Who has last say over money issues: Mom vs. Me (POA)?

This is all kind of beside the point, but thanks for the information on your brother. You can be a merit scholar, you know, and still be mentally ill. Brilliance in academics is not protection against cognitive impairments. Being transgender has been a true handicap -- let us hope that won't be so with the next generation. And having a circadian rhythm out of sync with where you are in the world can be totally miserable. (I know. I have been diagnosed with that disorder and it is No Fun.)

I don't blame you for thinking that your brother should have used his brilliance and made something of himself. At least to be self-supporting. And some parents would have worked very hard at encouraging that to happen.

But I also understand a parent wanting to protect the "different" child, the odd-man-out, the underdog, the handicapped. And I understand a mother's perception is different from a sister's, for example.

Your mother (and apparently your father?) has chosen to protect or help or coddle the child she sees as handicapped. We could have long discussions about whether that was wise and appropriate, but the fact is it was her money and her choice.

It is still her money and her choice. She may suffer some consequences from her choices, But the choices are clearly not a result of dementia -- she has been making them for decades. I think that how she treats your brother is outside the scope of your POA role.

She should, however, definitely be paying her own way -- not only in the future, but right now. Whether she is supporting her son or not, she should be supporting herself. A room and board and perhaps care agreement should be put in place immediately. Otherwise not only is she supporting her son (which is her choice) but you are subsidizing that support, and it does not sound like that is your choice! Anywhere Mom was living right now would expect to be paid for rent, board, and if appropriate, care. Independent living, assisted living, nursing homes all would cost her. She should be paying you. I hope that would make her responsibility to have enough money to pay her own way more clear to her. But even if it does not, you should not be expected to subsidize your brother by giving mom a free ride.

I think you and Mom should consult an Elder Law specialist to discuss the future and how current behavior impacts Medicaid eligibility. Did you have an attorney you liked draw up the POA documents?

If Brother had a specific diagnosis such as schizophrenia, then I don't think Mother's financial help to him would be considered a "gift" that would warrant a penalty. Especially since this has been going on for decades and is obviously not a last-minute effort to get around Medicaid requirements. If he has no clear diagnosis I'm not sure how this looks to Medicaid. But an Elder Law specialist should be able to advise you and perhaps suggest ways mother can continue to support her "handicapped" son without jeopardizing her eligibility. And if there is no legal way to do that, the lawyer should be able to explain that, so the burden is not solely on your shoulders.

I have confidence that you will get this into a manageable set up. Please keep us informed. We learn from each other.

Oh, I just thought of something very important, what if your Mom doesn't have enough money for her care and she applies for Medicaid. Medicaid will look back 5 years and see that she has been paying your brother's way, thus Medicaid will look at those amounts as "gifts", thus your Mom might not have any money for her future care unless your brother gives back what she had given him. I know this is too complex for your Mom to understand, it's the future.

debdaughter I understand where hadnuff's coming from. I see it in my own family. I have two family members who are on SSI for mental illness. You don't just waltz in and ask for it and next month you start getting checks. You don't get it for being lazy or selfish. You don't get it without a lot of evidence that you have serious mental health issues that prevent you from supporting yourself. This includes evidence from mental health professionals, such as psychiatrists.

So the fact that Barbaba's Brother (BB) is receiving SSI is enough to convince me that he has a genuine disability. He may also be lazy and selfish, or he may appear that way to someone who doesn't understand his disability, but nonetheless he has a genuine disability.

People can live on SSI, if they are prudent in how they use it, if they seek out other benefits available to them (such as subsidized housing) and especially if their family can help them a little. But often people with mental handicaps are not prudent and good at researching what is available and managing their lives. Maybe BB would have been better off if his parents had provided more guidance on how to manage on his own, and less on handouts. But I have a hard time sitting in judgement of his mother. Having a disabled child is a huge challenge.

"Shouldn't such people be placed somewhere?" Such as? There are various services open to such people (if they live in the right places.) These include organized recreation, various kinds of therapy (one of my relatives seems to benefit from art therapy sessions a few times a week.), and support groups. To my knowledge there are no residential programs.

