panel format, where I will be asking our presenters questions, and that's the way we're going to be doing it today. So our presenter today, our primary presenter is Jennifer Saki. She is the founder and CEO of Caregiving Corner, which is an 18-person firm providing care management and caregiving counseling services in the greater Charlotte area since 2005. So that is 20 years, they're celebrating their 20th anniversary. She founded her firm with the intent to provide families of older adults a way to navigate through the complex and oh-so-emotional impact of caregiving for elders and caregiving decisions. Her ultimate goal is to alleviate stress in families around caregiving. She also currently serves with the National Board of Aging Life Care Association and is a fellow of the Leadership Academy there, a designation held by fewer than 50 care managers in the country. She hosts the Caregiving Corner podcast on her website. Our next presenter today is also from the Caregiving Corner, and it's Chanel Glover. She is a care manager at Caregiving Corner. She received her master's in gerontology, as did Jennifer, and has many years in the space of elder care, including serving in senior living as a memory care director. So without further ado, I'm going to get started with our question and answer format that I'll be doing as a panel discussion with our presenters. I'm going to start with Jennifer. So Jennifer, as I said, you're celebrating 20 years this year working with families. Can you give us an idea from your perspective of why you founded your company 20 years ago and how you've helped families these many years? Yes. Yeah. Thank you for having us today. We're really excited to be here and to be talking to the audience. I started the company really after watching my mom have really challenging experiences as a caregiver when she was taking care of her mom. She just encountered a lot of barriers and obstacles, and she was kind of having an experience that's very typical for caregivers, where you called five different people and asked them the same question, and you get five different answers. And so she was spending a lot of time, wasting a lot of money, just kind of really spinning her wheels, getting nowhere with a lot of different things that my grandmother needed. And so I was in graduate school for gerontology at the time and learned about care management and just knew right away that this was a solution for caregivers and that this was what I really wanted to do. So my hope in reflecting back over the 20 years is that we've had the opportunity to work with hundreds of families, and I just really at the end of the day hope that we're bringing them peace of mind. They've got somebody on their side, they have somebody they can go to with questions, and they've got someone to bounce ideas off of and to be a sounding board. If they don't have someone else in their family that can be that person for them. So we wear a lot of different hats, but at the end of the day, we're really trying to do whatever we can to support the caregivers. Excellent. You obtain, we love certifications as CFPs, and you obtain a certified care manager designation, which you told me requires a lot of effort. Can you help us understand why we should look for somebody with that designation? Yeah, definitely. So as with some things, the phrase care manager is not trademarked. So really anybody could set themselves up and say, oh, I'm a care manager. This is what I know how to do. And so the certification process that our national professional organization, the Aging Life Care Association, decided to basically endorse five different certifications that members could obtain so that we could distinguish ourselves and be able to say to consumers, we've put in this extra time and effort into getting qualified to be able to take the exam. We've passed the exam. And then on an annual basis, we are being expected to take on 15 CEUs that are in the field. So it's something that we're constantly working on keeping fresh. So you have to have hundreds of hours of supervised experience before you qualify to even take the exam. So it's pretty rigorous, and we're proud of that. I hope they don't change it. I appreciate the fact that it's hard and that not anybody can just sign up to take it. Because like your field, I think it's really important that people be able to recognize that a certification means something. Absolutely. So given that, you mentioned the Aging Life Care Association. How can our attendees find a certified care manager in their area? Yes. So aginglifecare.org is the website, aginglifecare.org. And it's the only association that has aging life care managers registered as members. So you're able to do a zip code search or search by city, and it will get you a list of people that cover that area. And so it's a great tool for people that might be listening here, but might have a parent on the other side of the country and might need assistance elsewhere. It's a great tool. Right. Right. And I do see you all as maybe the first place people can turn when developing what we call a care management plan, which I know that's another thing that I found is a parallel between the kind of work you all do and the work we do. We love to plan. We love designations, but we also love to be forward thinking and really plan. And no one else does this as you all as care managers want to do. I remember you speaking at another event and talking about, well, it's, we should be doing not only an estate plan, but coordinating that with a care management plan. And I just, that immediately hit home for me because I thought, you know what, if we wait till the last minute, as I see so many of my clients doing, and then they trip over the dog's toys and find themselves on the floor with a major disaster and they have to go somewhere, they never planned for this stage. And help us understand why people need to plan ahead and what a caregiving management plan is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think that it goes hand in hand with a financial plan. And I think it goes hand in hand with an estate planning, an estate plan that you would put together with an attorney. So I think the three plans together really set the stage for the best possible chance you have at your aging years, unfolding the way that you'd like for them to, to the best of our ability to anticipate what's going to happen. We often get asked the question of, we don't know what's going to happen, so why am I planning for this? If I don't know what type of diagnosis I'm going to have, why is this something that I need to think about? And we tell people that it's important to think about because one of the characteristics that can happen that very often happens as