‘I want to be other people’s cautionary tale’: how do you financially prepare for a parent’s death?

Beth Pinsker, financial planner and author of My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving. Photograph: Courtesy Beth Pinsker

As a certified financial planner, Beth Pinsker had spent decades guiding clients through retirement and managing ageing parents’ finances. Yet when her own mother fell ill, she was caught off-guard: transferring funds on behalf of her mother and exercising her authority as power of attorney were logistical nightmares.

If she found caring for her mother’s affairs this complicated, Pinsker wondered how people with less financial knowhow managed. “There’s just a lot of moving pieces, and it’s impossible to think ahead and cover everything, because life is just too complicated,” she said.