Helping older relation to manage money after bereavement

[financialhelpneeded]

Very sadly, FIL died earlier this year. MIL is doing surprisingly well in every department except financial management.

They have a LOT of savings in many, many bank accounts which always used to be FIL's task to manage. Now he is gone, MIL is struggling with this task.

She can cope with the day to day demands of managing one bank account, she just can't deal with 40+ savings accounts. She has no experience of filing or organisation and she simply will not listen when we try to offer simple advice like "You need to keep letters from banks in folders, not in random plastic bags" or "Fill in this form we have made you with the key info for each bank account and then tick it off the list and file it in the red folder". Because she refuses to follow a sensible system, she constantly loses everything - including track of where she is.

She needs to get together a financial statement of FIL's assets for probate and it's proving VERY difficult. And this is a relatively straightforward task - all she has to do is to 1. Ring the bank 2. Send them a death certificate 3. Get a balance.

She is not a stupid or incapable person - she is articulate and fairly educated, but for the sake of honesty in getting advice: she is REALLY selfish. This is the first time in her entire life she has ever had to do something she didn't want to do.

DH has sat with her for HOURS (we live a long way away and have taken weeks off work to help her). He is extremely clear and patient and has talked her through it step by step. And it's not hard. Yet she refuses to listen. We really don't know what to do.

I know that a lot of people will put this down to the effects of grief, but she is absolutely fine in every other department of her life. She doesn't have much empathy or emotional range, and as long as she can spend the day seeing friends or making jam, she's fine.

What can we do to help her? Is there any way we can get someone professional to do this work for her?

If you are in UK you can apply for a health & financial Power of Attorneys via this website www.gov.uk

Or you can apply via a solicitor

It takes several weeks to receive the POA back

I like the advice that you could take some time out & stop helping & try helping in 6 months time

@Eggsc1t1ngDay

If you are in UK you can apply for a health & financial Power of Attorneys via this website www.gov.uk

Or you can apply via a solicitor

It takes several weeks to receive the POA back

I like the advice that you could take some time out & stop helping & try helping in 6 months time

To be accurate - you can't apply, the person who wants to donate the power of attorney must apply. They need to voluntarily give you the right to make decisions after they lose capacity. I

A third-party mandate is a document that tells your bank, building society or other account provider they can accept instructions about your money from a specific named person. It gives that person the authority to run your bank account (but no other financial arrangements) for you. it doesn't give you the right to decide what money is spent on or to withhold money from the person if, say, you were concerned they might spend it unwisely. They retain full rights to make their own financial decisions but give you the right to access and manage the account.

A lasting power of attorney is agreed by the Court of Protection and allows a designated person or people to make decisions on behalf of the person donating the LPA , in their best interest. It must be registered to be effective and must be completed prior to a person losing capacity. Capacity is decision specific and people must be supported to make their own decisions whenever possible.

Anyone can appoint an attorney and you don't need to have dementia to lack capacity. It might be that someone has a major accident and ventilated in intensive care - someone with LPA could refuse further treatment, for example. or take over the running of their finances until the received sufficient capacity to manage for themselves.

If you are appointed as a financial attorney, you may have been given permission to make decisions while the donor still has the mental capacity to make their own financial decisions. This is about supporting them, rather than taking over full control - unless they want you to. If they have capacity, they can change their mind at any time,

If your LPA doesn't give permission , you can only start making decisions when they don’t have mental capacity. That would have to be a professional assessment rather than an informal idea that they don't have capacity.

That is so, SO helpful @LemonRoses, thank you very very much.

Given the sheer number of accounts, I think PoA makes sense - it will be immensely stressful to go through the third party process over and over again, and I am not sure whether it will even cover accounts in FIL's sole name, whereas it sounds like PoA will enable me to move money around (according to her wishes, of course) on her behalf.

I am going on leave for a week on Friday, will mull this over and then raise it with MIL when we are back if we decide to go ahead. It is a HELL of a lot of work, but it will probably fall to us anyway. Either we can sort the mess out now, or when she loses capacity/health later on, when everything will be harder.

