If you've ever helped a parent navigate a medical issue, a financial decision, or even wondered what happens if something changes quickly, this episode is for you. Today I'm joined by Maureen Lester. Maureen is an elder law attorney.

And we spend this conversation breaking down what elder law actually is, how it's different from traditional estate planning, and why it becomes so important as parents age. We talk about long-term care planning, cognitive decline, family dynamics, and why having the right legal documents in place early can make an enormous difference later on. This is the first of a two-part conversation. And in this episode, we're really focused on building the foundation, understanding the problems, the risks, and where families often get stuck.

Let's get into it.

Just act natural. Alright. You ready to roll?

Welcome everybody on the internet to Sandwich Bread Podcast. These are conversations about life and money for the sandwich generation through the lines of financial planning. So today I have a very special guest, Maureen Lester. Maureen is an elder law attorney and so we're going to have a conversation with her about what the elder law profession is. why and how we should differentiate that from regular estate planning or where it fits in the legal profession. then we'll just case studies and ideas around things you should look for as somebody with maybe aging parents and how to utilize an elder law attorney to advance the wishes of your parents. great. Thank you for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. So we should probably figure out first who you are.

We should start there. Yeah. So I am a Kansas City native and I went to Mizzou for my undergrad and got a degree in business. And then after that, I worked in a sea of cubicles. And I knew at that point, that particular company was really hard to move up in management. So I had to sit down with my dad. He's kind of my planner guy. You know, I don't do that with your parents where like, You know the things that you are best suited to talk about with either parent. If I need help with organizing something or knowing where stuff is in the grocery store, that's mom all day long. But for big life plans and questions and things, that's my dad for me. sat down with my dad and we talked about what I like doing, what I'm good at. he was like, well, know, it can be really hard to just... move up in management chain and get to the top and get to the boardroom. But if you have a specialized degree, sometimes you can get there faster or easier or have a special skill at that level that gets you there. And he was like, really good at solving problems. You're really good at communicating. I think law would be perfect for you. No one in my family is a lawyer. I had never really been exposed to law. And so here I go, just running into law school saying, I'm going to go be in the boardroom. So I thought corporate law was for me. So I go to law school and I get there. And in my first year, all the other people around me are.

I'm going to be a trial attorney and I'm going be a prosecutor and I'm going to go to clerk and all this stuff. This is how naive I was. I was like, where's clerk? Little did I know, that's a job position, right? I just had no clue and I jumped in not really understanding what it meant.

And it was during that first year of law school that my grandparents, so these are my dad's mom and dad, they had lived in North Carolina my whole life and I'm a Midwestern girl. So I've never lived near them. And they had made the decision, they were going to sell their house and move into a retirement community. So they were navigating that. They were visiting the cities where each of their children lived and they ended up picking Kansas City near my dad.

So they came to Kansas City, they were living in an independent living community and I finally got to see them on regular basis but this ended up being in the last couple of years of their life. So I got to see sort of that downsized piece and then their decline over the next year and then both of them eventually passed away. So while I was in that first year of law school and seeing my family go through this with my grandparents, I realized wait a second, there are lawyers who can help families with this journey, that's what I'm gonna do. And so without even knowing what elder law was, by experiencing it with my own family, I realized that's what I wanted to do for law. That's cool. Yeah, I always, with niche type law, like professions or angles in the field, I always feel like there's something, some moment or something that like, that... that draws you one direction versus another. And I think about elder law or like special needs planning. I tend to think like there's something in your family or your life that like you see unfold and you're like, that's my calling. Those are the people I want to help and serve. Yeah. And it was, the timing was perfect because I wasn't quite sure that law was for me. I just wasn't a lot like my other law classmates. And so when that sort of you know, appeared to the surface for me. It was really great. And then I got to focus the rest of my law school career on that. I got to focus trying to search for a job in that field immediately. So I've been involved in elder law and special needs law now for about 12 years because I started that while I was in law school. Very cool.