In my family I see how the two handicapped persons are treated by their siblings. Some are accepting, supportive, and non-judgemental. They try to help with tasks the person finds challenging and/or anxiety-producing, such as taxes or filling out government applications. They don't get sucked into the negative spiral, but they act in love. And other siblings simply treat the mentally ill person as if he were "normal" and they expect normal behavior. They are judgemental. They think the afflicted persons are lazy or boring or not worth bothering with. They resent any help the mentally ill person gets, especially from other family members. Maybe that is their defense against admitting there are defective genes in their dna pool. I don't know, but it saddens me to see two brothers totally estranged because one is mentally ill.

"Is there nothing that can be done?" Well, maybe, sometimes. But in general I think we have less knowledge about treating mental illness than physical illnesses, and we certainly can't cure every physical illness. Both my family members receive ongoing treatment. One is on medications. One spent a couple of weeks in a mental health ward. I can see improvements in both of them, but neither is anywhere close to "well." I don't know if BB is or has received treatment. That is another thing his parents should have encouraged, in my mind. Maybe they did. Maybe he got treatment. We don't know the decades-long history here.

Barbara and debdaughter, I'm not attacking you personally. But these posts that show total disregard for someone's mental illness really push my hot buttons!

Mental illness is REAL. An autopsy will reveal anomalies in the brain. Just because we can't see physical symptoms doesn't mean they are not there.

The treatments we have for mental illness today are sometimes highly effective and sometimes next to useless.

No one chooses to be mentally ill.

If the social security folks determine a person to be too mentally ill to earn a living, they are most likely correct. Maybe, rarely, someone fools them to get a free ride, but the chances of that a pretty small.

Should parents treat all their children equally when it comes to finances? Or is a parent justified in providing more resources for a child who is unable to support himself (whether from physical or mental disability)? That is a complex question and many factors are involved in answering it.

If a parent decides to provide more resources for a disabled child, such as unequal inheritances, I can understand some resentment from the other children. Being disgruntled that BB is promised the house and savings I can understand. Being resentful that he takes leftovers home with him is way beyond reasonable, in my book.

And that's the end of this lecture on treating the mentally ill with compassion.

SO - what I am saying is if there is a slightly sneaky way of limiting the credit card - eg. report that it is being misused so you need a new number that maybe you can make sure brother will NOT get, switch to a reloadable debit card with a lower limit for spending that you have online control of - go for it. Tell mom you found someone has been making large expenditures using her card - it would be true and you would not have to say it was your brother. You would know best how brother would react and what to say or not say to him about it. Be "wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove."

Have her declared incompetent via a petition for Guardianship. She is making very bad decisions and he is exerting undue influence.

Mom2Mom, you are in that uncomfortable hinterland where you have responsibilities but not yet clear authority. That's the trouble with dementia - that there isn't a nice clear on/off switch. If only, hm?

But since it is a sliding scale, what about looking at your mother's decisions in a similar way - sort of "grading" them according to importance, consequences, complexity and so on.

So that, for example:

Funding your (eye roll) brother's - well, life. For as long as you are confident that she is unlikely to be significantly impoverished by them, then you should continue established spending patterns. These should change only when you believe for demonstrable reasons that they risk her wellbeing - and since Medicaid does come into it, their guidelines might be a useful measure to base your judgement on. At that point, if your mother seems unable to grasp those guidelines or to project her future funds, that would be a good definition of loss of that degree of capacity. But to add a caveat - say, for the sake of the point, that your mother were Wilhelmina Gates or something and would never run out of money however hard she tried: in that case, even if she'd completely left the planet mentally, you should still carry out her well-proven wishes and continue her spending pattern as normal. No matter how daft you think it is. Think of your brother as an abused donkey in Morocco or a snow leopard or some other equally hopeless, but cuter, cause.

The credit card is easier - she is probably in breach of contract, sharing her details as she does with an unauthorised third party. Especially if she doesn't really need a credit card, I'd be tempted to get the card issuer to close the account. If you need it, for spending on her behalf, then drag out the issuer's terms and conditions, read her the Riot Act, and if you have to take the card off her.

To help you err on the side of caution, remind yourself that you are legally responsible for protecting her best interests. Ironically, you're also responsible for protecting her autonomy of course (gee thanks!) - but if you have to put one ahead of the other, safety first.

I'm not going to comment on your brother's behaviour. Tum ti tum ti tum tap tap tap whistle - it's actually quite hard not to, but I'm not.

