Money, money, money! How to start talking about finances with your parent

Tips and conversation starters for your first talks about finances with your aging parent.

When I was first living on my own, I thought my salary from a domestic violence advocacy organization would be more than enough to sustain me. I was living in Westchester County, New York. I made $32,000. Spoiler alert, it was not enough.

I moved to New York from Pittsburgh, where I’d gone to graduate school, just two months after my mom died. My dad received a lump sum for her life insurance, and he was more than willing to help me pay for the security deposit on an apartment, car repairs, flights home, and even gas sometimes. We were about a thousand miles apart, but I still felt taken care of.

Fast forward eight years later. My dad had blown through that life insurance money. He’d taken vacations, put a down payment on a new apartment, paid off the lease for my Saturn, and spent like he had no time to lose.

I didn’t make it a year in New York before I moved back to Florida to be closer to him.

One Sunday, I sat in his cranberry-colored recliner, one of the pair my parents had bought when they returned to St. Pete from Las Vegas, and watched the Bucs game. My mind wandered and my eyes took in the room. I noticed black dots on the ceiling near the air conditioning vent. Is that… mold?

“Daddy,” I said during a commercial break. “Up there, by the air conditioning vent, above the TV. Is that mold?”

“Ah, I don’t know, sweetie,” he said. “Maybe?”

This is the vent at my dad’s apartment covered in mold.

My dad was addicted to nasal spray. My whole life, he always had a bottle of saline nasal spray next to the chair he sat in to watch television, and every hour or so, he’d use it to breathe better. It was so frequent—like when someone is a chronic throat-clearer or glasses adjuster—I stopped noticing it. I wondered suddenly, though, was he more congested now than usual? Was it mold? The eye drops he suddenly needed—was that because of the air in this apartment?

I walked around the apartment looking at the ceiling. In the kitchen, there was condensation on the vent, too, and the same black spots I saw in the living room. Mildew? Mold? What was the difference?

Thinking about my dad sitting in that room, barely leaving the house, breathing in something that was hurting him, I panicked. I was there several times a week—why hadn’t I noticed it days ago? Weeks ago?

I Googled mold removal and scheduled companies to give estimates. I found one that would clean the ducts and repaint using some sort of water resistant paint. It would cost about $700.

“Daddy, I found someone to clean the ducts. It’s going to cost $700.”

I expected him to say, “that’s terrific! Thank you!” But instead, he said, “Seven hundred dollars?! Honey, that seems really unnecessary.”

I was annoyed. Here I was, panicked about the mold but also thrilled that I’d found what I thought was a reasonably priced solution, and he was resisting the cost?

“I don’t want you breathing that in!” I said. “We have to take care of it.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Well, you’ll have to pay for it,” he said. “I don’t have that kind of money. You’ll get it back when you sell the apartment.”

I was stunned. The person who I used to call when I needed a $200 car repair now couldn’t pay for his own $700 home repair?

Did he have no savings at all? I felt sick. Was he really just living off the Social Security check he got each month? “When you sell the apartment,” he’d said. Did he mean when he was dead?

I should have been checking on him financially, I realized. I should not have been letting him grab the check when we went to Stone Soup for dinner. I should not have been asking him for help with anything. I should have asked him how he was investing that life insurance money, how he was planning for the future, if he was planning for anything. I wish I had stepped in earlier to ask questions about my dad’s finances.

You are reading this, though, and you won’t make the same mistakes I made. Here are some steps to gently guide you into talking about finances with your parent. Eventually, we’ll cover more topics on finances, but this should give you a good start.

Step 1: Ready yourself for the first conversation

It’s awkward to talk about finances with your parent, whether they’ve always cared for you financially, like my dad, or whether you’ve been basically silent on the topic, or whether you have needed to help them out in the past. You might worry that they will feel like you assume they can’t take care of their own finances. If they think that, they may also start to believe you think they can’t live independently. Remember that it’s likely your parent’s top concern is their independence, so this is a tricky subject. There are several things you can do to help make the conversation easier for everyone, including the steps I’m outlining here.

Step 2: Start slow (You may not even need to talk about money)

Ask your parent what they envision for their retirement. Do they want to travel? Downsize? Be close to grandchildren? Volunteer? This will nudge them toward talking about how they’ll finance that vision.