The most effective way of persuading her to the sense of allowing a LPA is to ask her who she might want/who she trusted to make decisions if she had a serious accident or became very unwell. Would she rather you and your husband or a stranger?
Explain that it isn't about taking away her control, but a way of ensuring her wishes about money and about care and treatment are respected.
It must be frightening to give away your independence, but it's much better to let someone you love and trust help than have a social worker or doctor making those decisions for you.

i've been witness to a very very (uncannily) similar situation OP. even down to both having pressured jobs, hours away from the relative who needed this support.

it was like they had some sort of mental block - didn't want to do the job, but was happy to let my DH run himself into the ground, taking time off work, and driving up and down the country at all hours to spend time dealing with it.. only to find basic basic stuff like make 1 phone call, with info we'd prepped, NOT DONE for weeks. it was hugely stressful.

i'm sorry to say but after almost a year of trying to "support", my DH walked away. he was getting ill with the stress of basically trying to support the in-law responsible but was getting nothing but blocker after blocker in return.

either figure out a way to gain control yourself, fully, without the MIL being the actual blocker to getting stuff sorted (even generating the letter templates to provide authorisation, etc so they can speak to you).. which is a huge task to take on yourself...

OR walk away.

my DH ended up just refusing to talk about it with the in law.

we just continued the normal relationship but if anything relating to sorting out the clusterfuck of financial mess (which was getting worse) came up, change the subject.

in the end, the in law paid a collection of lawyers, accountants and professional advisors to deal with it - costing tens of thousands of pounds to sort out a (not particularly complex OR large) financial pot.

honestly, i wish DH had walked away from trying to "help" MUCH much earlier instead of loading all the problems on himself to solve, but not actually having full control.

i've just seen this update:

We have literally done the draft letter thing for her - DH has also prepared her lists and standard forms for every account, and has sat with her for hour after hour showing her how to fill in the most rudimentary details. They are VERY Fisher Price.

honestly either knuckle down and take on the bigger, immense task of managing it yourselves, and get that control - OR walk away.

You don't have to step in and sort the mess, it will just be expensive to pay professionals to sort it now (or later..).

Could the Banks Tell Us Once service cut down the number of letters/phone calls required?

Having used the bank tell us once service recently it was rubbish ! No one got in touch and I ended up phoning all of them. The government one was brilliant and everyone got notified.

"it was like they had some sort of mental block - didn't want to do the job, but was happy to let my DH run himself into the ground, taking time off work, and driving up and down the country at all hours to spend time dealing with it.. only to find basic basic stuff like make 1 phone call, with info we'd prepped, NOT DONE for weeks. it was hugely stressful."

This is absolutely it. It's actually comforting to hear from someone in the same situation. It is absolutely a willed refusal to engage with it.

I agree, we either take this over fully and manage it efficiently, or not at all. It is her decision. I cannot work her way - it's hopelessly disorganised and inefficient and I simply do not have the time to spend 3 hours doing a job with her that would take 5 minutes on my own. Of course, she will still make all the decisions - but I have to be able to execute them my way, for the sake of time and sanity.

Because of her lack of empathy, she sees her sons as servants to be ordered around doing jobs for her, not as people who are also bereaved and struggling while also managing busy jobs and lives. Neither DH nor BIL has had any time to grieve properly because she has just made a series of really extreme demands on them. Last weekend, BIL and his partner went down and she worked them like dogs for 10-12 hours a day. They are both in extremely stressful work situations right now and also lives hours away. We are all exhausted. She has plenty of money - her income would cover a cleaner and gardener without needing to dip into savings - but she expects family to do everything.

We've used Tell Us Once - thanks for the suggestion, it's a good one - but they only cover a tiny number of banks.

"The most effective way of persuading her to the sense of allowing a LPA is to ask her who she might want/who she trusted to make decisions if she had a serious accident or became very unwell. Would she rather you and your husband or a stranger?"

Good idea. Will use this.

