And I really want to know what in your life made you realize that this was such a critical story that needed to be told?

Well, I started out writing about my journey with my mom because I was sitting by her hospital bed after she had her first surgery.

And I was still trying to work.

I was new at my job at MarketWatch.

And I was down there.

I was trying to parent from afar, trying to do my job from afar, trying to care for my mom and do all of these things all at one time.

And I had a column due.

What should women in your view consider before taking on that responsibility as basically the family caregiver?

What should those conversations look like?

I wish my mom had said to me when my dad first got sick, you know, I'm worried about having access to money.

I'm thinking about taking on a home equity loan.

And maybe I would have said, you know, that doesn't sound like a great idea.

If you need a float loan, maybe I could help you.

And then we would have had a conversation about it.

And then years later, it would have triggered and I would have remembered.

You had to have some fight in you to say, no, this is what we need.

So how did you actually approach writing this book and which hat did you kind of put on the most?

I put on the daughter hat the most because as a journalist, what works to get people to do things, to listen to you and to take any actions based on the kind of advice journalism that I do, we call it service journalism.

We're providing information to people in the hopes that they will take that information and, you know, use it to help themselves.

And in personal finance, that means providing them with information that can help them manage their money better.

The only way to get people to pay attention to that and actually do something with it is to tell them a story.

And stories need to be detailed and rich with information.

And the only story I had enough access to in order to tell a proper narrative was my own story.

What happened? Did you figure out a workaround or did your mom have to go down to the bank at some points?

What is the advice to navigate with siblings that may not be on the same page with you or may not understand what you're doing or think that you're doing something shifty when really you're just trying to get this taken care of?

Yes.

Well, every professional will tell you that the idea of naming co-proxies, co-executors and co-powers of attorney is a disaster in waiting.

My mom did that and my brother and I made it work, but it is just a tinderbox waiting to explode.

Nobody can be on the same page all the time.

And in some states, it actually becomes very cumbersome.

So parents don't want to choose.

So anything goes wrong.

Um, and it sounds like you came from a family where people were really responsible with their money, right? Did you have conversations about, uh, personal finance when you were growing up? How did your parents teach you about money? I learned nothing.

Well, I learned from watching, but in our house, you were meant to work always.

Um, I got my first job making money when I was 10, uh, selling sodas on the beach during summer vacation.

Then I was a babysitter, then a camp counselor, and a lifeguard, and a waitress.

Um, I...

You, you were expected to earn your keep always and put that money to good use.

Um, so you could buy a little luxury for yourself with your summer money, but it was meant to be saved for college, and you were meant to go to college and, you know, work in some capacity.

Um, I'm just resentful I have to take care of a parent who didn't take care of me.

story, right?

Yeah, everybody's got a story.

The absolute must is you need the correct permission slips, as I call them.

You need emergency keys.

And people understand that concept because, like, if you have parents who are living, I bet you're going to find a lot of people have a spare set of keys, right? Even if you just have a set of keys, so your parents want you to know that you're always welcome there.

Like, this is your house, too, right? You grew up here.

whatever.

So why does financial caregiving so often leave one person carrying the responsibility, but also the blame and the emotional weight for the whole family?

So I reached out to Beth, who is a financial planner, and asked her this question.

I am Beth Pinsker.

I am a columnist at MarketWatch.

I'm a certified financial planner.

The thing about leaving money in Venmo is, one, is it protected? Is it FDIC insured? Can somebody access it? Do you have consumer protections on it? If it's in a bank, nothing bad can happen to that money, and you're only liable for $50 worth of fraud ever, if any.

If you can prove that there's fraud, you're not going to be responsible for it.

The second thing is it's not going to earn any interest that way.

Okay.

Especially very good savers

...

Yeah.

It's hard.

And so when it comes to spending money in the HSA, it's uncomfortable for people to think about emptying accounts to zero.

You will have healthcare expenses in retirement.

Once you enroll in Medicare, you can delay it past 65, but generally once you're on Medicare, you can't contribute anymore.

