Helping your parent as they age is a difficult job. It is common when a child is taking their parent to the bank often for a teller to suggest that the parent “add” their child to the account. This makes it really easy to manage the account. That is the good.
What is the bad? The account is now JOINTLY owned by the parent and the child. This means that the funds are available to the child’s creditors if they owe money. It also means that when the parent dies, the account automatically belongs to the child. For small accounts, this is typically not an issue, but you can imagine that siblings aren’t happy when they find out that the child caring for the parent added themselves to every account and now gets all the money.
If you are a child helping your parents and want to make sure you can manage their money without taking all the money for yourself, and want to protect your parents should you ever get sued, give me a call.