you age is that you lose the ability to speak for yourself and to communicate to others what your wishes are. And that could be due to cognitive impairment, dementia of some sort. That could be for chronic health conditions, some type of rapid health deterioration. So there can be a lot of different reasons that you find yourself in a position where you're not able to communicate those things. And so taking the time to think about what's important to you and think about the way that you would like for your aging years to unfold and putting that on paper and putting that in front of the people that you've designated in your legal documents is super, super important. It gives families reassurance that if they are put in the unfortunate position of having to make decisions for you, it gives them some sense of relief knowing that they're doing what you would have wanted them to do. So again, it kind of goes back to that peace of mind that you're giving family. So it's a real gift to be having these conversations early with people. I love that because Jennifer, we said the same thing about estate planning. People don't want to do that. Yeah. And why should I spend money on that? It's not going to help me. Well, no, because it's going to help the people that you leave behind, the people that you love. And that's why I love trying to think about this in a way of coordinating with the estate plan and the financial plan because we see ourselves as the quarterbacks too. And if I were to restart my financial planning career, I think I would always put this in the list of recommendations along with an estate plan, develop your caregiving plan and really define that for people. And like you, my first inspiration was my own parents because I sat them down and tried to do my own caregiving or get them to plan around this and much, much resistance. My dad said, first of all, Bristling, you are not taking me out of here and my condo, my beautiful residence. I will be taken out on a stretcher. I will die in my sleep. Lots of resistance. He ended up dying in his sleep, God is wish, but I told him, dad, no plan is a plan in itself. You know, you can't, that's a hope to die in your sleep. That is not a plan. And then when I turned to mom and asked her, would you like dad to be your caregiver? You know, because I'm going to be straight up with you all, this is not my forte. I am a terrible nurse, terrible caregiver, and at least I was able to admit that ahead of time. So we need to really think about who's going to be that person for you. Are you going to go to a continuing care community? What will be the answer? And my mom said, your father's a terrible caregiver. I know this. He's already tried it. And I'm scared of that. So this really became, like so many of the advisors on the call today, a passion of mine as I lived this myself. And so that's why I feel like if I were to redo this for myself, I would really coordinate a caregiving plan for everybody. And by the way, my mom did end up joining a continuing care community. Thank goodness. That was my gift, right? As well as hers, because she is living her dream right now. Okay. So, so that's my dad shutting down and help us understand then, you know, and we'll get clients shutting down on this. We all know it. How do we respond to that when people say, stop talking about this. I'm just going to die in my house and I'm not going to be that person and diverse, you know, needing all this help. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, I, I use the same line that you did not having a plan is a, is a plan that you choosing to stick your head in the sands and not pay attention to the reality. You know, we, we plan for a lot of things that, that never happened and yet we're getting older every minute of every day. And so, you know, we're, I, that's the irony is that nobody wants to, wants to plan for the part that's actually inevitable that we know is happening. So, you know, I think, I think the focus oftentimes is sometimes the question gets brought up in such a way that it automatically has a negative connotation, like, you know, mom and dad, what would you want me to do if you needed help or if you couldn't stay at home? And so you can see that those questions are asked in such a way that automatically the person is having to think about themselves as, as being dependent, as being disabled somehow as not being able to have the thing that they want to be able to be at home. And so sometimes what's helpful is just changing the way that you ask the question. And so one of the phrases that we use very often to open the conversation is what does it mean to age well for you? Because that's really different for everybody. For some people that's, I want to sit in my study and read a book and I really don't want to talk to people unless I absolutely have to. Other people would like to be at five different bingo games throughout the day and be social butterflies. And then other people would like to sell their house, rent an RV and travel for the rest of their lives. I mean, for every person that's out there, there's a different idea about what aging well means. And so when you ask it like that, that really kind of inspires a more positive perspective on what you're asking. And then from there, you're able to glean what is important. So if you've got somebody that says, I'd really like to travel, well, that person may get to a point where they're not able to travel. But what that can tell the family is that, gosh, this is a person that may really struggle being moved to a place and having to put down roots and having to adjust to a sense of permanence. So maybe this is an opportunity for dad to be at an assisted living near a brother for a year and then move to be near a daughter the next year. So you can plan in such a way that captures people's values and what's important to them without the guarantee that, yes, you're going to be able to be on a cruise until you're a hundred and that sort of thing. So start with a positive way of asking the question and reframe it. And that usually gets people thinking about things. I think the other thing that you said, which was key, is that we hear from clients a lot. They say, I don't want my situation to become a burden for my kids. And so sometimes our response to that is then the best thing that you can do is have this conversation with us right now about, and let's talk this through. Let's make some decisions because every decision that you make now that we can document is one less decision that your family is going to have to make without you. And they're going to really suffer a lot of guilt and a lot of grief trying to figure out if they're doing what you would have wanted them to do. So those are usually two