Stop Cognitive Decline from Wreaking Havoc
Some cognitive decline is a normal part of aging, but when it interferes with daily life tasks, including understanding and meeting financial obligations, it can quickly become a serious risk to an individual’s well-being.
It can also cause added stress for caregivers who may need help handling the additional burdens cognitive decline can bring. Some financial advisors are stepping up to help clients and their caregivers by offering practical advice, acting as advocates, and creating safe spaces for ongoing discussions.
Cognitive decline is affecting more people as the population ages. There were more than 55 million people worldwide living with dementia in 2020, according to Alzheimer’s Disease International. That’s expected to double every 20 years, hitting 78 million in 2030 and 139 million in 2050.
Here are six ways families should deal with issues pertaining to cognitive decline, say financial advisors:
Make provisions early. Cognitive decline can be a slow process. But it’s important to ensure a second set of eyes on financial accounts before there’s a real problem, says Patrick Simasko, an elder law attorney and financial advisor at Simasko Law in Mount Clemens, Mich. He encourages clients to list a trusted individual on their accounts who can be contacted if the advisor has a question that the client can’t answer or to verify the appropriateness of transactions.
It’s also important to encourage clients to have a financial power of attorney in place in case it becomes necessary. This document gives an appointee the ability to make banking, real estate, and other types of financial decisions on another person’s behalf. Even if something is already in place, it may need to be updated, Simasko says.
Create a financial cheat sheet. Matt Liebman, founding partner and chief executive officer at Amplius Wealth Advisors in Blue Bell, Pa., encourages families to create a one or two-page document with contact information for important people, such as the financial advisor, estate planning attorney, and tax accountant. Also list information, such as where the insurance policies are kept and from what accounts the bills are paid.
This can help the individual with cognitive issues first, but then aid family members who eventually take over financial responsibility—at a time when stress levels may already be running high.
“This is incredibly helpful to save time and anxiety at a time when something already difficult is going on,” Liebman says. “When everybody is healthy and well is the time to get provisions in place,” he says.
Don’t beat around the bush. Early warning signs of cognitive decline can include having the same conversation a few times, seeing the individual has made financial decisions that are out of the ordinary, or noticing a change in personality or financial priorities. While it’s tempting to ignore these issues, it’s important to address them promptly, West says. Clients are likely to be defensive, but you have to risk a little bit of discomfort, he says.
When possible, West tries to tie the unusual behavior to past decisions to illustrate to the client the difference he’s noticed. In one case, he suspected a deeper cognitive issue, but it turned out the client hadn’t been sleeping because of medication. Once she was on a regular schedule, she told him she appreciated his candor because she was procrastinating about getting the problem checked out. “If you suspect something, say something,” West says. “It may be a little awkward in the short run, but it could be the best thing you do for the person and the family.”
Don’t hesitate to bring in some experts. A financial advisor can be a helpful intermediary for family members who have little financial experience who need to take over accounts for a relative.
Early in his career, West worked with a woman who was the primary caretaker for her husband. She hadn’t been involved in the finances before and needed help understanding the basics. To make it more palatable, he tried to present concepts using simple language and focus on specific goals she identified, such as hiring high-quality at-home care for her husband. Instead of taking a big-picture approach, he broke down the steps she’d need to take and what portfolio changes were necessary to help make this a reality.
It may take a network of professionals to arrange financial matters for a family member. West says he may refer clients to aging life professionals to help with caregiving responsibilities. Or he could bring in tax professionals on issues pertaining to IRA distributions and medical expenses.
Tag team if necessary. West had a different client who was in denial about her cognitive issues and was refusing to let her daughter exercise a previously drafted power of attorney. When the mother repeatedly insisted that the daughter was trying to take control unnecessarily, he played intermediary.
He gently reminded her that it had been her idea to have her daughter serve as power of attorney and that bringing her into the decision-making process would ensure everyone was on the same page. This helped the client accept her daughter’s involvement while maintaining a sense of control. He made sure the mom stayed informed for many years, well into the later stages of dementia.
