Helping Your Aging Parents Get Their Affairs In Order

Both, together. The book is written to you, the adult child, with prompts designed to make a sometimes-awkward conversation easier. You and your aging or elderly parent complete it at your own pace; nothing has to be done in one sitting.

No. One book covers both. Part 6 is a complete second record set — fourteen more pages with their own key people, legal documents, bank and investment accounts, insurance, bills, property, devices, medical snapshot, and care wishes. Banks, insurers, and Social Security treat your parents as two entirely separate files, so keeping their papers apart from the start saves untangling them later, and after a first death the second set is the one you'll use most.

Yes. Medicare generally does not pay for long-term custodial care — the day-to-day help with bathing, dressing, and eating that most families actually need — and it doesn't cover assisted living rent or adult day care either. The book gives you a checklist of those gaps, a worksheet for the monthly difference between what care costs where your parent lives and what comes in each month, a timeline page for the Medicaid look-back (commonly five years, but it varies by state and does change, so confirm with your state's Medicaid office), and tour sheets you fill in at the facility rather than that evening. It records your numbers; it isn't financial or legal advice.

A will says who inherits what; this organizer is the practical map for everything else — where the will is, who to call, which accounts and policies exist, what your parent wants, and what to do in the first 30 days. It complements a will, trust, and directive rather than replacing them, and it isn't legal advice.

It's built to be safe. It records where things are and who to call, and where passwords are kept — not the full account numbers themselves — so it stays useful to your family and useless to a thief if it's misplaced. Keep it somewhere you and your parent agree on.

That's exactly who it's written for. The conversation is broken into small, concrete sections, so you can start with the easy parts — contacts, doctors, where documents live — and work up to the rest over time. You're organizing where things are, not taking over control.

Yes — a paperback fill-in organizer with labeled spaces and prompts throughout. Order the paperback and we mail it to you, or download the PDF and start filling it in tonight. Published under the pen name M. E. Hart as part of the Retirement In Order series.

Buy it if you're the one who has to ask — where the will is, who the accountant is, what happens if your mother falls on a Tuesday. Don't buy it expecting legal documents: this is 80 pages of blanks, not a will, a trust or an advance directive, and it sits alongside those. It's also the wrong book if your parent has already done all of this and handed you the folder.