good ways to kind of catapult the conversation in the right direction. Well, yeah, so this is, this is so interesting because I think we need to keep pushing that conversation forward into where do we see ourselves maybe 10 years after that? Aging, what does this mean to age well? What about different phases? I mean, you know, and what, what do we see around that? Cause it's, but we're, it sounds like we're going to need your help to keep, keep these kinds of conversations, staying positive with our clients and another reason to have a caregiving manager be part of this whole thing. So let's see what else I have. Let's see when some of the other pieces that we hear a lot from clients, I have had so many experiences with aging clients, you know, digging in and wanting to be at home and things stay the same and all that, and people wanting to caregive for each other. And you know, so frequently we'll find wife caregiving for husband, somebody with advanced Alzheimer's and things that they find themselves rapidly getting over their skis. What are some of the pitfalls with, with trying to age in place and keep things the same and not get help? Well, I think, you know, unfortunately we've seen a really public example of this recently with the actor Gene Hackman and his passing with his wife. And you know, we, we don't know, and we probably won't ever know all of the circumstances, but that's kind of a, for us, it's somewhat classic situation where you have two people that are aging together, they are, you know, taking care of one another. They're not using outside help or outside services. And you know, it seems from what we know so far that something might've happened to the caregiver first, which left, you know, Gene in a position where he was without his caregiver. So you know, I think what's important is when some people are pressed for a plan and they say, well, I'm just going to take care of my husband, whatever he needs, that's, that's fine, but we still need to have a backup plan. And what I say to people is that even though in this moment, it might be very obvious that your husband is the one that needs assistance that could change tomorrow with you, you know, you could have something profound that changes with your health, where you now need more care than your husband does. And so let's put a plan B in place to at least know that we have a safety net. And that's a really important conversation because it's so easy for caregivers and people that are listening to this right now, I know you can relate to this. When you're a caregiver, you're focused on the other person. You're not taking care of yourself. You're skipping your own appointments, you're, you're prioritizing their doctor's appointments, you are. And so a lot of our job, and I see Chanel nodding, I know that she deals with this with clients is really talking to the caregiver and, and encouraging them to stop and catch their breath and focus on themselves. And that's really one of the best things that they can do for both of their situations is to make sure that they're doing a good job of taking care of themselves as caregivers. Yeah, I think that'd be great to hear from Chanel on this now. Chanel, as you guys boots on the ground, she is one of your caregiving managers, and I'd love to hear your perspective on this, you know, like, what, what do you see happening with people when they try to do all this stuff themselves? Yeah, Jenny, just just listening to Jennifer and really describing that, you know, this is, this is real life that folks are dealing with. And when we come into the home, you know, is that we're meeting with our clients, we're doing that initial assessment, we have not fully created that care plan yet. We are taking the steps to ask very sensitive questions about their current situation and thinking of part A and thinking of part B and even a C, a plan that we can put in place for them. And it's tough to sit down and look at the caregiver and ask them, what are you really going through? What does being the daughter again look like? Or what does being the wife again look like? Or being the husband again look like for you? Maybe you are very social and you're living in a neighborhood that you moved into to retire. And you have a group of friends that you wanna go out and eat lunch with and eat dinner with, but you can't because you are the caregiver. And you don't have an opportunity to step away because of guilt, because maybe you're seeing things that you're not able to share with other people. And that's where we come in and really sit down and have that open and honest conversation. It is allowing us to build trust in the individual. And it also allows us to bring in the daughter or the son in that conversation. So it's really a three-way conversation knowing if it's the parent that's dealing with this and it's their husband or wife that they're trying to manage and can't control the situation, or if it's the child that's having to handle both parents and situations. So we wanna really uncover all of the needs, put that care plan in place. We know that care plan is gonna pivot, right? As they age, things are going to change, right? And we wanna include individuals like yourself, your organization in a state planning to be a part of that conversation. Because as the resources that they have, it's going to allow us to put a better plan in place for them, right? So if we know that upfront and we're a part of that conversation, we can build a better plan for them and really lean on us to be the ones to have those difficult conversations. I've been in many rooms where the adult child is like, dad's not listening to anything I have to say, or I just, I'm too afraid to have this conversation. And that's okay. Let me have the conversation for you. That's why we talk about it in advance and you get those feelings to me so I can articulate that to your parent to uncover what plan we can put in place to best assist all of you guys. That is tremendously valuable. I'm sure lots of people, advisors are nodding heads right now. And I just, that is exactly it, right? I'm in this phase now with my own mom, like she doesn't wanna hear from me anymore. So I'm trying to get third parties to tell her stuff, you know, like maybe we need to limit the driving. Maybe we need to, you know, so I think having you there as a third party, boy, does that help our relationship, right? So you must get in the room. It sounds like you all are great listeners and really dig in to the emotional aspects, which of course we started our whole spiel to talk about how highly emotional this is for families and stressful. And when you start asking these questions and listening, I'll bet you get some tears. I'll bet you get a lot of emotion. Yes, and