Dementia brings new legal and financial issues

If you’ve read my columns or attended a Geezer Forum before, you know I have a bias toward planning ahead. Well, this is one of those columns. If you are a family member and/or caregiver for someone who is currently living with a diagnosis of some form of dementia, you know that planning ahead is very important.

This is especially true when it comes to evaluating legal and financial planning. This is my bias, but I’m also a firm believer in what I call “planned spontaneity.” It’s my way of saying that even the best of planning needs to be flexible enough to adjust to life circumstances. In that spirit, I continue.

In my research, the most concise and helpful article came from the National Institute on Aging. I simply Googled “legal and financial issues for persons with Alzheimer’s.” The NIA article came up.

If you want to find out more, here is the contact information: NIA Alzheimer’s and related Dementias Education and Referral (ADEAR) Center; by phone, 1-800-438-4380 (toll-free); by email, adear@nia.nih.gov, or online at nia.nih.gov/alzheimers.

You may have a family member newly diagnosed with some form of dementia — or perhaps you’ve lived with her/his diagnosis for some time. There are some basic legal/financial documents you do well to have completed — if they are appropriate for your circumstances: will, durable power of attorney for finances, and living trust. See the NIA article for more details.

There are also important medical documents that we must be aware of, and hopefully have in our possession too: a living will, which describes how the person wants end-of-life health care managed; a durable power of attorney for health care, which gives a designated person the authority to make healthcare decisions if the person is unable to speak for himself/herself; a “do not resuscitate order (signed by a physician), which instructs healthcare professionals to not perform CPR in case of a stopped heart or stopped breathing.

Both sets of these documents come with an important pre-condition: the person who is the subject of these documents must be able to understand and signed these documents for them to be legally binding. If you try to get these documents in place when the person can’t understand what the documents mean, then you need to consider guardianship for that person. And that’s a topic for another day.

Our Geezer Forum next Tuesday, March 10, will address the legal and financial issues for “families of dementia.” (You may not currently be part of a family where someone has dementia. But this information could be very important for you also, regardless of your life circumstances.)

Our resource speaker for next Tuesday’s forum is Denise Stewart, an elder law attorney and founder of ELTC Law Group. She will walk us through some of the legal and financial basics that families with dementia would do well to consider.

Please bring your questions and your curiosity next Tuesday, 2:30-4 p.m. to Columbia Bank’s Community Room (next to Tango Café). We’ll engage in a little “planned spontaneity” around these issues, for everyone’s family circumstances call for changing the plans some.

This Geezer Forum could put you on a road to helping your loved one and yourself in ways you hadn’t anticipated.

Paul Graves, M.Div., is lead geezer-in-training for Elder Advocates, a consulting ministry on aging issues. Contact Paul at 208-610-4971 or elderadvocates@nctv.com.