 29, 2005
How the heck do they expect psychmomma’s mom to take care of her needs? How much of this is because she is living with family? And can you tell us what insurance, is it something beyond straight Medicare ?
@psychmomma, I know there are long-term financial issues involved. But as someone who went through this with my dad, it’s impossible to predict the future or to know how long the term will be. There’s no sense attempting to do the impossible, not good for you, not good for your mom. Start looking right now for the services you just can’t do yourself, and use that money. Be good to yourself. You are a good daughter in an impossible situation. It helps no one for you to burn out in the first month. ((((((((((Hugs!))))))))))
In this case, she has united healthcare Medicare advantage. My understanding from social services is that Medicare rewards? pays? UHCMA to be efficient/use the least treatment “necessary”. Please jump in and correct me if this is not the case. (Mom’s insurance is a survivor benefit from a state university system. They switched from straight Medicare to this plan two years ago. She’s never been sick so we haven’t used any of these benefits before.)
I was also told that each plan has its positives- and UHCMA supposedly has good prescription coverage.
Also, living with family was a negative for her. They assume family takes care of you. We both work full-time and she was self-sufficient before. We could be gone 8-10 hours with no problems.
She has dramatically declined from two months ago, cognitively. Physically, she seems to be doing fairly well.
But if you can’t remember where the bathroom is, what to do when you walk in there, what the steps are to use the toilet, clean yourself, pull up your pants, wash your hands, dry them - you need lots of supervision and help.