we have to validate those emotions. They're real. They're things that they're going through. And we have, you know, because we've been doing this, Jennifer's been in business for 20 years. I've been in the business for 14 years of senior living. You really get tied into what those emotions are. And it allows you to be able to, you know, help them continue to ask those questions and feel better about what they're putting in place for them. So yeah, those emotions are real and it's good for us to validate. And then we think of the scenarios of things that we've seen down the road that we can express to them. You know, we don't want you to be in this situation, but it's a what-if scenario. What if this does happen? So let's talk about this, you know, let's talk about understanding where you are with your chronic conditions, whatever they might be, and the things that we've seen to not scare you, but to know that those are real and we need to have plans in place for that. Things that will possibly happen down the road. Correct. And you know, it's funny, cause you probably see this as well, but people who nobly want to be that person for their spouse and, you know, just say, look, you have Alzheimer's, I understand that. I want to do everything. I want to be your caregiver because I love you, right? And then what they find, and this is kind of the same in our money business, people think they can do something they weren't trained to do. What they find is that they're not good at it. And I know this because I have a friend going through it and I told him, I said, I wonder if the locks are on the doors, if you've got the proper protections and sure enough, spouse runs away in the middle of the night and gets lost. And so, you know, I just, I'm sure that you all have these kinds of conversations as you're saying, Chanel, here's the realities of what this is like with advanced Alzheimer's. Are you prepared? You know, can we get through this? Can we get help? Just in case, you know? And as care managers, we are, we have our fingertips on the best resources out there to be able to help them in their current situation. You know, we want to match them with the proper resources, right? We don't want them, as Jennifer mentioned with her mom, having to call all these different people and feel like they're getting nowhere. That's where we come into place and we can say, okay, I hear you, I understand what you're saying, and this is the best way to handle this situation. And not only do I want to, you know, this is what the plan is, but I can take it off your plate and I can put it in place for you so that you don't have to worry about it. That people will be, you know, if it's a caregiving service that's going to come in and there's companion services or a CNA, you know, let us connect the dots for you and get that person to your front door. So that's one less thing that you have to deal with as the caregiver at that time. I love that. Right? So they can still see those. So it's all those resources. Yeah, and they can still see themselves as a caregiver. You know, somebody who loves, loves, loves their person, but supplement, get a little bit of help from you all, depending on what they want to select. Right, to quarterback that for them, like you said, the same things that you all do. That's really helpful to understand more of what caregiving management's about. So, and I don't know which of you, Jennifer or Chanel, wants to answer the question about long-term, what we know about long-term pressure and toll on caregivers, especially elderly caregivers. We hear things like it takes years off their life. You can take a real physical and emotional toll on them. What do you all see? What does the data show? Yeah. Yeah, it's a profound change. We see spousal caregivers, you know, so if you've got a couple, two older adults that are living together, you know, we see them rapidly deteriorate, the caregiver as well. And, you know, some of the scenarios that Chanel mentioned where, you know, you might have a couple where the wife is very social, but because she's taking care of her husband, she's not able to be social. So she's missing out on that emotional connection. She's missing out on that mental stimulation of being out in community and maybe with friends. And so we see the trajectory of decline really accelerate in older adults who are caregivers, which is just super challenging for families if there are adult children, because sometimes it can be kind of a one-two punch, you know, one parent passes, and then very quickly the other one does because they've declined so much. And some people will say after one parent passes that they didn't realize how poorly the well spouse, so to speak, was doing until their other parent was gone because they just, everyone again was focused on the obvious person that had needs and maybe that other person needs weren't as apparent. So I think it's super critical. It's also very challenging when you have spousal caregivers because as they are declining, there's less that they can do physically. So even if they want to, and even if they can identify that they're good at caregiving, which as you've pointed out is not gonna be everybody, they sometimes physically can't be the caregiver. And it is very tricky to keep people together. You know, we might have a husband that is declining and needs placement in a memory care community, but maybe his wife is declining in a different way and she just needs assisted living. And, you know, if the goal of the couple is to stay in the same place, that can be very challenging for us to come up with a solution that works for both of them, that brings some relief to the caregiver, but addresses both of their needs. So, you know, sometimes we'll have a family reach out and say, oh, this is, you know, for both of my parents, but dad's really the client. You know, he's the one that has Alzheimer's. And most of the time we say, we're gonna put both of your parents in the system as individual clients, because we'd like to be able to be helpful to mom and make sure we've got, and sometimes we end up doing just as much to help mom or whoever the caregiver is as dad, because again, we not only wanna shore up that situation, but we also know that that person's decline is going to happen more rapidly than you would typically see. