Ep 502: Financial Caregiving 101: What You Need To Know Before You or Your Parent Gets Sick

HerMoney with Jean Chatzky

Jean Chatzky Her Money

Business, Investing

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When you're suddenly put in charge of an aging parent’s finances, the emotional toll is heavy, and the financial fallout can be even heavier. In this episode, Jean Chatzky is joined by certified financial planner and MarketWatch columnist Beth Pinsker, author of My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving. Together, they unpack Beth’s personal journey of managing her mother’s finances through illness, surgery, and estate settlement. Even with decades of experience writing about money, Beth found herself caught off-guard by just how complicated — and expensive — caregiving can be without the right documents and conversations in place. What You’ll Learn: The most overlooked (and affordable) legal documents everyone needs The difference between joint accounts, POA, and transfer-on-death How to prep for financial caregiving before a medical emergency The unexpected costs of not planning ahead — and how to avoid them How to be “the person who gets called” in a crisis — and what to ask in advance 💡 P.S. Need help getting your own financial life in order before you take on someone else’s? Check out our FinanceFixx program, our signature coaching experience that helps you get organized, take control of your spending, and build a plan that actually works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's one email that would save you from a year in court and $18,000 to file conservatorship over your parent who has dementia.
0:12.9	If you are that daughter we were talking about, the person who's everybody else's person, make a family map is what I call it, but not all the lines are blood-connected lines.
0:22.5	Like, I have a lot of single women friends who I'm their person.
0:29.1	Hey, everyone, welcome to Hermione. I'm Gene Chatsky. Today, we are diving into a topic that
0:35.5	so many of us are navigating right now, caring for our
0:40.6	older parents, aging parents, financially, emotionally, legally, and often without a road map.
0:49.6	If you have ever gotten that call, the one that suddenly makes you the person in charge as I have.
0:58.9	You know exactly how disorienting it can be. And if you haven't gotten that call yet, well,
1:05.4	it will come. Consider this ample warning. And let's be frank, even if your life situation is such that you will never get that call,
1:19.6	then I think you should continue to listen to this episode anyway, because even if you won't be managing somebody else's finances, someone will eventually
1:30.5	need to step in and manage your finances. And today's conversation is also about making their
1:38.9	job a little easier down the line. Let's take a quick break back in a second. All right, I have to say it. I finally tried the
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	...

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