How Financial Abuse Happens—and How Families Can Prevent It – Ann Cavlovic

You are listening to Boomers Today with your host Frank Sampson. Well, welcome to Boomers Today. I’m your host, Frank Samson. Of course, each week we bring you important and very useful information on issues facing baby boomers, their parents and other loved ones.

And as I do on every one of our shows, I thank all of you, and I thank all of you because so many of you are sharing podcasts or individual shows with friends and family, and I appreciate that so much, and that’s why our listeners are growing each and every day. Many of you listen on various podcast stations, are on pretty much all of them, Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or you can just ask a Luxus Siri to take you to Boomers Today Radio. And many of you go write to Boomers Today radio dot com to listen as well. So again, thank you.

But I do know why for sure your sharing and our listeners are growing is because we have wonderful guests, very educational and I’m not going to disappoint you today because we have with us and Kavlovic, who is a Canadian author. Her novel Count on Me portrays elder abuse in a family. She was the recipient of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, and her work has placed in several writing contests. And thank you so much for joining us on Boomers today.

Really appreciate it. Oh, thank you friend. Happy to be here. Yeah.

Yeah, So the book count On Me. So, you know, I wrote a book, and anytime anybody here’s I write a book, they always ask me, what inspired you to write your book? So I’m going to ask that right off the what inspired you to write count On Me? Yes? So I have had a long standing fascination with what happens when love and money combine, and earlier on, in earlier short stories, I was experimenting with this, but I wasn’t going too too far, and I thought I would park that until maybe I was a more mature writer. And then my own parents were in nursing homes and this is a work of fiction. But I did learn a lot spending time in nursing homes, and I would often see family fights break out in the hallways, and it was often about It was about money, it was about the wills, it was about who took what from the house, it was about your care decisions.

And I realized, wow, this is really where tensions between the two really start to manifest, and so my research and curiosity took off from there. Wow. Yeah, unfortunately I’ve seen a lot of that too in my career in this industry. But you know, you mentioned you did you wrote it was fiction, So why did you do explore? Why did you choose to explore elder you know, abuse or the story of it through fiction rather than.

Nonfiction, Because I don’t think my life is particularly that interesting. The beauty the beauty the beauty of fiction is that you can, you know, I can curate things and tell a story that I think is useful to other people. I do write nonfiction pieces sometimes actually, but I felt like for what I wanted to explore here, I wanted the freedom of exploring that in fiction, and then you know, through research and other things, I could pick up on elements that I thought were important to the story. Yeah.

So, who you’re trying to reach out to to for your book and who’s the audience you’re trying to reach. Well, I mean, any author wants everyone in the world to read their work. But so, I mean, it is about elder abuse, but it’s hopefully more than that. It is about you know, cycle breaking within a family, so sort of sandwich generation issues are dealt with in there too.

I hope people, I hope anyone who’s interested intentions between love and money would find something in it. I do find reader reactions kind of go in a few different camps. People who have been through this are been through you know, dealing with sort of aging parents or seniors who have you know, had tensions in the family. Often super appreciate seeing this in print because despite the statistics, as you know better than most, people going through it can feel very alone and you know, very isolated, or feel like it’s a shameful, rare thing that’s happening to them, which unfortunately it’s not.

But our culture does not talk about it, so you know, people going through it do find it helpful. That’s one reader I hope to reach, although sometimes people in the throes of it might not worry right in the evenings, I hope. I hope this book has a preventative effect too. So I hope people at any stage of life just have the courage to look at it because there’s so much prevention that of the negative outcomes that that can be done.

And I’m sure we’ll pick up more on that in our in our conversation, because it is one of many things in our culture that you know, that we shy away from and that doesn’t help us. I hope parents find something in it too, who are living through the Sandwich generation. And then anyone who’s I mean, you know, tensions between love and money is just endemic in our culture, particularly a very kind of consumer society culture. So anyone who has a curiosity of why someone could come to feel entitled to someone else’s money, particular early in the family, I hope I would find something in this book.

Right, So, I know we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna You’re right, we’re gonna talk a little bit more about it, about the money part of it. But I’d have to say that probably many people, at least in my experience, imagine elder abuse is physical abuse. Financial abuse is you know, sometimes even often invisible. How common is financial abuse versus physical abuse? Talk talk to us a.

Little bit about that, sure, So I’m more familiar with the statistics in Canada, but my understanding is that they’re very similar in the States and other Western countries. But when we’re talking about elder abuse, I think the majority of it is actually financial, physical and other forms are are less common. We also tend to imagine and so with financial abuse, you know, maybe imagine phone scams and you know, these sorts of things, and those are those are real, But like many forms of abuse, it’s more often someone close or someone known to the victim. In Canada, the estimates are that at least ten percent of seniors are affected by some form of financial abuse, some form of elder abuse, and again the majority of that would be financial abuse.