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely, I think we're all nodding our heads and have seen all these movies before of this noble elderly spouse also declining just as a caregiver and frequently dying quickly after the other person dies because of it. So yeah, it's just all eyes wide open around this. And this is more of your training that we don't have around this subject of how to talk to clients about it. And at least to get you in the door. So, I have another question for you all, because we have more time and my mom happened to be making the choice of going to continuing care retirement community when she became a widow. And I've really seen her blossom and it felt like she got younger when she went into this independent living. My mom has to be a really social person. She goes to the bar every night. She's 85 and just, I think she's getting her third wind here after losing my dad. And many of them date in these places and it's just really, and it's hard to get people to move from their home. I understand that. The other thing that's happened just this week is my mom went and had a terrible accident and she's needing a lot of care rehab and it's just really been stressful for me, obviously. But what do I find? I find her tribe, right? So I asked my mom, who are your favorite people? And one of the people already started calling me and they all wanna do something. I said, you can be her fan club. You can come in to the rehab unit and urge her on, because this is gonna be really tough. And so I'm just seeing so many benefits and it makes me sad that more people don't, they wanna dig into their home. Do you see these things that people, when they move into these social settings, really benefit from that? Yeah, I wish we could figure out how to put what you said on a billboard to get people to believe it, because it's just the socialization, the change, the kind of the spirit that can ignite inside of people when they find community again is so powerful. And even for people that aren't, people that consider themselves very social, just to simply have people that have an awareness about them and to know that they have people checking in on them or are aware that they didn't show up for breakfast. And so maybe that warrants a phone call or a knock on the door to see how they're doing. It just can give so much. And obviously with COVID, I mean, we saw tremendous impacts of isolation and thankfully, a silver lining of COVID is that now social isolation in seniors is something that's widely being studied and the impact that that has on the health. And the first studies out, aren't a surprise to any of us who work in this space. And it's that seniors are at increased risk for isolation and they're at increased risk because they are living at home. Even if they have support services, very often the support services that are coming in are much younger. And so there's generational differences. So we see that the older adult is not necessarily getting what they need from that relationship to replace socialization altogether. But we've had clients that have, and I know Chanel has seen this from the senior living side. You have clients that move into these communities and they discover new hobbies. They meet new friends. They try things that they've never had the courage or been brave enough to try before. And it's just, it's almost magical to see. It really is. To see the transformation. Yeah. It feels magical. Jenny, the stigma is, for you thinking about folks that are 80, 85 years old, is that their parents were in a retirement home. They were in a skilled nursing. So the way that their mindset is, Right. I walk in there, they're gonna be all in wheelchairs. They're gonna be all asleep. And that's not the case. And if you can get past that, then it does allow us to open up those doors to say, come in and see exactly what this looks like now. As people continue to do research on what, you know, 80 year olds and 85 year olds are looking for, they're catering to their needs right there in the community. So when we find someone is at home and they're saying, oh, I'm not gonna move. I don't wanna go there. It's gonna look like this. We encourage them. You know what? Based on what you're telling me about what you're looking for, I know a place that would fit those needs for you. And I encourage them to come with me. Come with me. Come tour. Come see. Come see it. Come have lunch. Come do an activity. And because I was on the other side of that for so many years as a sales manager, that allowed me, you know, seeing those families come in and I'm the one receiving them and showing them what this really looks like and introducing them to people as they walk around and really understanding their life journey and what they're looking for. You know, the sales folks, they bring that to the customer when they come in so that they can feel a sense of purpose when they come to the community. So it's not what you envisioned before, you know, when you had your mother there, when you saw your grandmother, you know, in a skilled nursing, it doesn't feel like that anymore. So it's so wonderful to see them blossom. I have so many, so many success stories of folks learning how to paint and have these, you know, nice little artworks that they're doing now, or they're very crafty, or they're like, I'm gonna be like your mom, 85 at the bar. Like this is, you know, those are the things that we like to see. There are some families, some couples, some folks have actually gotten married in some of these facilities. We have seen some wonderful stories of coming from being alone in your home to going into a community and just, like you said, just absolutely blossoming and catching that third wind and living a life that we really want them to live. We want them to be as independent as possible, but there's assisted living and there's places for them to be in that will help them as they continue to age and have issues. But we still want them to have a purpose and to be able to live in a place that they still can find friendship and find a way to continue to be social. Over the years, what we've seen, especially like around the holidays and things like that, as you said, folks get very depressed. They get very lonely. And when you're showing them that there's a setting, because you think about the adult children who are supposed to be there for them, and they can't, they're trying to plan holidays, they're trying to go on trips, they're trying to do all, they can't do those things. And we want them to look at the independent living, assisted living and memory care setting as this is an extension of your family. And like you said, you found your tribe. Who are those tribe people now that can come in and be a part of your life, while we continue to still support you as the caregiver, as the children, but also still have that life too as being the daughter or the son again. That's exactly right. And it's one of those things where I think we all want the same thing. We want our elderly clients and we want our parents to be happy and to not be so dependent on us for their happiness. And what I found was that she's definitely way happier with