Keep an eye out for financial exploitation. Older people, in particular, are especially susceptible to scams, and someone with cognitive decline can be even more vulnerable. Don’t be afraid to reach out to the trusted individual if something seems amiss, Simasko says.
He had a client in her early 70s who sent $300,000 from her bank account to someone she met on the internet. He found out about the first withdrawal after she asked to withdraw the same amount from her financial account at his firm, claiming it was necessary to avoid being charged with money laundering by the Afghani government.
The client wouldn’t believe it was a scam, so Simasko called in the county sheriff to provide additional support and context. “You have to stop it quickly because the damage can be irreversible.”
READ @BARRONS.COM
Money Red Flags to address before a spouse dies
One spouse or partner often handles most financial matters for the household. If that spouse or partner dies first, the survivor can be left with a hot mess. Survivors need to navigate their finances at a time when they’re vulnerable, grieving, and coping with living alone. To add to their stress, there can frequently be looming deadlines with penalties for late payments.
In general, it’s more common that women outlive men, making female survivors the ones who will be sorting out the finances. However, in all situations, there will be financial stresses on the survivor when the spouse or partner dies. To help alleviate these stresses, it makes sense for couples to plan for the inevitability that one spouse or partner will be living alone at some time in the future.
Let’s look at five red flags for retired couples’ money management, along with tips for addressing each situation.
1. Not Understanding All Sources Of Retirement Income
Both spouses should know about all sources and amounts of their retirement income, including Social Security, pensions, systematic withdrawals from invested assets, and any income that’s being generated from working. You’ll also want to understand how retirement income will likely change when one spouse passes away. Usually, a couple’s household income drops much more than living expenses do, often resulting in the retired widow’s money crunch.
Tip: Make sure both spouses are familiar with all sources of retirement income. Plan ahead to make sure the surviving spouse will have enough money to pay for living expenses despite the drop in income.
2. Being Unfamiliar With The Budget For Living Expenses
It’s essential that both spouses understand how much they spend on living expenses, both regular monthly bills and one-time costs that are paid throughout the year. When you’ve prepared a realistic, thorough budget, you’ll know whether the lifetime retirement income the survivor can expect will be sufficient to cover that person’s living expenses.
Examples of regular monthly expenses include mortgage or rent, car payments, utilities, food, credit card payments, premiums for Medicare and supplemental insurance, and other insurance premiums, such as car insurance. Examples of one-time expenses include property taxes and homeowner’s insurance.
It’s also important to identify expenses that cover must-have vs. nice-to-have purchases. When the household income drops after one spouse dies, hopefully the survivor’s retirement income will at least cover the must-have living expenses.
Tip: Both spouses should participate in preparing their budget, and they should understand how it will change when one spouse passes away.
3. Being Unaware Of Payment Details For Living Expenses
When one spouse passes away, the surviving spouse will need to know how their regular and one-time expenses are paid. Possibilities include:
- Sending a check via the mail;
- Triggering an online payment from a checking account; or
- Setting up automatic payments via a checking account, debit card, or credit card.
Essential details to know include the account name and number, usernames, and current passwords.
Tip: Prepare an inventory of all accounts that require regular or one-time payments, including all pertinent payment details, and make sure both spouses know how to access this inventory.
4. Being Ignorant Of Credit Cards Or Checking Accounts That Are Only In One Spouse’s Name
Most credit cards are generally issued to one person, who can then add a spouse or partner as an authorized user. When the credit card holder dies, the financial institution usually cancels the card within a few weeks of being notified of the death, even if the spouse or partner has a card with their own name on it.
This situation can cause serious problems if any living expenses are paid automatically by credit card or if both spouses rely on the credit card for most of their purchases. The consequences are the same for checking accounts that have been issued only to one spouse or partner.
