Some services that may be in effect will self destruct with no repercussions after a set period. I tried to cancel Spectrum for my dad after his death and the service guy literally didn’t know how to do it. He said the normal route was someone didn’t pay for three months and then they’d cancel it. Same with Spotify. Insurance, electric and water all had guest services to pay (or if on automatic pay it just keeps going). Not a perfect system but does give some cushion in timing if you need it.
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My sibling and I have a dedicated email address that we use for all the financial things we handle for our parents as well as for the vacation home we co-own.
All the bills that have the option are on autopay, and we generate checks from our shared bank account for any other occasional bills.
It’s a lot easier for us to have the bills emailed to this sole email address rather than keeping track of paper mail! Especially as we live in different states.
Additionally, having a dedicated email address for just this purpose keeps our personal accounts from being cluttered with these emails, and it also makes it very easy to have all the correspondence related to our co-owned home and our parent’s finances in one central location.
We also keep a locked, real-time document with all of the usernames and passwords and links to the websites of all the utilities and various billing entities. This makes it easy for either of us to log in to any account, and make payments with our shared bank account. S23 was added to the document as an authorized viewer when he turned 18, and his cousins will be added as well when they’re older.
The master document, with log-ins and passwords for all the financial institutions is kept separately in all our homes, and all of us know where that piece of paper is for the others.
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My dad had his “little blue book”. It was a small ledger that was a running list of passwords, phone calls to companies etc. It was chronological so everytime he changed a password he’d write it down (so you needed to start at the end and work your way back). He also kept phone numbers, who he talked to for service calls etc in it.
At first I thought it would be better to have a separate list of PWs and accounts but it was literally so convenient and stupidly simple for him that I changed my mind. And not hard to find info because he’d highlight some or sticky note a page.
Plus the dates–I called to complain about X, this is the person I talked to, here’s the phone number, this is what they said.
The end result is everything we needed–accounts, services, passwords were recorded in one small book.
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My father had a little book with all the passwords that he kept on his desk, he was pretty faithful in keeping it up to date. I am not sure what happened when he “forgot his password”, none of the passwords in the book worked. It was the middle of the pandemic, he had been in and out of the hospital with bouts of COVID, and things just fell apart quickly. I was under the false impression that his lawyer at that time knew all his financial information (had account numbers etc.) and he didn’t.
Lessons learned the hard way - make sure somebody (lawyer or family member) has your account information for everything and your passwords.
I love the idea of the dedicated email that the family shares for paying bills, etc. My daughter and I have one email we use for stuff we both need to access. Works really well.
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My father wears an apple watch for the same reason. Great, except that he’s old and has always taken off his (not waterproof) watch to shower. You guessed it, he fell in the shower.
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a friend’s mom had an alert , the kind you hang around your neck, and an apple watch. I didn’t want to bring it up, but these devices are only as good as their ability to have a reliable signal so they can triangulate a location, not just a fall. They are not foolproof and shouldn’t be assumed to be.
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Completely agree. The apple watch is a bit of piece of mind for a guy who doesn’t want to admit he needs anything. If he had been wearing it to shower he wouldn’t have had to figure out how to get himself back up by himself. His emergency list would have been contacted or he would have been able to call someone. This was an open shower stall, not a tub which would have been more challenging.
Reminder to all of us: as we age we need to practice getting down on the floor and getting back up without any having to grab anything.
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Was going to post this in the Parents Caring for Parents thread, but more appropriate here. My mother’s fallen twice trying to get out of bed. She walks with a walker almost 100%, so has lost a lot of muscle tone in her legs. Happened one time when I was there – but there was no way I could get her up. Hit her alert button and the on call nurses from her excellent IL got her up.
That night I ordered her this:
https://a.co/d/g7yFnFt
The next day “the home” (as we call it) was having a yard sell and I found almost the exact same thing, never used, for under $10! Now she has one of both sides of her bed.
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we used those on my daughters bed when she was little so she couldn’t roll off
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I have access to all of my mom’s online accounts. She also gave me power of attorney for one of her accounts so I would have access to it if she should become incapacitated.
My mom is still quite mobile, so I use Findmy on her iPhone to track her.
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I got one free from our local “Buy Nothing” facebook page (where people list things they are giving away). Sadly her mom had passed and she wanted to give it to someone who could use it. It’s helped quite a bit for my fil who recently broke a hip.
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When I bought my Dad his ipad/keyboard (with LTE), it was not meant to have any safety benefits. But one time when his wife fell, he could not find the cellphone. Grabbed the ipad and facetimed me from the hospital. (Probably though he would have remembered my home phone number or could have asked somebody to look it up.) Alas, they locked the house but did not bring any keys. The kindly neighbor used a ladder to climb up to their deck and “break in”. This summer I was decluttering and found a lockbox and gave it to them (with a code set, but instructions of how to change if desired). Hopefully they decided to put a key in it and hang on one of the outside doorknobs.
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This isn’t specifically in home but the recent posts reminded me of a delightful 91 year old woman I met who proudly showed me the air tag clipped to her belt loop. She lived alone and still drove very short distances including to the community center where I met her while she was waiting to go to her exercise class. It sounded like she sometimes didn’t take her phone and this was a way for her family to see where she was if she didn’t answer.
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That’s a great idea!
Last year on a river cruise I was the only one in our group who wanted to stroll around the cute town. I took my cellphone for emergency but had it turned off to avoid the daily feel. I did agree to put an air tag in my pocket so my husband would know my approximate location.
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Some of these suggestions might be good to install before the senior needs them.
I have an electric kettle and have had one for years. My friend asked why I didn’t just use the microwave. Because that is dangerous! Water (and oatmeal) boils over, the cup handles are hot and you could drop it, our microwave is above the stove so is hard to reach and see if the water is boiling. A few years ago the electric kettle suddenly died and Amazon had another here the next day. I can’t live without it.
I use a pill sorter and would have no idea how to take medications without it. Someone I know has 4, so she only sorts medicine once a month.
So, even though most of these suggestions are for much older people, I use a lot of them and think others should start them long before they are needed. At my daughter’s college, they could only have appliances that had auto shut offs, so starting them early with the electric kettle.
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That’s great advice, twoinanddone! I’m adopting a variety of safety-type measures at home (e.g., night lights) even though I think I’m fine now. So much better to avoid an issue (like a hip-breaking fall) rather than institute procedures afterwards. And getting familiar with things (like electric kettle) rather than trying to adapt later makes sense.
That being said - whenever it can be done is good!
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It is possible to superheat water in the microwave. Dh did so several times before we bought an electric kettle. The kettle is much safer.
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This. It can not be set to boil water for 200 minutes instead of 2 minutes. Ask me how I know…
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I thought of an obvious safety thing – I am signed up to receive an email if anything changes in my mom’s patient portal for her medical providers. So appointments, messages, forms, notes, and test results – I get an email. 90% are mundane. But…
This is how we discovered she had called an ambulance and been taken to the ER (she didn’t want to bother Local by letting him know). I got an email saying there was an update so when I opened the site, I could see she was getting tests at the ER.
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A friend is having her bathroom remodeled. I convinced her to have wood blocking installed between the studs of her shower walls for grab bars to be installed in the future. (Her husband thinks bars look “old”.)
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