SeniorTruth

Question: After 49 years of marriage, I recently became a widow. My husband always handled the banking and investments. I get all these monthly statements. I need to know my financial situation, but don’t know where to start.
Answer: I’m sorry for your loss. Handling unfamiliar financial issues is especially difficult in the midst of the [...]

A recently-published paper by the Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison questions whether older adults truly know their spouses’ end-of-life treatment preferences.
The authors conclude that:

A study just released by AARP confirms what we expected, unpaid family and friends provide billions of dollars worth of care annually. In 2006, the $350 billion of care was more than spent for the total Medicare program. Without family and friends helping out, our care system would collapse.
In California alone, the value of [...]

For years we’ve been warning about the growth of light-weight “credentials” that are used to entice and comfort seniors into making questionable financial decisions. We first wrote about it in “Choose the Right Financial Planner” in the Spring 2004 H.E.L.P. Is Here magazine.
A week at summer camp is more work than obtaining some lofty-sounding titles. [...]

Under recently proposed rules, each California attorney would have to tell clients if the attorney does not have malpractice insurance. The attorney would also have to notify the CA Bar, and the fact that the attorney does not have malpractice insurance would be posted on the Bar’s website.
I support these disclosure proposals, in general. Attorneys [...]