I interned at a large brokerage firm in Omaha. in college and then was offered a job right out of college and it was nice coming out of school to have an offer, I was fortunate with my career at this awesome employer that I had growth opportunities, moved cities and moved jobs. But same type of crisis though, like it doesn't take long for you be like, is this my life? am I in severance? So let's talk about a little bit about elder law. So estate planning, very familiar to everyone.

how does elder law? Differentiate from just general estate planning or maybe in what ways is it similar? What ways is it different? Yeah, it's really similar to estate planning. In fact Most of the time elder laws considered a subset of estate planning.

I take estate planning principles and then I shift them to looking at what we hope are going to be the last chapter or chapters of our life. Okay. basically I'm looking at a period of time where somebody is likely to need long-term care, which basically means somebody helping them with something in their life, more than just an ordinary, like spouses juggling job duties in the household and that sort of thing, but somebody who's helping with bill pay and making sure that finances are safe and used appropriately. And it could also be on the personal side of personal care, making sure that somebody is baiting themselves properly and regularly enough because maybe they didn't remember that it's been many days since they've, gotten really clean or, know, that their hair is a mess and so they just need those cues to make sure that they keep up with those things. So if that, becomes a reality for somebody, that really changes.

what the plan looks like. And it means that you need somebody else around pretty frequently helping you with these things. And so we have to look at what does that look like and what does that cost? And so we really plan for both financially and practically how to do this. And I think that's what differentiates them. An elder law attorney is not only looking at Yes, we want there to be money to pass on to the next generation and that is a big goal and that should be super clear. But if we need to use that money on the person who ends up being my client during their lifetimes, we have to look at that in a holistic framework and who are going to be the people involved? Do they have the right motivations? Are they going to be good at that job? And then how financially are we going to make that work?

Yeah, yeah, okay. That makes a lot of sense. It is a daunting subcategory of estate planning because as a financial planner, I serve most frequently folks that are roughly millennial. It's ages 30 to 50-ish and millennials are nearing 50 almost. They're getting, and, I started to have more conversations with parents of my clients and I have a not small part of my business that's folks that are in retirement mode. What I started to notice though is that when there's cognitive issues or there's aging issues involved, it goes from a very simple financial plan to a deeply complicated financial plan really fast. So I've taken additional elder specialist credentialing this year to deepen my skills there because At first blush, was inclined to just say, I don't know if I want to take this on. You know, I should probably search for fellow financial planners that really narrowly focus on this, this subset. But I found that it's so deeply integrated into my own clients lives. You have to embrace it as part of your practice, but it's complicated. it's, it's not simple. scary thing about long-term care planning as you know, is that it can be such a wide range of cost and getting insurance lined up and the estate planning strategy lined up and budgeting and cashflow aligning the investments with it is just so complicated. Yeah. And it can be a really wide range of timeframe too. Sometimes someone only requires long-term care for a couple of months, maybe a year, but there are others who start having cognitive decline.

really early and the family members almost just naturally kind of pick up the deficits, but they're there. And that doesn't mean that we're not in a long-term care journey at that point. They definitely are. It's just that those supports are natural and they're free because they're family members, right? They're just jumping in and picking up the slack and doing what they need to do to keep their family member safe and healthy and happy at home. Yeah. So, you know, one of the
primary groups that I've served over the years are sometimes called elder orphans, right? What if somebody doesn't have a spouse, doesn't have anybody that lives with them, and if they don't have children nearby, they need to have extra plans in place because there's not that natural fit to sort of help them out with things. So, you if we take that as sort of a overarching case study, I think that's one where it makes so much sense to think through, okay, if you didn't have anybody in your life, what were all the things that you would have to think about throughout your day and to make sure that you're safe, healthy and happy. And that your money too is safe and healthy and happy if you couldn't really keep track of that very well. Or if you were vulnerable. I can't tell you how many times I've had clients or the client's children call and say, no, I think I just gave $10,000 to a scammer. no, this just happened with a big chunk of money and that's scary. yeah and to your point, it's a very vulnerable population and if they've got no one around them, you know, it's really scary.

