Dealing with Financial Affairs for Someone Else…..
This is a thought exercise…
Suppose you are the son or daughter of a reasonably tech competent older person. They have asked you to step in to act on their behalf should they be unable to do so on their own. The would name you as primary on their Durable Power of Attorney. You have agreed and are in the process of trying to understand how your parent deals with their finances now.
In your research you have discovered the following information:
1) Your parent uses a variety of tech equipment to deal with finances. This equipment includes a Windows 11 PC, an Apple IPhone, and an Apple IPad.
2) These devices all have a PW manager installed. The PW manager automatically synchronizes data across all devices.
3) The IPhone uses facial recognition in addition to a numerical access code. The IPad uses fingerprint data for access in addition to a numerical access code. The Windows PC only uses a numerical access code.
4) The parent has 2 bank accounts, 5 credit card accounts of which only 2 are really used, and 4 brokerage accounts (1 broker).
5) There is a bill pay service at one of the banks which is used to pay any bills which are not set up to be paid automatically via direct debits, or credit card debits. The credit cars are auto pay through the bill pay service.
6) The parent uses Quicken to record all financial transactions for all accounts and has done so for 25 years.
7) Most bills are delivered via your parent’s primary email address. Exceptions are property taxes and HOA fees and a cell phone bill.
8) The parent does their own taxes using TurboTax desktop and stores all the returns and data in Dropbox.
You quickly determine that you need to have both the phone and the PC as a minimum if you are to step into your parent’s shoes financially. BUT, even if you have the devices, there are some catch-22 issues; you cannot satisfy the existing biometric requirements. So, you need the numerical access codes for all devices. You also need the PW manager’s PW, because on the phone and IPad, the alternate to using the PW is biometric. The PC uses the same numeric code for access to the PW manager as to the device. So, you think you can just use the PC and skip the phone. Unfortunately, the primary brokerage/bank access requires use of an authentication APP which resides only on the phone. Dropbox access, like many other providers, uses 2factor authentication through text messages to the IPhone. Fortunately, the IPhone allows addition of a second face/fingerprint for access, provided you have the parent present to show their face as authentication for adding another face. This might be hard to do unless done before need arose.
Because you live in another state, you think that you should setup email access to the parent’s primary email address so that you can see bills that arrive by email. You quickly find out that Gmail requires a passcode which comes from the parent's phone for you to sign into the email account. Boy, you think, nothing about this is easy!
Thought exercises are useful because they help us realize that everything in the modern world is much more complicated than we realize. There is obviously more involved in effectively setting up someone to act on your behalf than just naming them in a legal document. And this exercise didn’t cover things like the need to communicate your investment philosophy, budget, financial goals, things that you might have begun, like a home improvement. It just dealt with what you would have to do from a tech point of view to allow another person to act for you. I am writing this because I just spent the last 3 days with one of my sons trying to figure out what he would need to really do this for me. Your own tech situation will be different from mine; different gear etc.
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