Tip: Make sure both spouses have at least one credit card for which they’re the primary card holder. Another possibility is to obtain a credit card or cards that are issued as a joint account and will continue after the death of one spouse or partner. Also make sure both spouses or partners are listed on at least one joint checking account that pays any of the household expenses.
READ MORE @FORBES.COM
Four Common Election Scams to Avoid This Year
Criminals may target voters with bogus registration sites, requests for donations to fake PACs, and other fraud.
As Michael Bruemmer, 65, shopped for a Christmas tree at a Kiwanis lot near his Austin, Texas, home, a voter registration volunteer approached him with an iPad, wanting to register him for the next election. The registration ploy was a scam, but unbeknownst to the scammer, Bruemmer was not an easy target: He’s a fraud expert and vice president of data breach resolution for Experian, a data analytics and consumer credit reporting company. Bruemmer quickly noticed misspellings on the supposed registration page.
“I said, ‘First of all, I’m already registered to vote, and second, your site is fake,’” recalls Bruemmer.
The flustered scammer stammered and gave excuses but quickly recovered — then, Bruemmer says, the guy asked him for his phone so he could download a registration app, “and I said, ‘I’m sorry, sir. You’re not going to download anything.’”
That was two years ago. Scammers have only grown more sophisticated, in part due to advances in and availability of AI, and they’re likely to use this year’s election to target your data and cash. Here are four common scams and ways to protect yourself.
1. Voter registration scams
When Bruemmer’s scammer offered to download a voter registration app on his phone, he likely would have downloaded a malicious app instead, allowing cybercriminals to steal personal data such as payment information and login credentials. Some apps “can suck people’s information out over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth,” Bruemmer cautions.
The more common problem, however, involves links to fake voter registration forms, which scammers send by phone, email or text. Those links may be phishing scams to collect personal data (such as your passwords and Social Security number) for or allow others to access your devices, according to Experian.
Ways to protect yourself:
- If someone claims you’re not registered to vote and offers to register you by phone, hang up. You cannot register by phone, email or text. In all 50 states, you can only register to vote online, by mail, or in person at a local election office.
- The safest option is to register at a government location or do so by mail. If you do register online, do not use unsolicited links.
- Voter registration drives often occur at events such as festivals and farmers markets, and sometimes the filled-out forms are left on tables where anyone can see them, the Identity Theft Resource Center warns. A better option is to take a form, fill it out, and mail it or deliver it in person to an election office.
2. Robocalls
Days before the January New Hampshire primary, as many as 25,000 Granite State residents received a robocall from what sounded like Joe Biden but was actually an AI-generated voice. The message: Don’t vote. “Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” the fake Biden said. In response, the Federal Communications Commission issued a declaratory ruling in February that made “voice cloning technology used in common robocall scams” illegal.
Despite the ruling, voters should remain on high alert for AI-generated audio, whether in phone calls or social media posts.
“The one genre of misinformation I’m most worried about for the election is fake audio,” says Dan Evon, senior manager of education design for the News Literacy Project. With video, he explains, visual cues can help indicate it’s fake, such as speeches where the words don’t match the candidates’ mouths. With a robocall, “There’s not as many obvious red flags to indicate whether something is false.”
Scammers could use fake audio for multiple purposes, from spreading misinformation to directing voters to a fraudulent donation site.
Ways to protect yourself:
- Be suspicious of robocalls and confirm whether the information is accurate. If a robocall tells you that your polling place will be closed on Election Day, for example, don’t believe it. Instead, follow up with your local election office.
- “If you receive a suspicious call from someone trying to influence your vote, the best thing to do is just hang up,” notes a consumer alert from North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein. And never trust a robocall that directs you to donate, Bruemmer advises.
- Be skeptical of unexpected calls from someone claiming to be a politician or a celebrity. In recent months, scammers have released deepfake videos of famous people such as Tom Hanks, Elon Musk and Dolly Parton for fraudulent product endorsements.
