My friend’s mom is on a fixed income and is very irresponsible with her money. He is currently managing many of her bills, but often finds that she’s overdrawn and/or “accidentally forgot” to pay something. She just missed a mortgage payment which is causing a lot of consternation, as you might imagine.
Is there a service that will basically assume responsibility for your bills, pay everything on your behalf and then give you the remaining money as your allowance for the month? The stress of this situation is putting a lot of strain on their relationship and I kind of feel like she doesn’t take it seriously because it’s her son doing all of the dirty work.
I’m sure there is, even if there isn’t you could probably hire a local CPA or bookkeeper to do it for you. The question is, if she’s already overdrawn*, can she afford the extra money to spend on this?
*I’m assuming she doesn’t have the extra money, it could be that she has plenty of extra money and that she’s just reckless with her checking account.
Also, if you do hire someone to pay all the bills, make sure they’re all getting paid. I’ve seen local business that say ‘here’s all my money, here’s all my bills, take care of it’ and a year later they find out the person they were paying to do it was just keeping all the money. They find out because they’re suddenly in collections and foreclosure and never knew anything was wrong.
Make sure you never let the address or phone numbers get changed away from her house so she (or her son) always knows what’s going on and that they’re always opening the mail to make sure everything is getting paid on time and checks drawn off her checking account is going to who it’s supposed to be going to.
I thought about this too but between all the late charges and hits to her credit-- as well as the potential to lose her house if she continually forgets to pay the mortgage-- I still think it would be worthwhile.
I already suggested online bill pay but I feel like she needs someone with some authority to tell her what is and isn’t feasible within her constraints.
Is she a senior citizen? You might want to contact a senior center where she lives. They quite often provide services like this for senior citizens for free or very cheaply.
The friend may also just need to be more involved. It’s an uncomfortable and unpleasant process for parents and children, but if a parent isn’t able to handle certain activities of daily living anymore, passing them on to a child is a viable option. Suddenly a service like online bill pay becomes a useful tool instead of a confusing contraption more likely to cause trouble than solve it.
Paying all my father’s bills for him was easily one of the lightest burdens I had to take on throughout his dementia.
US Social Security has a Representative Payee program, but it looks like Representative Payees are restricted in what they can charge the customer. In other words, it looks like this is more of a way that you can help out senile old Great Aunt Mabel without a full guardianship order than a business opportunity that you can advertise widely.
If one can do this sort of stuff professionally - what regulations exist? Do you have to be a CPA? Licensed Financial Advisor?
There are some services like that. In my experience, they’re usually just individuals who work from home most of the time. Whether they’re trustworthy or not would depend on the individual. I don’t know anything that’s got some kind of corporate structure behind it.
I agree that this is a place where a DIY approach is actually better.
Here’s what I’d do:
get a trust account set up - i.e. an account in the mother’s name, but the friend is the only signer.
all income is first deposited into the trust account.
the trust account pays out all of the regular/fixed expenses like mortgage and utility.
the trust account pays out to the mother an amount for her discretionary spending. How they implement this is going to depend on what she needs. A second checking account might be OK if she can avoid overdrafts. Perhaps better: a mix of cash and pre-paid debit cards. There are even re-loadable debit cards… just watch out for things like ATM fees.
use this opportunity to make sure that other end-of-life issues are taken care of - is there a will? Do they need a trust for the estate? Review the beneficiaries on life insurance and retirement accounts (because these bypass the will). Are medical POA or DNR documents in place? Do kids have a list of assets and passwords?
None of this is fun, but doing it ahead of time will make life (and death) a lot easier for everyone.