Jan 16, 2016 | aging, diminished cognition, elder investor, elderly, handling money for seniors, investor, long term care, senior citizen investor, senior investor
“Best Practices For Communication Challenges With Senior Investors”
Summary of course:
Aging clients present many challenges for their financial advisors. There are physical changes in hearing, vision and mobility as well as memory issues. This course shows the advisor how to accommodate for the changes that normally accompany aging so they can best serve older clients. It also offers strategies to address changes that are not normal, such as cognitive decline and loss of capacity for financial decisions. Talking to clients about these is likely to be uncomfortable. With the expertise of the psychologist who helped author this course, conversation scripts are offered on how to bring up and talk about delicate subjects tactfully. We illustrate advisor-client dialog with videos and demonstrate the best ways to talk to a client about giving up decision-making authority when impairment sets in.
Learning objectives:
- Identify ways to accommodate a client who has physical impairments that are barriers to advisor-client communication.
- Plan and know how to rehearse the words to use when it is time to approach a client with memory loss about getting a third party involved in financial decisions.
- Manage client resistance to discussing these difficult subjects.
- Use basic rules of communication that are proven success techniques to approach any difficult conversation with your client.
Jan 16, 2016 | aging, aging investor, elder investor, elderly, finra, investor, NASAA, SEC, senior investor
“Regulatory Changes Advisors Must Face With Your Aging Clients”
Summary of course:
Update on what the SEC, FINRA an NASAA have in mind for financial professionals across the country in how they do business with clients over age 65. Review of the research these agencies have done, Model Rules regulators have created and what exemplary things they found firms and organizations doing for aging clients. They all want financial professionals to be more protective of aging investors. They envision mandates for reporting financial abuse of elders will and expand mandates into other areas. This course highlights areas regulators expect advisors to address, such as training in senior issues and increased communication with aging clients. It provides specifics on how to get ready for what the regulators want so that you will not have to scramble to comply with mandates.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the regulators’ concept of a “senior program” and how you can create one.
- Know the Model Rules about financial abuse the regulators have already publicly posted.
- Know what other firms across the US are doing about aging investors that you should be doing too.
- Know what action steps you can and should take now to be ready for mandates.
Jan 16, 2016 | aging, aging investor, Alzheimer's disease, diminished cognition, elder investor, elderly, financial capacity, investor, senior citizen investor, senior investor, the gray zone
“Best Practices For Managing Clients With Diminished Capacity”
Summary of course:
Our population is living longer than ever. The risk of dementia rises with age. That means that most of us are going to encounter problems of aging in our clients.
We need to recognize the red flags of impairment that will affect financial capacity. These include:
- Cognitive signs, such as memory loss and difficulty understanding the conversation
- Communication, calculations and orientation problems
- Emotional signs that are out of character for your client.
It is essential for every financial professional to understand the complexity of financial capacity and appreciate how many parts it has. There are 9 domains of financial capacity. You cannot determine if a person is impaired or not just by talking on the phone with her or having a brief meeting in which you give information.
A normal social conversation with the client is not a measure of whether or not the client has diminished financial capacity.
The more aware you are as a professional, the better chance you have of protecting your client from loss and protecting yourself as well.
Learning objectives:
- Prepare yourself for the wave of aging clients by understanding the demographics of our aging population and the risks of dementia associated with aging.
- Understand the 9 domains of financial capacity and learn how to spot problems with any one of them.
- Be able to identify red flags of impaired cognition that should prompt you to act.
- Develop a personal plan for what to do when you see warning signs of diminishing financial capacity
Dec 15, 2015 | aging, aging investor, elderly
When your clients spend time during this season with their aging loved ones, let them know that it’s an opportunity to look out for signs that a loved one needs help. Some things are possible tipoffs that they should get involved in helping monitor their aging parents’ spending, giving and susceptibility to scams. Educating them about these signs gives the client the impression that you understand and that you care. Your Boomer clients may have parents or other relatives in their 80’s, 90’s and beyond. You can help both clients and their aging family members stay safer.
Encourage them to watch out for these three signs when they see loved ones at their parents’ homes:
- Evidence of unpaid bills. Older folks begin to lose the capacity to keep track of finances very early in the process of any form of dementia. If bill collectors are calling, or they see dunning notices, that is a red flag. They could be forgetting what to pay or when to pay a bill. Insurance can be cut off, utilities can be stopped and a lot of other consequences flow from this forgetfulness. Adult children can help by offering to do the bill paying, putting it online or otherwise keeping watch over bills. Your Boomer clients could be stuck with having to support their aging parents if the elders lose the ability to manage their money.