3. Donation scams
Cybercriminals also use fake audio to request campaign contributions. In some cases, a supposed candidate may ask for a donation and tell you to push a number on your phone, which directs you to a representative, reports ID Watchdog, a consumer site from Equifax. Or an actual human may call, encouraging you to donate. You may also receive emails or texts with donation links; as with bogus voter registration links, donation links could also be phishing scams.
Some solicitations come from fake political action committees (PACs). The FBI defines scam PACs as “fraudulent political action committees designed to reroute political contributions for personal gain,” which is a federal crime. Bruemmer compares their tactics to phony charities that raise money following natural disasters. They frequently seem credible and often employ high-pressure, emotional appeals.
Ways to protect yourself:
- If you want to donate to candidates, go to their certified site. “Don’t answer any phone calls, don’t click on any links in an email or text, even if it’s from somebody you recognize or you might think is reputable,” Bruemmer says. “Someone could have taken over their account and started spamming you.”
- Don’t rely on Caller ID: Scammers can impersonate a political campaign phone number through a tactic known as spoofing.
- Another reason to not answer calls: Cybercriminals only need a few seconds to record your voice and use AI to create a dialogue that could evade authentications with your financial institution or credit card company.
- Visit the Federal Election Commission’s website and search to see if a PAC is registered. If it’s not, it’s not legal, the FBI states.
- If you’ve been targeted by a scam PAC, contact your local FBI field office and ask to speak to an election crimes coordinator.
4. Fake surveys, petitions and polls
Opinion polls are almost as common as campaign rallies during election season, but be careful when participating in a survey or signing a petition.
The process often seems innocuous. Someone contacts you by phone, email, text or in person to answer a few questions. Or you might receive an urgent email — often featuring a well-known politician’s name and photo — asking you to sign a petition and make a small contribution, notes former Federal Election Commission Chair Ann M. Ravel. The problem, however, is when you’re asked to provide personal information, such as your birth date and email address. Some scammers may offer a gift card or other prize as an incentive to participate in the survey, and then request your Social Security number, home address and other info — including your credit card number to cover taxes and shipping costs for your prize.
Ways to protect yourself:
- A legitimate survey may ask how you to plan to vote along with your political affiliation, and surveyors may request demographic information, such as age or race, notes Equifax’s ID Watchdog. But don’t share more specific information. Age is one thing, your birth date is another. Decline to provide your name, address, email address, Social Security number or driver’s license number.
- As with other election scams, don’t click on survey links from unsolicited emails and texts.
- If someone conducting a survey or poll offers a prize, don’t participate. “Real political polls rarely offer prizes for participation, and none would ask for a credit card number,” ID Watchdog states.
READ @AARP.ORG
These Are the Best U.S. National Parks
THE 63 NATIONAL PARKS in the U.S.—what writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner once called “our best idea”—encompass a dizzying variety of worlds. Spoiled beyond belief, we can choose between dense woodland and bone-dry desert, inaccessible mountain peaks and protected swaths of ocean.
In Zion, endangered condors soar above red escarpments, while in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, lackadaisical banana slugs mosey through old-growth rainforest.
Every summer, Americans head out to make the most of these public lands, but where to begin? We grounded our recommendations in cold, hard numbers that reveal, definitively, which park is best. We collected data from every Congress-designated national park across four main criteria: the size of the crowds, the quantity and quality of hiking routes, availability of campsites and access to other recreational activities like horseback riding, mountain biking and fishing. We pulled data on hiking trails and other activities from AllTrails, the largest aggregate website of U.S. trails, and other numbers, including camping figures, directly from the National Park Service.
Nothing destroys the tranquility of nature like limboing through a sea of selfie sticks, so, conscious of crowd-averse travelers, we gave the most weight to visitor data—ascribing 50% of the total score to crowd sizes—then factored in the other categories evenly to tally each park’s final score.
Here, a winner that will make you rethink what you thought you knew about our parks, a breakdown of the numbers and a guide to planning a summer of outdoor adventure.