Just to clarify the initial intent of the POA. Dad used to do e erything dealing with money. After he oassed, Mom tried to do it but mostly couldn't be bothered and found it to be a struggle so she gave me a very limited POA to cover writing her checks to pay her bills.

At the time, she was still working full time, so she was clearly comptent.

After she moved in with me, I had her sign a new POA which gave me control of everything financial, including her real estate (she has three houses...two rentals and the one the brother is in)

She has passed memory and cognitive tests in the doctors office.

I think she is far from being declared incompetent so I think I will just have to deal with this through other means (persuasion, hiding credit cards, etc)

My mother, in the past, has been seen by a neurologist who calls it mild dementia. Her primary care physician has run memory tests in the office. I wasn't there for that but I think he has someone in the office to do it.

I don't know what it would take to declare her incomptant.

As to how she came to move in with me... Several years ago, she approached me and asked me if she paid for it, would I build an addition to my house for her to live in. That was not feasible because of the slope and shape of my lot. So, after asking her several times if she was sure, I put my house on the market and bought a larger house with a MIL apartment. My other house didn't sell so we rented it out.

My brother had been living with her at t g e time of all this and panicked when he realized that her money was going with her.

Of course, she has forgotten that it was her idea that started all this in motion.

I have a little different perspective and answer.

Before I had the two physician letters documenting my mom's incapacity - which given the way our POA was written, was necessary before I could make the big decisions, like selling her house, I was actually doing quite a few things that she would not necessarily have approved of. For example, she wanted to buy gifts for staff and was using her QVC card to buy multiple, multiple little trinkets from this company that she liked a lot, but no one else really did :-) and we could not afford it. Plus she was ordering chocolates from Dan's "for the staff" and mostly eating them herself and her sugars were through the roof. Well, she was not able to understand or remember why she was not to keep doing those things, and I just started buying her the sugarfree chocolates instead, and said I could take care of buying gifts and making sure we did not already have some to give, and quietly collected the card. And I was true to my word - when there were occasions we were allowed to make gifts, I got the things we already had from her closet or drawer and wrapped and presented them as she wished. I never did have to get a guardianship, because in a sad way, I was fortunate that as my mom's judgement became worse, so did her ability to even make phone calls independently. And as she lost the ability to read and do math, we just as a matter of course stopped doing the bills together; she would ask about things she was concerned about and I would take care of them and show her the checks and/or the pictures (e.g. lawn care for the house, paying for the car inspection, etc.) Don't know how this will play out for you, Mom2Mom, but don't bend over so far backwards respecting her expressed wishes that you neglect the real need - and really, the wish too, else she would have never written a POA - to have care and guidance in these years of losing skills and judgement. You really are in a Mom to Mom-like role now and part of that is respectfully steering her away from danger and preventing the problems that she can no longer see coming, as best you can. Guardianship can be a step you can or even have to take if dementia progresses to the point of legal incompetence while the person can still do enough to wreak havoc - and even then it can get very sticky, the system is biased, and rightfully so to a degree - towards preserving autonomy. Some people really have been thwarted an unable to avert disaster though no fault of there own. But hopefully there is a lot you can begin to do before things are at that point, and maybe they never will be.

Jude I'm not sure, but I don't think there is quite the same clear-cut registration process for POA in the States - plus no doubt whatever the equivalent process is, and of course there must be one, it will vary from state to state.

To explain to anyone who wants to know what I'm whittering about: in the UK, POAs (called Lasting Powers of Attorney and falling into two categories, viz Finance and Health & Welfare) are drawn up, just as in the States, while the person giving them is still in full possession of his mental faculties. What is slightly different over here is that, once it is considered that a person has crossed a line (a blurry line, but hypothetically there is one), the LPA must be registered with the Office of the Public Guardian to come into force. The OPG is a department of the state responsible for ensuring that all LPAs are compliant with the law: valid in their creation, notified to any interested parties nominated by the person giving them prior to registration (so that, for example, if you don't agree that the person has lost it and you suspect that the LPA is just after control of the money, you have a chance to object to registration), and exercised properly thereafter.

Getting the OPG to involve itself in a problem, however…

Still, they are a useful source of guidance when you're uncertain about anything, and it's nice to know they're there. But then again, this is a small country with a long-ingrained, if often grumpy, acceptance of governmental meddling in family matters. Can't see that happening in the States any time soon.