Oh, and another thing, if I take this on I NEVER WANT TO HEAR ANOTHER PATRONISING WORD FROM HER TOWARDS ME!

Not Herrington angst. Does she inherit everything? If so leave her to it. If she ends up losing money it's no skin off your nose because you obviously don't like her anyway! You could spend hours helping and her leave it all to the donkey sanctuary!

I am not really motivated by inheritance. We are lucky, we have everything we need and I'm not a very material person anyway. Not saying that with any sense of superiority, people are wired differently. My life plans are all built around what DH and I earn ourselves.

The need to take things over is more because a. Yes I dislike her but DH doesn't want to go NC with her (and it's his decision). b. He is currently very stressed trying to get her to do absolutely basic things like ringing the bank (as someone said upthread, it takes massive amounts of time to get someone disorganised and inefficient to do things) and c. We know that she is likely to need care at some point so we can either get things straight now, and know how much money she has and where it is, or we can wait until crisis hits and have to do all this work in a frenzy. We are both people who very much like order and organisation and things running on smooth tracks so this may reduce our stress long term since we will likely have to deal with the situation one way or another and we are probably going to be even busier in a few years than we are now.

I don't want to have to do it, but in the circumstances I think we have to step up unfortunately.

I know the above post will get sneered at and disbelieved, btw, because there are loads of people on here that are only motivated by money. But that's genuinely not our values or our lifestyle. We both do vocational jobs where we are motivated by the work we do, not the pay packet and we are fortunate that we don't have expensive tastes and live in a cheap city.

Is it possible for a solicitor or someone sorting out the probate (sorry, not sure who's involved but it sounds like there's business professionals of some type or another involved) to do this work, even if they charge for it at commercial rates?

It sounds like MIL could have several £M in these accounts (based on 40+ accounts opened up to keep below £85k per institution) and seeing as there's likely to be more money than your MIL could spend during the rest of her lifetime, and the cost wouldn't be an issue to you, it might be worth just being able to give them a bag of passbooks and statements to work through?

Does she have to actually phone the bank though? Can't this be done by post? They need a copy of the death certificate by post, so this with a covering letter of the 'Mr X passed away on Y date, please can you supply me with an up to date balance from this account for probate' signed by MIL with the same address should be enough, shouldn't it? You or DH prepare the letters and she just signs them.

I am still on team LPA. They can use it now to get through probate and then afterwards get her agreement to how she wants to invest it going fowards (simple, keep it simple) and sort that out. After that she can go back to living her own life but they've got the LPA set up for if she needs more support in the future.

(Total aside here - if she can afford to hire a gardener then that's what she should be doing so her sons can visit for fun not labour. This is a new stage of her life now and she may need to make some changes, do the brothers still want to be cutting the grass in five years time?)

i'm still on team "walk away and pay through the nose for professionals to sort it from the estate after she dies".

i was the poster who shared our story of trying to support a bereaved in-law through administering a basic (under IHT threshold-type value) estate, and i honestly, genuniely think that it's better for everyone involve - there's no pretense any more than you're helping (because right now, it doesn't sound like you are -you're just bashing your head against their brick wall).

if you don't care about wasting £££s from the estate, because of her inability to e.g. make a phonecall or sign a letter despite all the work you're doing to prep it.... think of it as buying a stress free life. expensive, yes, but worthwhile.

sorry, i realise i'm totally skewed in my opinion here because my similar story happened 6 years ago, and DH is still quite traumatised by what happened - the emotional guilt and willingness to put HIM in a difficult position for months was immense, and it still is- the relative still talks frequently about all the wasted money that the professionals "stole" off her to sort it out. ffs.

( of course, with the implication that DH should have continued putting his job at risk by leaving early on a Friday to get there in time to walk her through making a phone call here and there, or attend appointments with her, only to find her having stuffed all the collated paperwork into different drawers 10mins before they were due to leave to meet lawyers, and so on. every comment about accountants and lawyers "stealing" from the estate is really just a continued dig at DH for not wrapping up the estate work despite the year of our help.)