The other interesting thing, folks like yourself are extremely helpful, but I've started to network with such a wide network of bill pay you brought up. That's complicated, and how do we have a service where it's truly like a fiduciary service handling the bill pay for clients and getting people to their doctor's appointments and overseeing their tax filings and all those things. And so I have this growing network of people that are there to serve, and it's just as much time to vet the people.

that I'm trying to get in front of clients is the meeting and the planning and the strategy. It's really tricky. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that just is a great illustration. Just getting to a doctor's appointment and the amount of steps that it takes just for that one piece. And what I have to ask clients pretty consistently is realistically, the people who you've chosen to be your support network and to help you in that situation.

Are they able to do that? Do they have the time and the flexibility and frankly the financial ability if they had to leave their job in order to take over caring for you? Can they? Because I've had so many clients where they say, I'm never going into a care facility. And I hope for their sake that's so true. That's the default. Yeah. But if they're not safe in their home, that means either they're moving in with somebody else in their family. And is that realistic?

or somebody else is putting a lot of time and effort into keeping them at home and is that realistic? Do we actually have that support network and can we make it happen financially? And those are the puzzles that I love to solve because I get to understand the family unit and who has flexibility where and who has personal strengths and weaknesses where, and you know, if one person is called upon to do healthcare items and a different person is the financial helper.

are they going to work well together? Because that has to occur too if you ask different people. So figuring out all these different puzzle pieces and then looking at the financial side and saying, okay, if family steps in and helps, is it realistic that they will do that for free or that they can do that for free? And what burden is that placing on them to do that for free? Or should we actually put in a place a way to pay them?

because it is valuable services that they provide. And so figuring all those pieces out is the puzzle that I love to solve. Yeah, yeah, and I mean, what I've experienced, which is super cool, is that, you know, in the case of like personally within my practice, the families when they're aligned and they're working really hard to do right by the parents, it's a really cool thing. You know, it's a, it makes you feel like There's like good in the world. You know, like, cause the kids who were raised by their parents are recognizing, acknowledging the great things their parents have done for them and caring for them. You know, it's really cool. Motivating and exciting, you hear about all the terrible things on the news and the exploitation and stealing of money, but there's a lot of like really exciting and happy things happening there too. Yeah, there are. And that's also my job to try and figure out.

and to really work with my client long enough and in great enough detail to make sure they know that the people they're putting in that support network, whether it's their kids or nieces or nephews or grandchildren, that not only are they capable, but are they going to do the right thing? Because the minute that my client signs a legal document giving that child or grandchild power of attorney and giving them authority to handle their money,

If that child doesn't do right by them, it not only causes, you know, obviously financial turmoil if they're not using money correctly. Now my client doesn't have the money they planned on using and our plan falls apart. But also to keep that person accountable or to get money back from the mistakes that they made is a battle.

and one that I don't want any of my clients going through. So I have to be very cautious and very detailed in the way that I'm talking about it because a lot of times people don't want to talk about hard stuff, especially in the first meeting, right? They've just met me. It's been a 30 minutes of chit chat. Maybe not telling me they're doing the family you like your assets to be split up when you die? Yeah, I mean, for a lot of people, that's the easy question. Yeah. Right? Right. Or it's a plan they've had in place for many, many years and it's not changing. It's more of the, I'm seeing deficits in my memory, I'm realizing that it's not as easy for me to get around town and I'm not comfortable with the technology that helps me get around town and I don't want to tell my kids that because I want to be independent. But I also realize I may need some help. And especially if the people in their lives that are that natural support network

If there's going to be some arguing, if one is chosen over the other, or there's somebody involved who's not trustworthy. I mean, those can be really hard things to talk about. Yeah. So on that note, let's talk horror stories. All right, let's get to it.

That wraps up part of my conversation with Maureen Lester. In this episode we focused on what elder law is, how it fits into estate planning, and why planning for aging parents is very different from planning for death alone. In part two we go deeper into real world scenarios.

What happens when planning is done too late? How families can avoid crisis situations? And how elder law can actually create better outcomes and less conflict? If this episode resonated with you, you're not going to want to miss the next one. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you in part two.