Step 3: Consider what you actually need to know in an emergency.

You aren’t asking exactly what your inheritance will be because you’re eyeing a new car. You’re trying to plan for your parent’s future. If your parent is suddenly incapacitated, there are few things you must know: has your parent worked with an attorney on a will, a living will, power of attorney and other documents? Are you their health care surrogate? Where are those documents and are they up to date? How does your parent currently pay their bills?

Step 4: Find out more.

Once you’ve had the initial conversations, it will be easier for your parent to open up about their finances. To help advise your parent as you plan for the future together or to step in to fully manage their finances if they’re unable to do so, you’ll need to know where they get their money (Social Security? Pension? Investments?), what accounts they have, every bill and how much debt they have, whether and what kinds of insurance they have, and how to contact any financial professionals they may be working with.

Step 5: Ask about their final wishes.

Probably the hardest thing to talk about, related to finances, is your parent’s final wishes. But you’ll need to know what they want. What do they want to happen to their money when they’re gone? Are there donations or gifts they want you to make? Is this spelled out somewhere? Have they prepaid for any funeral or burial services? A close family member of mine is currently in the end stages of cancer. She still doesn’t want to talk to her family about a funeral. I suggested instead that she write down what she wants to happen regarding a burial, celebration, or funeral, and set aside the letter so her husband can read it when the time comes. Find a way to help your parent tell you what they want to happen when they die.

In “Mom, Dad, We Need to Talk,” Cameron Huddleston says she made the mistake of avoiding the conversation with her mom until it was nearly too late.

“For estate planning documents to be valid, you have to be mentally competent when you sign them. Around the time my mom signed hers, she had visited another neurologist, taken more tests and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Fortunately, she was still aware enough of what was going on that the attorney found her competent to sign her will, living will, and power of attorney documents. If I had waited any longer to encourage my mom to meet with an attorney, she might not have been able to sign those documents.”

Conversation Starters and Quick Tips

Center them in the conversation. I know we just talked about what you will need to know, but I urge you to revisit your parent’s values and center those in the conversation.

“Mom, I know it’s important to you to stay living in your house as long as possible. I’m wondering if there are some financial things we might need to do now to make sure we’re set up for that.”

“Dad, I am sure you’ve thought about donations you want to make from your investments after you’re gone. In your will, does it spell out what the ACLU gets vs. Planned Parenthood?”

Share details of your own story. If you are using a new app or organizational method, tell your parent about it. Ask how they currently manage their bills and investments. If your parent pays each bill individually, offer to help them by setting up recurring payments.

“I finally met with a financial adviser this week, and set up automatic deductions to my retirement. I bet I won’t even miss that money, and my new job matches it!”

Offer to help your parent use a password manager, such as LastPass, and encourage them to share the master password with you. And make sure you know your parent’s password for their phone and computer. Getting into these can be either annoying or impossible without the passwords.

“I see these Post-it notes with all these passwords here. Isn’t that annoying for you? Want me to show you an easier way?”

Don’t forget about their phone. If your parent uses a smartphone or computer, ask them to add you as a legacy contact. This will allow you to access their devices using a special key in the event of their death. You will need to provide the key and a copy of their death certificate. I simply accessed everything via LastPass, but your parent may not want you to do this until their death.

Tell a story. You can use one of my stories, of not knowing how little money my dad had until it was gone, or about spending down his savings until he qualified for Medicaid, Cameron Huddleston’s story of almost intervening too late, or that of a friend or family member. Sometimes starting the conversation with a story about someone else makes it easier for your parent to talk about something sensitive.

Ask “what if” questions. If you start having these conversations early enough, when your parent is still working or still in good health, it’s easier to talk in hypotheticals about the future.

“I know it’s years (or decades) away, but have you thought about what you want to happen to all these investments after you die?”

“Remember when Aunt Eleanor couldn’t live alone anymore? How did she pay for that fancy assisted living? Have you thought about how you’ll pay for things like that down the road?”

Keep having this conversation

Talking to your parent about their finances isn’t one conversation. It’s many conversations over years. It’s conversations about income, debt, illness, death, retirement, inheritance, investments, bills, emergencies. You need to start talking to your parent about finances now, because this is a dialogue that will have to continue, and it only gets harder the longer you wait.

Have you talked to your parent about their finances? How did it go?