If these are concerns on your mind, it is time for the talk. You shouldn’t delay it any longer.
Cameron Huddleston nearly waited too long for the conversation with her mother. She began to notice her mom’s forgetfulness and that she was asking the same question more than once.
Huddleston initially thought that her mother was just having issues with her hearing. But after realizing something was wrong, she got her mother to update essential estate planning documents. Fortunately, it was before her mother’s mental health deteriorated to the point where she would not have been competent to sign the legal papers.
With the proper estate documents in place, Huddleston turned her attention to her mother’s financial situation.
But by then her mother, 65, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Huddleston had to take over and figure things out without much input from her mother, who could no longer remember key information about her finances. Eventually her mother had to move into an assisted living facility.
Motivated by her own experience, Huddleston, who has been writing about personal finance for more than 17 years, has written “Mom and Dad, We Need to Talk: How to Have Essential Conversations with Your Parents About Their Finances.” It’s this month’s Color of Money Book Club pick.
Huddleston admits that despite her professional history, including now as a money columnist, she failed to act quickly enough.
“I wish there had been somebody to give me the kick in the pants I needed to start talking to my mom about her finances well before she started losing her memory,” she writes. “I delayed the conversation until it became apparent that I couldn’t put it off any longer. Then I had to scramble.”
Don’t assume your parent has it all together, she says.
In Huddleston’s case, she made some assumptions about her father’s handling of his personal affairs. After her parents divorced, her father remarried. He was an attorney and part of his job was drafting wills for clients. No need to worry about him, right?
Wrong.
Her father didn’t have a will.
“The awkwardness that arose after my dad died without a will might have been avoided entirely if I had recognized the importance of talking to him about money matters and estate planning,” she writes.
One of the keys to a successful talk with your parents is knowing what not to say.
“Remember how frustrated you felt when you were a teenager and thought you knew everything and your parents were constantly reminding you that you didn’t? That’s how they are going to feel if you start acting like the parent and treating them like naive kids,” Huddleston advises.
Huddleston provides an excellent step-by-step guide to navigate what can be time-consuming, uncomfortable conversations.
I’m hosting an online chat about “Mom and Dad, We Need to Talk” at noon Eastern on July 25 at washingtonpost.com/discussions. Huddleston will join me to answer your questions on the challenges of talking finances with your own aging parents.
