My father is getting old and I would like to find some sort of accounting service that would take over his bills and other finances. I also dont trust him to do online bill paying and banking since he’s always losing his password and such plus his computer isnt very secure. Any ideas where to find one?
Speaking as someone with a 91 year old mother, the accounting service for your father is you. You’ll need to get a durable power of attorney or a limited power of attorney depending on your situation.
Unless he has lots and lots of money, I don’t think you’ll be able to find someone to handle that. I looked at getting that set up for my mother but it was really too expensive. And if he has lots and lots of money, you run the risk of someone embezzling his money, so you’d need to check on it anyway and keep records, cause eventually you’ll be doing his taxes.
OMG does the paperwork pile up. I usually shove the useless stuff into bags and take it to Staples for shredding a couple of times a year.
You might look for state or nonprofit agencies first. People who fall into certain income brackets or disability statuses may qualify to use those. (In my neck of the woods, the Arc of King County comes to mind.) I have clients who use their services to manage their regular expenses and then I handle annual tax filings.
Depending on how much there is in assets, you might look into setting up a trust and having a third party fiduciary manage the assets. Probably overkill for most people. I don’t know if fiduciary would be the right term to search for if there’s not a trust involved.
If you have some kind of local senior center, people there could be a good resource. Again, in my neck of the woods, most cities and every county has senior centers that offer a variety of services.
This. I managed my elderly parents’ finances until they both passed away. In their location, there was really no other choice. I consulted the county aging services in their county - Jewish Family Services did offer an accounting service (and no, you didn’t have to be Jewish - we’re not) but these services cost money, so unless your father has considerable or complicated assets, it’s not worth it.
I set up as many online accounts as I could for their bills, and for anything that couldn’t be set up that way, I had the bill forwarded to my address. This all worked fine. I had a durable power of attorney that allowed me to do this. One thing to note about that, though, is that the POA ends with the person’s death, so you may wish to set some money aside for funeral expenses in an account with your own name on it, particularly if there’s no life insurance and/or death certificates are not available in a timely manner in your parent’s location.
I’ve seen ad’s in my local paper for bookkeepers for hire. They would charge you an hourly rate. You’d want someone trustworthy and you could set it up so that he or she has some limits on what they could do on the bank account. A CPA could be hired too, I think.
I’m a bookkeeper and this is the sort of work I would hope to be able to do from home someday (when I can retire.) I could earn a little money for some pretty easy (to me) work.
POA’s may end on death, but bank accounts can be set up to pay out automatically to named beneficiaries. It’s called POD (pay on death). You may want to check with a lawyer or an accountant. To my best knowledge, with a POD the account never becomes part of your parent’s estate, but I don’t know if it’s considered an inheritance (not income taxable) or not.
Mom put me on her bank accounts as a second signature, because she had cancer and wanted someone to be able to write checks to pay bills if she was too sick to do it. She had three banks. Two of them paid out to beneficiaries with no problem. The third said that they couldn’t disburse to beneficiaries when there was still a living signatory to the account.
Forgot to add. With a living signatory, none of the bank accounts were ever frozen, which made the funeral arrangements and putting her house on the market a lot easier.
Also, some banks require that you use their own POA form. They won’t accept a general one. I found that out when my aunt was sick. It complicated things.
I have Power of Attorney.
What I’d like is to put a certain amount of money into a special checking account every month. Then have some bookkeeper just use that fund to pay bills.
Lots of bills (utilities, credit cards, health insurance…) can be set up for bank autopay: the bill is automatically paid by the bank each month. Likewise you can have Social Security and pensions… automatically deposited into a bank account.
My aunt does this in Phoenix, but I think her clients are rich people. Or at least when she started she worked for a rich guy who owned a business but as she went along she did pick up some “average joes” along the way.
It is a very personal service they are performing so you do have to find someone very trustworthy with lots of references. I’d think they would need to be even more trustworthy than a home health care worker.
But, I don’t think they would be that hard to come by. It is a very nice part-time job for someone with the right skills - like any retired bookkeeper or someone who left the office to become a stay-at-home parent or caretaker.
Can bookkeepers be bonded?
Pretty much any local business bookkeeping service can readily do this for you. The Yellow Pages still work for finding those.
The problem is it’ll probably cost $50 or more per month for them to write a half-dozen checks. Whether that’s de minimis, Dad’s money well spent, or a profligate waste is up to you.
My bet is you can do a lot to automate most of his expenses as either auto-pay from his checking account, or auto-charge to a single CC. Then auto-pay that CC from the checking account. So all you’ll be left with actually *doing * each month is filing statements and riding herd on the irregular expenses like medical.
For sure now’s a good time to simplify. My MIL liked to have 6 checking accounts to separate the funds spent on different categories of expenses. It made sense to her :eek: :smack:. She also had investments scattered across every brokerage and mutual fund company you’ve ever heard of. And 3 safety deposit boxes at different banks.
Not anymore. One bank box (where the one surviving checking account is) and Vanguard does the rest. She had made riding herd on her adequate-but-not-wealthy pile of money into a full-time job. Now it takes a few minutes a month.
My father in law does this. He’s mostly retired from 40+ years in taxes and financial services. He lives in a 55+ community and advertises in the HOA newsletter. Most of his clientele are either seasonal residents or people who don’t want to relinquish POA to their children because of pride or independence or taboo.
or whose kids are untrustworthy.
My wife is a bank attorney and we make a nice living helping her banks stop unscrupulous adult children, other relatives, and assorted hangers-on from stealing aged Mom & Dad’s money via misusing POAs and other legit but risky legal arrangements.
THIS. One of the uncomfortable questions I have to ask my (mostly elderly) patients is if anyone helps them manage their finances. It’s a big red flag. My own mother was enraged to find that when her aunt and cousin visited her mother in a nursing home, their travel expenses and gifts they brought (flowers, coffee, candy) were charged against her mother’s estate. I don’t quite get that either.
A smaller accounting firm might be your best bet. The man who looks after my mother in law’s finances has used his experience with her to expand his business into elder care. My MIL lives in a care home in Canada, we live in England so the accountant arranges for a companion who spends time with her, gets her out into the community, takes her to doctors appointments, shopsfor Christmas etc…all of the things that the home does not have time for and that we would do if we lived there.
They can be, yes, though it’s not particularly common.
Many accounting professionals also have some kind of E&O insurance, which could also be used to help you recover damages from a dishonest bookkeeper.