It becomes this orphan account like an old 401[k].

yeah so i i reached out to beth who is a financial planner and asked her this question

i am beth pinsker i am a columnist at market watch i'm a certified financial planner the thing about leaving money in venmo is one is it protected is it fdic insured can somebody access it do you have consumer protections on it if it's in a bank Nothing bad can happen to that money and you're only liable for $50 worth of fraud ever, if any.

Like if you can prove that there's fraud, you're not going to be responsible for it.

The second thing is it's not going to earn any interest that way.

So if it's a significant balance, you're losing money as it sits there and you don't want to do that.

I would say best practices go back to the old thing.

The thing I tell my kids, number one, is do not pay for things on your credit card or Venmo or whatever payment method you're going to choose and collect cash from your friends and think that that's a good idea.

Okay.

And they had to figure out how to separate the three shares among four kids.

Yeah.

See, I think that money is the easiest thing to split, 'cause you can get down to the pennies and split it all up.

It's the stuff that is more rare and more meaningful and emotional that people get hung up over.

And in the same way, I think that the after-death stuff is a lot less important than the sickness stuff.

The way that I deal with it in the book is, not to give any spoilers, but my mom passed away in 2023, and so for half the book I'm dealing with, you know, the sickness issues, and half the book I'm settling her estate.

And there's a lot of paperwork, but there's no deadline.

Why, why, why is it both?

So to explain that.

So they were working on a case study of a small business owner who owned a coffee shop.

And he had the exercise was he had $1,000 and he wanted to save it in order to expand his shop down the road.

And so they had to figure out what was the best option for him for saving his money.

And they looked at a regular big national bank, a credit union, a high-yield savings account at an online bank, a CD, which they didn't know what it was at the beginning of a class, and a treasury bill, a one-year treasury bill.

And they had to go online, find the rates for all of those things, use an online calculator to see what the interest would be if you started out with $1,000 and then added, I think it was $100 for four years.

What would your ending balance be and how much would you have earned in interest over that time? And they were supposed to see which was the best product for their purpose.

What'd they come up with?

Mm-hmm.

There are a lot of people out there caring for children, caring for their parents, and caring for their grandparents, who are still alive but their parents are now too old to take care of their, you know, their parents, and so people my age really have it hard.

And we have, you know, digging into your retirement savings should be something that's the worst case scenario, last thing possibly that you do because you can't replenish those funds the way you can other savings out of income.

And we are the generation that doesn't have pensions.

We are the first generation of the 401K only and we didn't start early enough, and so Generation X is way behind the eight ball on retirement savings in ways that Millennials and younger generations are not because they got the benefit of auto-enrollment and auto-escalation, which were two additions to the 401K system that came after my age group, also Roth IRAs.

So you know, when I was 20 and starting out in the workforce, I had none of those benefits and so people my age who contributed to 401Ks if they did it at all, did it at the sort of barest bones rate of, of contribution and we're behind now and getting squeezed.

Beth, when offering financial advice around caregiving, how do you balance the personal finance piece with the structural realities of the country's healthcare system?

It can be really hard and the thing that we get uncomfortable with mostly is it's, the message to everybody is save, save, save and there's not a lot of psychology or planning around spending that money.

Beth, as a financial columnist focused on caregiving and retirement, what are the most common issues you see among the people seeking your advice?

advice?They are concerned about their retirement savings getting squeezed from all directions.

So Generation X, which is the, the current generation that's sandwiched, which is me, um, we have two really big generations on either side of us that we are caring for, and sometimes I'll add one more li- l- uh, sandwich to you, it's a club sandwich.

There are a lot of people out there caring for children, caring for their parents, and caring for their grandparents, who are still alive but their parents are now too old to take care of their, you know, their parents.

And so people my age really have it hard and we have, you know ...

Digging into your retirement savings should be something that's the worst case scenario, last thing possibly that you do because you can't replenish those funds the way you can other savings out of income.

And we are the generation that doesn't have pensions.

Beth, when offering financial advice around caregiving, how do you balance the personal finance piece with the structural realities of the country's healthcare system?