Dozens of articles appear each week about the challenges of being a caregiver. We’ve shared many of these here on the Blog. But occasionally we encounter an article like this one from NextAvenue that tells a familiar story from a slightly different perspective. Articles like these help us understand the pressures of caregiving with greater clarity.  

The NextAvenue article, authored by writer and college professor Annie Abbott, is a touching first-person account of Abbott’s journey as a caregiver for her husband, with a specific focus on how difficult it was to have to step in to manage and protect the couple’s finances as her spouse suffered from worsening dementia. We offer this article as an important example of the need to prepare as thoroughly as we can for life’s eventualities. None of us can know when or if we might find ourselves in Abbott’s shoes. 

Unprepared for the Complexities of Financial Caregiving 

Abbott begins by outlining her daily caregiving tasks, which may seem a bit unconventional on the surface: “logging into our family’s bank accounts, checking credit card statements, scrolling through my husband’s text messages and glancing at his WhatsApp chats.”  

She notes that she is not paid for this work. Though she is employed full time as a college professor, she was “unprepared for the complexities and possible hardships” included in managing not only the physical wellbeing of her husband who suffers from cognitive and physical decline from Parkinson’s disease, but also the financial health of their household.  

(We wrote about the particular stress on women caregivers in this recent Blog article.) 

Stress of Financial Caregiving Met with Silence, Ambiguity 

Abbott writes, “Each November is National Family Caregivers Month, [acknowledging] 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.”  

She notes that this silence and ambiguity can cause underrepresented harm, as family members who step into the caregiving role for elderly or ill loved ones may not fully understand how to protect themselves and their households from financial threats and scams.  

“I know this firsthand,” Abbott writes.  

Husband’s Medication Triggered Poor Financial Decisions 

For Abbott, the impact of the caregiving role came on gradually. “Even though my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s several years ago, I did not identify as his family caregiver,” she explains. “Medication controlled his tremors; on weekends he went for long bike rides, and he still ran his own successful business. What did I need to take care of?” 

But sadly, her husband’s medication—the very one that controlled his tremors—had a side effect: it induced poor decision-making, especially with 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,” she writes.  

Wife’s Frightening Discovery Turns Life Upside Down 

Over the decades of their marriage, Abbott and her husband had always had good communication about finances. They discussed big decisions ahead of time, but maintained separate bank accounts and credit cards. “I earned a steady salary; he rode the highs and lows of self-employment,” she writes.  

Their hobbies were relatively simple, too: for her, time with family and yarn work; for him, reading and following the stock market, buying and selling. Abbott never worried much about their financial health and never thought she had to.   

“But our routines — and my life — turned upside down when I recently discovered missing money — large amounts of missing money,” she writes. “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.” That money, it turned out, had disappeared for good. 

Abbott’s family is not alone in this dire predicament. The Federal Trade Commission announced that people lost $10 billion to scams in 2023, and older adults lost more money than young people when scammed.  

Families Must be Better Prepared to Spot Danger Signs 

This experience revealed a sad truth to Abbott: caregivers are not properly prepared for the ways that illness and decline can wreak havoc on household finances.  

“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,” she writes. Moreover, this is a widespread need, as according to the Family Caregiver Alliance there are 43.5 million family caregivers in this country alone.   

“A caregiver is expensive,” Abbott adds. “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.”  

Family Caregiving Robs Families of Earning Potential 

Caregivers themselves lose earning potential: a lifetime average of $237,000 according to the American Association of Retired Persons, or AARP. 

“Yet some people — like my spouse — need a financial caregiver before spending a dime on physical caregivers,” Abbott writes. “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.” 

Parkinson’s disease, for example, can cause mild cognitive impairment before the physical or motor symptoms advance enough to require caregiving, says a 2024 study.  

Financial Caregiving Can Upend Family Gender Roles 

These issues do, sadly, seem to fall along gendered lines, too. Abbott reminds us that 75 percent of family caregivers are women, which means that the financial side requires learning a new set of skills and “upending family gender roles”.  

She adds, “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.” 

For Abbott, the results ended up being positive: she and her husband worked together with a financial advisor to get a wider view of their finances, pooling their money into one bank account in Abbott’s sole control. “He tapered off that medicine, and though his tremor partially returned, his thinking cleared,” she writes.   

Financial Dangers Demand Constant Vigilance 

While that crisis was in the past, financial dangers still lurk for Abbott and her husband. With his permission she still monitors his phone to block potential scammers, even though she knows she can’t protect from every scam.  

“Despite the positive outcome, the process was arduous and that money is gone forever,” she writes. “Wrangling over finances while trying to repair the damage to our relationship has taken an emotional toll that all types of family caregivers experience.” 

She adds that “I Care…” was 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.”  

This is why Abbott advocates for better and more productive conversations around caregiving and what it entails. She says, concluding her article, “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.” 

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(originally reported at www.nextavenue.org)