I was on vacation in Europe this summer when I got the phone call that every baby boomer dreads, letting me know there was a medical emergency with my mother. It seemed that Mom, a spry 82-year-old who still played a mean game of tennis, was in the process of reorganizing her kitchen when she fell off a ladder and sustained serious brain injury. By the time I flew across the Atlantic and went straight from the airport to the neurological intensive care unit at the New York hospital where she’d been taken by ambulance, she had the wherewithal to greet me by saying, “I did a stupid thing.”
It didn’t take me long to realize that I had, too: I hadn’t been more insistent about getting her to organize all her financial and personal information, preferably with my help. Until the accident she was fiercely independent. Now that she is thankfully recovering, she’s once again insisting that she doesn’t need me telling her what to do. But I have now had the experience of rummaging around her apartment for everything from her appointment book to bottles of essential medications. It wasn’t a pretty picture. And if she hadn’t recovered enough to run her own affairs, it would have been a whole lot worse.
Yes, she has signed the essential estate planning documents, including a health care proxy and a durable power of attorney. But it would take considerable sleuth work before I could even pay the bills associated with her New York City apartment and cavernous house, deep in the woods of Massachusetts. So though she has always said she doesn’t want to burden her children, her independence has the potential to do just that.
Once the most urgent medical issues subsided, I loaded a demo copy of the CBData software onto the PC at my Forbes office. It’s the brainchild of Carol R. Kaufman, who founded a company called Care Binders in 2009, inspired by her 14-year experience caring for her father after the devastating accident that severely injured him and killed her mother. The software that she designed enables users to consolidate personal, medical, financial and even small business information for each family member. It’s a useful tool for tech-savvy boomers like me.
Until recently, I resisted the idea for two reasons: CBData is not available in a version for the Apple computer (which is what I use at home); and there’s a learning curve to master it. I voiced both these objections to Kaufman when we met five years ago at the Heckerling Institute on Estate Planning – the annual meeting on the subject that I attend each year. The technological workaround for the former is to run the program using Parallels. And as for the time required to learn it, and of course to enter all the necessary data, I now realize it’s a lot quicker and more pleasurable than sorting through the detritus of a borderline packrat.
In my mother’s case, the main information I would enter comes under the tab labeled “financial”: credit card account numbers (with bill-pay reminders); insurance policies; non-brokered investments (including the cost basis); and financial accounts.
The section labeled “Critical Documents” lets me choose which items to list, with information about where the originals are located and whom they can be released to. I can even attach a PDF. Most recently, that would have saved me the trouble of a round-trip by subway from the hospital to my own home to retrieve a copy of my mother’s health care proxy that I keep in a file cabinet in my basement. Under the medical tab, I can enter all the places she’s been hospitalized; doctors’ names; medicines she takes; and even contact information for her pharmacy. (If you’ve ever been admitted to a hospital, you may recall that you need to repeat your medical history several times.)
There is a place for passwords, which would have come in handy when I tried to get on the Wi-Fi system in her apartment while she was in the hospital. Information in the section on subscriptions (with notations for those that are automatically paid) would have given me an easy way to suspend home delivery of her newspapers.
Additional tabs don’t apply to her situation but could come in handy for other people. For my own records, I would use the tab labeled “IT Virtual/Software Inventory” for information about cloud-based storage and the website for my book. There’s a tab for pets, where you can list everything from the license number to the immunization record, all of which could be helpful to someone caring for your pet if you become disabled or die. (See my post, “If You Love Your Dog (Or Cat Or Gerbil), Read This.”)
Ghoulish as it sounds, the heading, “Last Wishes” can save your relatives some guesswork in their time of grief. My grandmother did us the favor of leaving instructions in a fruit bowl on her mantel. But it took me several phone calls to locate the Cape Cod military cemetery where she and my grandfather wanted to be buried. As it happened, Grandma died first and Grandpa’s military discharge papers from World War II, which were a prerequisite for burial in a military cemetery, had been in his wallet for the past 55 years.
Two things I missed on CBData were specific categories for taxes, and expenses paid on a regular basis – with a chance to indicate whether bills were being automatically charged to a credit card. True, there’s a category under the “Personal Tab” for professional firms, where you could list the accountant who prepares your estimated taxes. But that wouldn’t help if you do your own. Regular expenses associated with your home could be listed under another “Personal Tab” heading, labeled “Residential Service Providers.” There you could include notes about how bills are being paid and reminders about when to pay them.
As with any record-keeping system, the question arises, “Who will operate it?” CBData would seem to work well for tech-savvy adult children managing accounts for elderly parents; and for financial advisors who offer this concierge-type service to their clients. (CBData partners with professional organizers.) But it could be confounding to loved ones who aren’t familiar with the software and only discover, after someone becomes demented or dies, that this is where all the necessary information is stored. They might appreciate the choice between software like this, which gives them everything at their fingertips, and legible notes on a yellow legal pad that provides a roadmap to what they need.
Another issue is: On whose computer will the data be housed? CBData is set up so that you need to enter passwords before accessing every tab. But I wouldn’t want it on the PC in my mother’s apartment, where numerous home health aides have come and gone since her recent accident.
All that said, in the not-too-distant future, I intend to plunk down $150 for a personal license to the CBData Software (a small business version costs $250). I will start by entering all the data for my husband and I, and link the information to the free CBData app that I’ve already downloaded for my iPad. (You can link just some of the data to your mobile device, or all of it; it gets transferred in encrypted form.)
After that I plan to make a date with my mother to put her financial house in order. I figure we can make a day of it. And this time I won’t take “No” for an answer. Heck, I’ll even bring lunch.
Archive of Forbes Articles By Deborah Jacobs
Deborah L. Jacobs, a lawyer and journalist, is the author of Estate Planning Smarts: A Practical, User-Friendly, Action-Oriented Guide, now available in the third edition.
