Diminished Capacity: Protecting Your Parents’ Assets

[Music] It's Keith Davidson from Albertson and Davidson in this video I'm discussing how do you protect your parents assets from bad people that can be a very difficult thing to do because while your parents are alive they are the owners of their assets that means they have control of their assets they get to decide how they hold those assets what they do with those assets how they spend them but when parents age and their capacity starts to slide and maybe they can't handle their finances as well as they used to it can be very difficult to step in and help your parent and unfortunately a bad person seeing an opportunity a lot of times can get in and do harm before you have a chance to get it to get into your parents finances and help them protect their money Trust and power of attorneys and things like that are certainly helpful when a parent loses capacity so that you can step in and manage their assets but sometimes a parent doesn't want to admit that they no longer have the ability to manage their assets so when that happens it can be very hard and sensitive to convince a parent that they should step down they should hand over control of everything to you the child to manage it every case is going to be a little bit different and this at least is just a preview of a much wider topic of how to protect parents from financial elder abuse and in the future we're going to do a more in-depth video that'll go into these issues and a little bit more detail but for now you should know that protecting a parent's assets is not an easy thing to do you certainly could use your powers under the trust or power of attorney but that doesn't always work sometimes you may have to file for conservatorship which is a big problem in itself as well so the number one thing you should be doing above all else is pay attention to your parents ask a lot of questions pay attention to who's interacting with your parents and what they're doing and trust your gut if you have a bad gut feeling about a situation or a person that's in your parents life your gut reaction is probably right Albertson and Davidson is here to help you fight for your inheritance check out Alda law calm for our complete library of helpful legal videos and articles from your favorite California trusts and we'll litigation law firm Albertson and Davidson LLP.