her own tribe than with my family tribe being the only ones for her. I would say my mom has more friends than I do. She's turning down activities with friends because she can't do them all. So it's really fun to watch. And I just wish more people would be aware and open to, as you said, my last presentation I did last year for NEPA was around the trends in senior living, going to see these places and seeing how different they are from the old-fashioned retirement home. So fun. Okay, so another topic for us that's of interest I know as advisors is the financial piece. We often see clients start to struggle with finances and financial decisions as they age. And so some of the issues we see as advisors are, maybe dad was in charge of the money for a very, very long time. He still wants to be in charge of everything, but at this point he's making lousy decisions, calling us going, and even though he's maybe gotten technically the keys taken away, he's no longer got financial power of attorney. Wife has it by example, but he's still calling us and going, hey, I wanna move this around and sell that and do that. How do we handle this kind of thing with somebody who's losing capacity to handle? Is there a polite way to talk about this? Take away those keys, for example. Yeah, so that's a really tricky question. And I know that this comes up an awful lot. There's kind of two different things to be aware of. And we're seeing a lot of increase in scams and exploitation with older adults. So on the one hand, there's kind of the fiduciary responsibility of making sure that your client's not asking you to do something that's just totally crazy and out of character that might be a result of them having been scammed. So we are working with a client right now that has wired $50,000 to somebody that it's a romance scam. So she thinks that she's in a relationship with this person. She's never spoken to them. She's only texted. And, you know, she's convinced that she's in love. And so she, her financial advisor was the first person that spotted that something was going on. And it was because of that request for that transaction. So, you know, I think, I think you all are on kind of the front lines to see some of that. I think that making sure people are coming into the office and that you're dealing with them in person to before big decisions are made, can, can be helpful, because it puts enough of a distance where they have to make enough of an effort to come and see you, that if it's really something that they want to do, and importantly, if it's something that they're going to be able to remember, then that's going to demonstrate to you that that it is a legitimate, you know, request. And so sometimes just something as easy as saying, gosh, I would love to do this for you. Why don't you and your wife come into the office and we can meet about this, this is really kind of a larger conversation than, than what we can handle over the phone. And what we've been told is that, you know, if you don't hear from the person, again, that might tell you what you need to know that that person is maybe having some difficulties, they, you know, are, they might have forgotten that they had the conversation with you, or they aren't able to put together the sequence of steps to be able to get in the car and come and see you. And that's a scary thing to think about. But some people, a lot of people at home before they receive care, or before they move into a care community, are operating around that level, where if you put a barrier in place, that's meant to be protective, you're not saying no to their request, you're simply saying, come into my office, come in person, and let's chat about this, that that's enough of a barrier that you can eliminate, or at least it will shine brighter to you if this person is somebody that can't follow through with those steps and actually come and see you in person. You know, I know that a lot of financial advisors, obviously, we're trying to incorporate with the client's permission, you know, family conversations, you know, if you're, if you, if you've relocated, and your adult children are here, let's bring them in for a conversation. We don't have to share personal information, but let's make sure that they know that, you know, that you're going to be taken care of, and that you're, you're set. And, you know, maybe we can talk to them about what your financial goals are, or something. So trying to start incorporating the family, where possible, is super helpful. You know, we, we have had situations where banks or financial advisors have had to call in Adult Protective Services, simply because they don't feel comfortable at all moving forward. And that triggers kind of a separate legal process to look into capacity. You know, the courts can decide if someone is still competent, perhaps put in place a guardianship. I mean, that's that we could, we could spend a whole another day talking about, about all of those pieces. But I just, you know, reasonably thinking through is something that your client is asking you to do? Is it really out of the ordinary? And is there something that you could ask them to do that might just give you extra time to think, extra time to run it by a colleague, extra time to fly the flagpole and see what advice you get from other people that have dealt with it. And then, you know, it might put just enough of a barrier that if, if Bob calls and says, I need $50,000, I'm interested in Bitcoin. And you say, well, let's go. Why don't you come into my office? I've got some interesting charts on Bitcoin that I can show you. Then he comes to your office or he, or he maybe doesn't come to your office because he's forgotten. And that would be indicative that there could be something going on. Very interesting. Well, kind of a related topic is something I learned about in the AARP bank safe practices. I was so interested in this because when we talk about elder financial abuse, you know, there, there are signs that we can look for. And, but the other piece as advisors that we can look to do is understand who is the most frequent abuser financially of an elder person. And I was shocked to hear it's overwhelmingly family members that abuse our elderly clients. Can you go over some of those signs that we should look for to know if our clients are having that happen? Yeah. You know, one of the kind of telltale signs is if a client is estranged or hasn't communicated with an adult child in quite some time, and all of a sudden that person resurfaces, shows up after years of not being in touch, shows up after years, you know, of maybe a lot of disagreements, maybe a lot of turmoil within the family. But when that person resurfaces or when documents are changed, you know, maybe