A Surprising Victor
Most people tend to associate national parks with a few predictable places—Yellowstone, Zion, Yosemite—but when we crunched the numbers, an unexpected winner emerged: Isle Royale National Park, a wooded archipelago near the northwestern edge of Lake Superior in Michigan, is, according to our metrics, the best.
About 508 miles of hiking routes crisscross scraggly boreal forest and follow windswept coastline. Accessible only by ferry, private boat or seaplane, this is true wilderness: a land of moose and wolves and the drama forever playing out between them.
Backpackers can pitch a tent in one of the park’s 36 rustic campgrounds, but visitors will find plenty of day-hiking opportunities, too, and the circa-1956 Rock Harbor Lodge makes up for a lack of bells and whistles with an endless reserve of old-school charm.
Only around 25,000 visitors come to Isle Royale every year, but the park scores high for hiking infrastructure. On the 40-mile Greenstone Ridge Trail, look out for knobby-kneed moose and take in the vastness of Lake Superior.
Travelers will find a touch of the sublime on long solo treks and early-morning dips at what feels like the edge of the world—even if the social-media shots don’t compare to those of some blockbuster parks farther west.
Our runners-up, North Cascades, Wash., and Sequoia & Kings Canyon, Calif., scored high for plenty of diversions and small crowds—though you can access both, unlike our winner, easily by car. In North Cascades, around 400 miles of hiking routes lead up glaciated peaks and to electric-blue lakes, while at Sequoia & Kings Canyon, campers can choose from 1,213 sites, including dreamy spots near the Giant Forest shaded by mighty ponderosa pines.
The Question of Crowds
Whether you blame Instagram or the pent-up wanderlust that came from Covid-19 lockdowns, it’s no secret that these days, the soul-sucking experience of shuffling from viewpoint to viewpoint amid hordes of people often leaves a national park visit nonrestorative. It’s gotten so bad that parks like Rocky Mountain and Arches have had to impose timed-entry reservations.
As we sorted through the data, we found that simply looking at lists of the “most visited” parks doesn’t tell the whole story. Many of the country’s most popular sites are enormous and offer hundreds of miles of trails, making them actually feel less crowded than smaller parks. To achieve a more accurate crowding score, we combined each park’s 2023 visitation numbers with its total acreage.
Unsurprisingly, photogenic destinations like Acadia in Maine—accessible from many Northeast cities—and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the border between Tennessee and North Carolina, topped the list as the most crowded. Other names you might have heard of similarly slid down our overall rankings due to their continuing struggles with overcrowding. Spread over just 143,843 acres, Utah’s Zion National Park, for example, attracted a staggering 4.6 million visitors last year.
On the other end of the spectrum, the most remote parks in Alaska attract only five-figure visitor counts. Gates of the Arctic and Lake Clark, where ornery grizzlies roam untouched wilderness, had the fewest visitors per acre, but their lack of trails and campsites put them lower in the overall ranking.
Hiking and Camping
Perhaps the best part of being in a national park is indulging your feral self: scrambling up a craggy summit on all fours, cooking over an open fire, putting a pause on social norms like showering to sleep in a tent for a week straight.
To determine the best parks for hiking, we combined the number of unique paths listed on AllTrails with the total route mileage and average user rating of those trails to create a unified hiking score. California’s Yosemite, home to a sizable section of the storied John Muir Trail, emerged as the best park for hikers. Acadia, with trails that showcase the sea and the best of New England autumn, earned second place, while Great Smoky Mountains and Colorado’s Rocky Mountain national parks tied for third. Looking to embark on a multiday trek? Yosemite and Great Smoky Mountains each has more than 140 different backpacking-specific routes on AllTrails.
To determine the best parks for camping, we fused the total number of campsites with the number of visitors per park. Though Yellowstone has the most campsites at 2,139, less-traveled Sequoia & Kings Canyon earned the overall best camping score. The 214 car-friendly sites at Sequoia’s Lodgepole Campground, for example, hug a section of the mighty Kaweah River.
