09/25/2026
Fiduciary for Your Mom
A fiduciary decides what your mother would decide if she could, not what is easiest for the family or best for the estate. Everything below flows from that one rule.
Get the authority before you need it. A durable financial power of attorney (durable, not springing, since springing ones require a doctor to declare incapacity and banks stall on them), a California Advance Health Care Directive, HIPAA authorizations naming you, and a trust with clean successor trustee language. Then do the step most people skip: take the POA to each bank, brokerage, and insurer now and get it accepted on their own form while she can still sign. Institutions reject outside POAs constantly, and you do not want to discover that during a hospital stay.
Keep her money hers. Separate accounts, never commingled with yours, no loans to family, no bargain purchases of her property, no gifts out of her assets that benefit you. Reimburse yourself only with receipts. If you would be uncomfortable explaining a transaction to a judge or to Madison and Mallory twenty years from now, do not do it.
Write it down and share it. One place with account numbers, deeds, insurance, Medicare details, doctors, and logins. A short annual accounting to your siblings even if nobody demands one. Family fights over elder finances are almost always about opacity rather than theft, and a boring spreadsheet sent every January prevents most of them.
The over-70 specifics worth a calendar reminder. RMDs from her retirement accounts, taken by December 31 each year, with the penalty for missing one now 25% and reducible to 10% if corrected promptly. Medicare Part D and Advantage plans re-shopped during open enrollment every fall, since plan formularies change and most people never look. Long-term care funding decided before it is needed, because at 88 insurance is off the table and it becomes a cash flow and housing question. On the house, resist the instinct to deed it to the kids now: a lifetime transfer usually triggers reassessment under Prop 19 and gives up the step-up in basis at death, which is typically the single most valuable tax benefit in the whole estate. For 2026 the annual gift exclusion is $19,000 per recipient and the federal estate exemption is $15 million, so for most families the planning question is basis, not estate tax.
Fraud is the real risk at her age. Freeze her credit, add a trusted contact to every brokerage account, put her on the Do Not Call registry, and watch for the tells: new "friends," unopened mail, urgency about a payment. Elder financial abuse overwhelmingly comes from people already in the circle, and the first sign is usually a change in who has her ear.
Decide with her, not for her. Capacity is not binary. Keep her in the room for as long as she can participate, ask what she wants rather than what is efficient, and save the override for the decisions that genuinely cannot wait.
Hope this helps.