the person's daughter has always been the power of attorney. And then the brother that has been disconnected from everyone else in the family shows up and suddenly the brother is now the power of attorney. That's often a quick switch in documents is often a sign that there's something going on. And again, somebody resurfacing, you know, we're all for people recognizing as someone is aging and at the end of life that it's a good time to put, you know, let bygones be bygones and patch things up. But I will say that probably 95% of the time when someone shows up who's been out of someone's life, it ends up with a sort of fraud or exploitation attached to it, sadly. Okay. Well, that is super interesting as well. And I remember going, when I went through the training, they said things like, you see this person show up with the client at the meeting and you haven't met that person in a while. And then client seems agitated, nervous, stressed, that those are all signs that something's a mess. Right. The person won't let you be alone with them. Right. Yeah. Right. Okay. So I thought that was really interesting, possibly helpful to advisors. Let's see, we have probably maybe just one more question before we get to the Q and A. I've got a few questions in there too, Jenny. Oh, are there a lot of questions now? Not right now. There's just a few questions here. A few. Okay. I wanted to ask about the master guardian designation that you have as well, Jennifer, and would you review what this means and why it's helpful to the work you do for families? Yeah. So probably about 12 years ago, caregiving foreigners started serving as corporate guardian for individuals who are adjudicated by the courts as incompetent. And when family, when there either is no family or family is unfit to serve as someone's guardian of the person, we don't do anything with finances. We just serve as the guardian and the person. And so that's essentially serving as someone's healthcare decision maker. It closely aligns with what we're doing as care managers, except for the fact that we are at that point becoming the decision maker. And I went through the process of first becoming a certified guardian and I love certifications too, and pushing myself. And so I decided that I really wanted to be at the top of my game. And they have a master guardian designation that you qualify for after you've been in guardianship for 10 years. And it's a two day exam. It's a lot, but I felt like it demonstrated to clients and to the court system and attorneys with whom we work, our dedication in serving a growing number of people that end up under guardianship and a big population that we're seeing are people that come before the courts and they either do not have any family, maybe they never married, child-free, divorced, widowed later in life, they don't have anyone who can serve. And so we kind of are sort of a natural next step for them and it alleviates. So then we can get involved and we can do our advocacy and we can make sure that they have everything that they need. It's just in the context of a guardianship. So I'm very proud of the work that I'm doing and with the National Guardianship Association and being an active member. And I feel like that's an important part of our business. Okay. Well, maybe we should save this time, the rest of the time for the Q and A, and that could take some time. So Chanel, do you want to tee up our first question? I will. So Jennifer, it kind of aligns, not necessarily with guardianship, but another program that we offer. We have a question that says, how are you setting up caregiving plans for single women with no kids? So it made me think about maybe talking about Solo Senior and the opportunities we have there. Yeah. Yeah. So we created a specific plan for Solo Seniors. That's the population that we kind of identified. And it was some of the people that I mentioned previously. So people that are child-free, single, never married, divorced, widowed. That's actually the largest and fastest growing segment of older adults are people who are considered to be aging solo. So they don't have a spouse, they don't have children. They might have children and they are not connected with them due to estrangement. I've been surprised at the number of people who have come to us for support as Solo Seniors, but they have children. They just are not, they don't wish for them to be involved in the process. And so we created a program. And again, from our guardianship experience, we knew that if we could proactively get involved and become someone's healthcare power of attorney, if people had a professional option, then they might be able to avoid a guardianship down the road. If they could surround themselves and build a care team with professionals, because they don't have a typical family structure. So I think it's really important that we acknowledge that family is different for everybody. And it's, that's never been truer than it is today. And so it's, it's surprising to some people to find out that solo agers are the fastest growing segment of older adults in the United States. And so they have, they have a unique set of needs that we try to address within our program. Wow. Fascinating. Right. I can think of tons of these kinds of people for sure. So is there another Q and A there? Yeah, we've got about six questions, so we're just going to keep going through them. So how do you, how do we help to navigate the confusion around doctors, hospital visits, and understanding treatments and making medical decisions is from Christopher. Yeah. So, so one of the things that we do as care managers is we attend appointments with our clients and we take notes for the client. We can type those up and provide the summary to the family. A lot of our clients have notebooks where we print out, you know, kind of notes. They like that, you know, everybody leaves the doctor's office with like that after visit summary, but that's full of medical jargon. And sometimes doesn't really highlight the stuff that you, that you really want to focus on. And so, so we, we will take notes and kind of manage things and help people stay on top of appointments. We can get people to appointments. And then, you know, more importantly, most of the time when you're going to an appointment, something changes, a medication or something like that. And so instead of just taking the client back home, we will go to the pharmacy and take the prescription and make sure that it gets filled and make sure that it gets put into the person's pill boxes. If a med has changed, you know, so that that doctor's order can take effect immediately. You know, there's going to a doctor's appointment can be very overwhelming for an older adult because you have about five to six