- Too much “charitable” giving to anyone who asks. Scammers call seniors and pose as anybody from anywhere. Unsuspecting elders believe them and do not check out the validity of the charity they claim to represent. Remind your clients to caution their senior loved ones to ask for detailed information about anyone who solicits them, including name, address and phone number. They should to call the charity and verify that the solicitation was from them.
- Evidence of a new “friend” who seems overly involved in an aging parent’s life, especially if he or she has access to personal information such as Social Security number, credit cards and bank accounts. There are predators out there waiting for a chance to get to the money and run. Particularly with a parent who has memory loss, manipulation and theft are all too easy for a person just hanging around waiting for an opportunity to steal. At AgingInvestor.com we suggest that adult children closely monitor seniors’ accounts and question anything odd immediately.
Client education needs to be about more than what products will yield the best return and how to make money last. It has to be about your client’s life too. And since regulators want all advisors to educate clients about issues that affect them, this is one perfect for the educational effort. Feel free to copy this email and send it out modified a bit, with your name on it. Your clients will appreciate you!
Nov 24, 2015 | finances for elders, financial capacity, finra, NASAA, SEC, senior citizen investor, senior investor, seniors finances
FINRA, together with the SEC and NASAA are on a joint mission to keep seniors and impaired adults from being financially abused. FINRA has proposed new rules that will allow a firm to put a temporary hold on financial transactions when abuse is suspected, and will allow the firm to contact a trusted other during this hold period.
Where’s the flaw? No rule yet mandates that every financial firm and every individual advisor obtain information for a trusted contact person for every client. Not only should this be required for all new accounts, it should be mandated that such trusted others be identified for every client over age 65. As the risk of dementia doubles approximately every five years after age 65, the reasons for the advisor to have someone to call when concerns arise is obvious.
As to the subject of the trusted other, the elder usually names an adult son or daughter as the trusted one. Sometimes that is all the information the advisor has. At the same time, the studies on elder financial abuse show us that family members are the most frequent abusers. Do you see the contradiction here? Every advisor should be required to obtain not only one “trusted person” but two or three so that if abuse is going on or seems to be a threat, the advisor can involve more than one person in the effort to stop it.
Another flaw in the proposed rule is that is it assumed that something helpful will occur during the hold period when the institution is excused from liability for not acting. But there is no clear evidence that either advisors or institutions are being trained to spot financial abuse warning signs before the money is all drained from the account. As we see it, the proposed rule focuses on doing something after abuse is clear and the institution has “a reasonable belief” that financial abuse is occurring. We think the industry can do much better than reacting by being required to call someone after the client has been taken advantage of or had the portfolio plundered.
Here’s the truth: getting an unwilling aging person to step down from financial authority over his portfolio takes more than a few days or a couple of weeks. If there is a trust in place and the elder is the trustee, the terms often state that at least one doctor, or two must say that the client is no longer capable of handling financial matters. Getting a doctor or two to see the client, do an assessment and produce something in writing with the needed findings can take months. And we’ve witnessed this exact scenario when it did take three months to oust the impaired, demented senior who wanted to give his predatory adult child a debit card for his cash management account.
At AgingInvestor.com, where we educate both financial institutions and independent advisors about stopping financial abuse, we think the effort to keep elders financially safer needs to go to the front end of abuse, not the back end after it has happened. Proactive steps can be taken. We urge every financial professional to know the warning signs of diminished capacity so you can engage the trusted third party when the signs emerge, rather than waiting until someone, whether family or outside predator seizes the opportunity to exploit diminished capacity.
To learn more about what you or your institution can do that we think is much better than simply being allowed to hold transactions for a bit when you believe abuse is going on, contact us at AgingInvestor.com. We have an entire program outline ready for you with focus on prevention.
If your client is being manipulated, holding transactions when you’re pretty sure it’s gone on can do little to protect your client. The predators and thieves can empty an account faster than it would take you to fill out the forms FINRA will inevitably give you. Think the way you are trained to think about finances generally: plan ahead, anticipate problems before they get here, and take protective action.
Carolyn Rosenblatt, RN, Elder Law Attorney, Founder AgingInvestor.com
