At All Costs: Caregivers Need More Awareness of Financial Risks
Monitoring finances and avoiding scams is another role caregivers may need to manage
As a family caregiver, I perform my usual daily caregiving tasks: logging into our family's bank accounts, checking credit card statements, scrolling through my husband's text messages and glancing at his WhatsApp chats.
I am not paid for this work that I began to shoulder this year, and I work full time as a college professor. Still, I was unprepared for the complexities and possible hardships connected to this role of managing the finances of a beloved family member who needs assistance or is incapable of those tasks.
November is National Family Caregivers Month, a role that many people perceive as physically tending to an infirm family member and managing the complexities of their health care. But becoming a financial caregiver — defined as taking care of someone else's financial matters big or small — is just as important, yet rarely discussed.
This silence and ambiguity leaves many family members unprepared to step into that role and unguarded against today's financial threats to elders and the ill, including scams. I know this firsthand.
Even though my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's several years ago, I did not identify as his family caregiver. Medication controlled his tremors; on weekends he went for long bike rides, and he still ran his own successful business.
Unbeknownst to me, the very medication that controlled his tremors also caused a side effect that induced him to make poor decisions with our personal finances.
What did I need to take care of? But unbeknownst to me, the very medication that controlled his tremors also caused a side effect that induced him to make poor decisions with our personal finances. When he received that prescription years ago, the doctors told us to be on the lookout for gambling, but they should have warned us about risky financial behavior of any kind.
Married for decades, we had always talked through big financial decisions but maintained separate bank accounts and credit cards. I earned a steady salary; he rode the highs and lows of self-employment.
Financial Scams
Evenings, I engaged with our children or did yarn work; he read books and followed the stock market, buying and selling. But our routines — and my life — turned upside down when I recently discovered missing money — large amounts of missing money.
He wired cash to someone he met in an online financial forum who pretended to be a successful investor willing to share his precise money moves.
Of course, our family is not alone.
Family caregivers lose earning potential — a lifetime average of $237,000 according to the American Association of Retired Persons, or AARP.
The Federal Trade Commission announced that people lost $10 billion to scams in 2023. Older adults, when scammed, lost more money than young people.
To resolve this crisis that can deplete savings and leave older people without resources or ways to pay for care, conversations around caregiving must better prepare family members to recognize when a loved one needs financial caregiving and to know how to steward the family finances. This will help countless families as there are 43.5 million family caregivers in this country, according to the Family Caregiver Alliance.
A caregiver is expensive. President Joe Biden's 2024 proclamation on National Family Caregivers Month framed it in pocketbook terms: families face the high price of caregiving in the U.S. while professional caregivers earn low wages.
Being a caregiver has its own costs. Family caregivers lose earning potential — a lifetime average of $237,000 according to the American Association of Retired Persons, or AARP.
Some people — like my spouse — need a financial caregiver before spending a dime on physical caregivers.
Yet some people — like my spouse — need a financial caregiver before spending a dime on physical caregivers. Cognitive impairments related to aging or neurodegenerative disease can leave a person physically independent but without the full executive functioning the brain needs to think through financial complexities.
For example, Parkinson's disease can cause mildly impaired cognition before the patient's motor symptoms require caregiving. A 2024 study states that executive functioning is one of the first cognitive domains to be impaired with Parkinson's.
Women's Role
Since 75% of family caregivers are women, financial caregiving often also entails learning a new set of skills and upending family gender roles. Although a growing number of women have wage parity with their husbands, according to the Pew Research Center, a team of researchers this year found that women across all generations remain less financially literate than men.
On the positive side, my husband and I worked together with a financial adviser to gain a full view of our finances, and I pooled our money into one bank account that I control. He tapered off that medicine, and though his tremor partially returned, his thinking cleared.
Wrangling over finances while trying to repair the damage to our relationship has taken an emotional toll that all types of family caregivers experience.
The crisis passed, but financial dangers still lurk. With my husband's permission, I monitor his phone regularly to block potential scammers, knowing that I can never thwart every fraudster out there.
Despite the positive outcome, the process was arduous and that money is gone forever. Wrangling over finances while trying to repair the damage to our relationship has taken an emotional toll that all types of family caregivers experience.
"I Care…" is this year's theme for National Family Caregivers Month. According to the Caregiver Action Network, "more than half of those providing care don't recognize themselves as caregivers."
A more direct and proactive discussion of financial caregiving from medical professionals can help family members be aware of financial caregiving as a necessity and a way to show they care.
