My in-laws, 89 and 90, live independently at home a few hours away from me, they have been in their current home since the 1960’s. We organise home shopping, prescriptions etc and visit when we can. They are no longer able to keep on top of their finances, are pretty much housebound, can’t get to a bank unless we take them, don’t do tech, refuse to pay anything on line, won’t use cards. They have both become very confused over the past year and their short term memory is terrible. They don’t recall a conversation you had with them an hour ago.
They sorted POA ten years ago, they have POA for financial issues for each other, and then their three children are named, two of which live overseas. Problem is that the children (one of which is my husband) cannot act for them unless their POA’s for each other are revoked. They don’t understand why they need to be revoked, they don’t have capacity to instruct their solicitor to change it, but they don’t have capacity to act for each other in the event of something happening, such as needing to pay for carers etc. They have numerous bank accounts with significant funds but have no way of accessing them as they don’t understand how to without significant assistance, but as we cannot currently use the POA we are stuck.
they did the right thing setting up the POA but unfortunately they are trapped in an awful situation where they aren’t able to act for each other and no one can act for them.
Does anyone have any experience of this problem? Any advice on how to move forward would be appreciated.