If the thought of navigating your parents’ finances and care makes you anxious, you’re not alone. In this video, Paul Sydlansky, CFP® walks through three key areas to help you simplify this process: getting organized, ensuring estate plans are current, and clarifying care preferences. Watch for guidance on starting these conversations.

Topics Discussed:

• Organizing key contacts
• Updating estate planning documents
• Understanding care preferences

Transcript:

Hi everybody. I’m Paul Sydlansky and welcome to Unlocking Hidden Value. Today, we’re going to talk about something that we’ve been hearing a lot from our clients, which is the struggles that they face in helping their aging parents. Having these discussions can be stressful, complex, and most often, folks don’t even know where to begin. Today, we’re going to give you three areas that you can focus on to help your aging parents plan.

The first is organization. Start by getting a list together of all the contacts in your parents’ life, whether that’s attorneys, doctors, CPAs, financial planners. Do you know who these people are? Do you have their phone numbers, their emails? A list comprising all of these important decision-makers is a great place to start.

The second area where you can get organized is around their documentation, specifically their estate plan documentation. Do you know where their power of attorneys are? Healthcare proxy? Any of these documents you need to have access to, and you want to make sure that they’re in an easily accessible place for your parents and you. While you might have the documents, are they up to date? Are all of the right people still in the roles that they need to be? Whether that’s executors, trustees, beneficiaries. Oftentimes, estate plans can be outdated and things change. You really want to make sure that you have all the right people in the right positions to be able to help your family.

The third area that you want to start focusing on is care. More specifically, what are your parents’ wishes as they get older? Do they want to stay in their own home? Do they want to move to an assisted living facility? Do they have long-term care coverage? Understanding what your parents’ wishes are are the first steps in helping you build a plan to make sure that they’re cared for in the way they want to be.

These conversations are not easy, but you need to start somewhere. If you need help starting this conversation or have questions, please feel free to reach out. We’d be happy to help.

If you found this helpful, please also feel free to pass it along to someone else. Thank you and we’ll see you soon. 

Lake Road Advisors, a Fee-Only, independent financial planning firm with offices in Corning, NY, Ithaca, NY and Portland, OR works with clients virtually all across the country. Paul Sydlansky, the founder of Lake Road Advisors LLC, has worked in the financial services industry for 20+ years. Prior to founding Lake Road Advisors, Paul worked at Morgan Stanley in Manhattan for 13 years. While at Morgan Stanley, Paul was a senior-level manager within the Institutional Equities Department. In 2018 he was named to Investopedia’s Top 100 Financial Advisors list. Paul received a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Marist College and holds an MBA from New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Paul is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® and a member of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) and the XY Planning Network. They can be reached by phone at the Corning, NY office at (607) 438-2914, Ithaca, NY office at (607) 463-8400, or Portland, OR office at (607) 292-2172 or at the firm’s website at https://lakeroadadvisors.com/