minutes with a doctor now. And unless you're there for your annual exam, that's about all the face time you're going to get. And so for an older adult who has a lot of questions and might need to hear something explained several times or repeated while they write, it's, it's great to have a healthcare advocate. So that's, that's an important piece of what we do, the healthcare advocacy. We do the same thing in the hospital. When somebody goes to the hospital, we show up at the hospital. Hospitals are horrible environments for people with any type of cognitive impairment to understand and to navigate. And so we go in, we know their medical history, we're able to communicate to the doctors, we're able to get them on the phone with the right family member that they need to be talking to so that that doctor is not trying to call the facility and trying to call, you know, the person that's connected to the driver's license. I mean, sometimes it's a bit of a mess when they're trying to find out information about a patient that's come into the ER. So, so that's, that's a lot of what we do with our medical advocacy. Next, next question. Yeah, we'd love to know when it makes sense for advisors to broach this topic with clients at retirement, at a, at what specific stage or age is it time to develop a care plan? This is two questions that I've kind of merged because they are pretty much asking the same thing. Yeah, yeah, definitely. That's a, that's a great question. I would say that I don't think it's, it's ever too early. We have people that come and meet with us annually, and they're in their fifties, they're still working. And they just like having conversations, check in conversations to, maybe they're talking about articles that they've seen on aging, or they've noticed that a new place in our community opened up, and they want our feedback or input on it, or they're hearing about a trend, and they'd like our perspective on something. So, you know, for those individuals, they're going to be armed with a tremendous amount of information as, as their plan kind of kicks in. And it's really, they're doing a lot of groundwork to educate themselves. I think definitely, before retirement, but if you haven't caught someone before retirement, then definitely as they retire, I think the two things, you know, the question of what does it mean to age well, but then also for you all having the financial information to say, let's, let's bring in an aging life care manager so that you can understand what your buying power looks like in our community. It's a great opportunity to position it like that, like this care managers out in the field knows the prices of everything, and can walk you through, you know, based on your high level view of your assets or financial situation, they can tell you what you can afford and what it's going to look like. So you don't waste your time looking at something that is out of your price range, or that might not suit your needs. So I, there's, you definitely, you're more at risk for things going wrong if you're waiting too late. So it's, so my answer to that is that it's definitely never too early to talk about it. What can you do to help ensure an individual in assisted living or memory care is being properly cared for? How do you discern what is natural decline and what is poor care? It's a great question. Oh, that's a great question. Yeah. So we're fortunate enough on our team, you know, I've got colleagues like Chanel, we've got one of our care managers used to be a state surveyor for nursing homes. And so it was her job to go in and play detective and see what was wrong in nursing home settings. And so having team members with different skill sets and different experiences is super helpful, because we see a lot of clients who are already living in communities. And that surprises some people, because our goal as care managers is to keep people living independently for as long as possible. But a lot of our clients are already living in community. And so we're hoping that they don't have to move again, we're hoping that we can keep them independent as possible in whatever level of care they're in. And so our job is to go into communities. And first of all, make sure that someone's paying attention to their, you know, to their feedback to their concerns that they might be having and keeping an eye on care. And that's a big one for people that are out of town, you know, people whose mom or dad might be here, but they live elsewhere. And so they want somebody that can lay eyes on the situation and can show up, we show up, you know, first shift, sometimes we show up second shift, or after hours, to just kind of take a peek at what's going on. And we want to make sure that if our clients are paying for care, no matter where they're paying for it, that they're getting what they're paying for, and that it's good quality care. Okay, so coming up on the hour, maybe we have like one more minute for a really good question. Yeah. So I think some of them are about Solo Senior, which Jennifer, I think we could just send the information as a part of the attachment to this about Solo Seniors wanted to know about if it's in the Charlotte area about solo aging plans outside of Charlotte. So I think we could probably send that. Few several more came in. So people love this topic. Yeah. So what should you expect a care advisor to cost? I think I'll leave it the last one. And what type of services would you expect it to be included when you meet with a client? Yeah, yeah. So, so a care manager is in the in the Charlotte area, it's different in different markets, but we charge by the hour, the range of rates locally is 130 to 155 an hour. And so you're essentially bringing us in, you know, as consultants, so you're paying for our time. We tell people that generally, for us to go in and do a thorough assessment, create a care plan and bring it back to the family and client and present it to them is typically an eight to 10 hour process. So it's a relatively minimal investment upfront. And then a lot of our clients, most everyone has us continue to visit every six weeks, every month. Some of our clients that are in the midst of care needs have us visiting weekly, but we really are are involved from that point on to help ensure that the rest of the aging journey goes smoothly. Okay, I think we're at the top of the hour, everybody again. So thank you so much for attending today. And please do commit to complete the survey that you'll see in this in the chat. And then stay tuned for our continuing conversation in the conversation circle on this topic with the Women's Initiative on April 17. Thanks, everybody for attending. Thank you. Thank you.

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