I am an only child. No other family around, have been caring for my dad for 7+ years. We are currently in crisis mode, he's being released from hospital after a fall last week & into rehab today. He'll be 90 in 3 weeks. He has lived alone with very part-time caregivers till now, but now will need nursing home care. I am POA, he put his home in a trust with me as trustee 8 years ago, has told me for years he wants me to have house. I don't want the house. Sure, it'd be nice to have the money from the sale but I don't really care - I have begged and begged him for years to sell his house & move to assisted living. He was lonely and I was afraid as his health declined he would fall, and that is what has happened - it was a serious fall, & there were many other smaller ones before this big one. He only has SS income & VA Aid and Attendance, no other money - I manage all his financial stuff, have since 2015 when he had a stroke & was told by drs he was no longer capable. He has never been dx'd with dementia but def has cognitive decline. One year ago he fell for a Publisher's Clearing House phone scam, & I tried to tell him he was being scammed and he wouldn't listen to me. I blocked his bank accounts temporarily to try to save him from being scammed & he cussed me out & threatened to never see me again. He found an old credit card that I didn't know he still had and let the scammers charge $10K to it before we got a fraud alert on email and he finally believed me. He is obssessed with having more money & his whole life has never managed his money well - so much so my mom, who died 6 yrs ago, hid an inheritance she got from her aunt from him & I am glad she did because we had to use it to pay for end of life care when she needed a nursing home at the end.
I am in the process right now of not only worrying about his recovery and move to rehab but trying to figure out LTC and how we'll pay for it. I know we'll have to sell the house, which is fine, it will be a ton of work for me and my husband to clean out a huge house & sell it quickly but we will do what needs to be done as he can no longer live there alone (3 stories, stairs, etc and we can't afford to pay private caregivers more than part-time). His only asset is house and a car which we are gonna also sell. He knows all this.
So he has no immediate family left, he's outlived everyone. My husband and I help him, that's it. And very part-time caregivers that we pay. But he has a meddling cousin that lives in the UK (we're in US) and his cousin's sister, who are just awful. My mother hated them & never let them visit our house when she was alive. The sister has texted me and physically threatened me via text and I have blocked her. The male cousin has meddled in my dad's business, even going so far to get a lawyer to come to my dad's house and meet with him about doing a reverse morgtage in the cousin's name and taking me off the trust, which he does not understand what that means. I kept begging him to sell to move to Assisted Living but he refused over and over. My dad did all of this meeting with this new lawyer & discussing all his financial affairs with his cousin behind my back - prior I have been invloved in every financial thing for almost 8 yrs now and handle all his care, dr apts, make sure he's got everything he needs, groceries, meds, etc etc. All that comes with caregiving. I have my own family and a daughter still in school and 2 part-time jobs so cannot be there 24/7 which is why I hired caregivers for as much as he could afford. According to my crazy nutso cousins, who I have only met 2 times in my entire life (I am 53), I am a terrible daughter and they have tried to get involved in his finances, I guess to try and get the house? I don't know for sure but I just discovered all of this while at my dad's packing his things to move to rehab and discovered these letters from his UK cousin. I am livid and hurt and don't know what to think. I guess I am just venti
Vent away, but NEVER EVER feel distressed or worse humbled, by what someone who has NO CONTROL over your father’s welfare SAYS about YOU.
YOU are his caregiver.
YOU are his emotional support.
YOU are rightly (AND LEGALLY) concerned about ALL of your father’s needs.
YOU are his SOLE LEGAL FINANCIAL AGENT.
YOU are his CLOSEST LIVING RELATIVE.
By the way, your father has lost HIS ability to filter his emotional reactions, so once again FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, make every effort to let anything painful that he says to you float past you as much as you can.
THE COUSIN’S LAWYER?? OUTRAGEOUS NONSENSE!!
Will it make you feel better to get a legal opinion on this? THEN DO THAT.
You always have a place to vent here. Come back.
You will find out your options when you do this. You are acting as financial manager apparently without knowing what assets exist and without being in charge of the accounts with your Grandfather having only a small account for spending of his own.
He is either competent or he is not competent. If he is competent you have no power. If he is incompetent you need to embrace all powers, and have meticulous record keeping and you need to place and manage things. This means you need two letters to that affect.
Again, you need to be managing the finances.
Again, this is a total mess. Time to hire a lawyer ON DAD'S DIME to work this out. His Trust and his Estate pay to do this. I agree with you. The home should be sold and he should be placed in care. Whether I would want to go through all the mess to do this I am not certain.
Step one attorney appointment, either trust and estate or elder law.
Step two, letter of incompetency after full exam and diagnosis so you can do your duty as POA and make it CRYSTAL CLEAR to the MD that is what you are going to have to do. After you do that and get all accounts arranged it doesn't matter what cousins do. YOU WILL BE IN CHARGE. And responsible under the law for proving you are handling things well and keeping meticulous records. If you are not mentally or physically prepared for a grueling mountain of work, step away from all this.
While he is in Rehab have him evaluated for 24/7 care. (Tested for Dementia tooĺ) If its needed, transfer him to LTC after Rehab is done. Where I live Rehab and LTC are in the same building. The house is in a trust so should be safe from Medicaid. Even if not in a trust, Medicaid counts it as an exempt asset that can't be recovered from until the person passes. If Dad has any assets besides the house, he can use them towards his care. Apply for Medicaid when he only has 3 months of money left to pay for LTC.
Dad is going to get worse so choose LTC.
Thank you everyone for your responses. I am trying not to let what 2 nutso distant cousins do and say affect me, and now that I am realizing my dad may have been experiencing greater cognitive decline than I realized then it helps me not be so angry because he was not making rational decisions when he was allowing cousin to try to talk him into all this other stuff behind my back.