Others might prefer a trip to Death Valley in California—the third best park for camping—where only 1.1 million annual visitors share 804 campsites spread across 3.4 million acres. Though you’d be wise to avoid summer, when temperatures often hit a mind-melting 120 degrees, a night under the stars in Death Valley appeals in the cooler months.
Something for Everyone
Not everyone’s idea of a good time involves daylong hikes and open-air sleeping. So, for a more well-rounded breakdown of our parks, we also looked to AllTrails data and assigned a score based on the range of other, non-hiking recreational activities offered in each park, including cycling, snowshoeing and 13 other activities.
Acadia delivers enjoyable bike rides on the shaded crushed-stone carriage roads near Jordan Pond—make sure to include a stop at the Victorian-era tea house nearby—and the park’s quality birding and sea kayaking opportunities helped it edge out the competition as the top park for non-hiking adventures. Experienced anglers won’t be surprised to hear that Yellowstone came in close behind thanks to the superlative fly fishing to be had on the Madison, Lamar and Yellowstone Rivers. And when summer is a distant memory, try Wyoming’s Grand Teton, Montana’s Glacier or Colorado’s Rocky Mountain national parks, all tied in the number three spot, in part for the opportunities to hit extensive snowshoeing trails.
The Unscientific Analysis of a Parks Obsessive
Our national-park expert steps away from the numbers to share her personal favorites
As a die-hard outdoors nerd who spent a year living in a minivan while visiting all 63 U.S. national parks, I was filled with effervescent glee when I pulled up the ranking team’s final data to see that Isle Royale National Park, a place that few non-Michiganders have even heard of, topped our list for best overall national park. I hiked its famed Greenstone Ridge Trail in 2020, and though I suffered more mosquito bites than I can count, I walked away in awe.
I’ll never get over just how big a moose is in person or how small you can feel in a seemingly endless boreal forest. The absence of crowds allowed for so many of my most memorable moments exploring national parks—times I was forced to fall back on my own self-reliance, get a little uncomfortable and be present.
Other less-traveled favorites of mine also cracked our top 5, including Big Bend in Texas, which wowed me with dizzying night skies and limestone canyons that pop with unlikely colors. Due to their lack of trails and campgrounds, some Alaska parks ranked lower than I would have liked, but one rose to the top for its balance of accessibility and unbridled nature. Despite being largely explorable by car, Denali and its caribou, blueberry-munching grizzlies and miles of tundra introduced me to a truer notion of wilderness than I ever thought possible. Its sheer, undeveloped hugeness staggered me.
Numbers, of course, never tell the whole story. Utah’s Capitol Reef didn’t even make the top 30, but I often recommend it to others, admittedly in part because of experiences I could never have planned—like watching ravens gather on cliffs at the end of a hike up Grand Wash. The beauty of America’s best idea is that there’s something for everyone, and no two trips will ever be the same, no matter where you go. —Emily Pennington
READ @WSJ.COM
According to SHRM, a 2021 Employee Benefits Survey conducted by XPertHR showed that roughly 82% of employers studied matched a portion of their employees’ contributions while the remaining 18% didn’t provide any matches at all.
Source: shrm.org, 2021
Did you know?
Looking for the best beach of 2023?
According to Forbes, the best beach of 2023 was St. George Island State Park, the Florida Panhandle. This long barrier island, far from urban areas, is a favorite destination for crystal-clear water and white sand.
Source: Forbes.com, May 2023
On the Bright Side
Investment Advisory Services offered through Trek Financial LLC., a (SEC) Registered Investment Adviser. Information presented is for educational purposes only. It should not be considered specific investment advice, does not take into consideration your specific situation, and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any securities or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and are not guaranteed, and past performance is no guarantee of future results. For specific tax advice on any strategy, consult with a qualified tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed herein. DISCLOSURES