It’s probably higher than that, of course, because it’s often not reported. As a Canadian Association of Retired Persons estimates one in six older Canadians experienced some form of elder abuse, and one in three of their members said they know of a senior who’s been abused. And we also tend to think of you know, maybe nurses and nursing homes or again someone outside, but it’s more often a family member, adult children, grandchildren, or or more relatives. Yeah.

So, I know, you start out talking about what you saw it in the nursing homes and the hallways, and you know some of the issues there. Talk to us about. Let’s zero in on you know, financial abuse. Can you give us some examples of the types of things that that people are unfortunately dealing with, and and where is it coming from? Is it coming from within the families from the outside.

I know it’s a loaded question, but I love love to get your input on that. Yeah, we’ll go in based on my understanding from the research and what I tried to sort of represent the novel. I will say to listeners at this point, if it’s starting to sound depressing, there’s a light. You know, there’s some light in here, because prevention can do a lot, and facing these things head on can do a lot.

There’s a Canadian author, mad Lynthian who says literature helps us face some of the things we’re most afraid of. So I hope here listeners remain brave because looking at the stuff head on can be very helpful. But so, one of the forms of financial abuse that that takes place in my novel is theft by power of attorney. Now, I think that’s probably a similar term used in the States, right of or mandates.

Yes, so you know, you can set up a power of attorney to give someone access to your accounts, you know, in the event that you’re incapacitated, But different jurisdictions have different levels of sort of control over how much. They check first that the individual actually is not able to make decisions before someone could take that piece of paper and start doing things, So that’s shown and awareness of how that works in your particular jurisdiction can help protect you. The more insidious for I find has to do with banks. So in Canada, again the rest of the world, it’s somewhat easy to go into, you know, a bank with a senior and say, well, you know, I’d like to become joint on this person’s account.

Sometimes the banks even encourage this because it can make transactions easier, But then you lose clarity on whose money is whose, and that lack that fuzziness can lead to some interesting calculations of you know, I didn’t get that birthday party when I was six years old, so I’m kind of like kick payback now. You know. There’s actually a consultation place in Canada for a voluntary code of conduct for banks to prevent that kind of what’s called financial abuse, so that banks have greater awareness of the kinds of coercion that can happen, so that they can help nip that in the blood. So you know, things like that that can be you know, look from the outside and sometimes are legitimately ways of just making things convenient and helping pay bills, et cetera.

But the fuzziness can cause can lead to some really unfortunate outcomes. Yeah, so let’s talk about what you know, you just brought up. Maybe somebody going into the bank with an elderly person and trying to set up a joint account. And like you said, banks should be you know, should be red flags.

But well, what have you seen as far as who’s trying to do that? Is that a family member or is that a family or non family caregiver who is trying to do that with that senior And what’s kind of the tactics they use. So again from the statistics, it’s someone known to the family, So that could be an adult child. That can also be the spouse of an adult child. And in in my novel, the girlfriend of an adult child, you start to realize more and more has been sort of pulling the strings and in a way exploiting some legitimate tensions between the mother and the son, but using that for you know, for her own financial gain.

I was careful in the novel, you know, to avoid stereotypes, and you know, no one’s a perfect character, No one in life is a perfect character. And no matter what you know has happened between you know, parents and children along the way, I was careful to draw in that there’s never it never justifies a form of payback, you know. But but usually there’s you know, there’s some seeds of something that maybe you know, even a misunderstanding that has not been addressed and festered over the years, can be a wedge that that can be exploited by someone sort of tangential to the family or you know, sometimes it is the children on their own. It’s less likely, you know, it’s it’s very rarely like a nurse or a caring professional.

It’s almost a stereotype. And when I looked at other books that deal with elder abuse, by the way, I think I found about five. There are not many, and they all had you know, like you know, once was a nurse or in one literally the butler did it, and just in reality, that’s not that’s really that’s really really rare. It’s more often someone known.

So I wanted to explore that dynamic because it is mind blowing to think how a child could sort of turn on a parent like that, and I wanted to understand how how can that happen? And with that awareness, I hope people could take steps to help prevent things from, you know, spiraling downward like that. Right, well, we’re going to take a break in just a minute, but before we do, you know you brought up something. You know people hearing about this it’s it is. It’s a depressing subject matter, all right.

You hear about stories and a family member trying to take an advantage of a parent or whatever the case may be, or a sibling or whatever the case may be. So talk, just talk to our listeners as far as hey, like you said, there might be some light at the end of the tunnel here, but should just share share your thoughts on that subject. So, in the. Context of the novel, there’s a brother and sister, and the brother is the one with his girlfriend, who you start to realize is taking steps taking liberties you should not be taking, whereas the sister is has a young child and is trying to sort of break cycles in her own parenting while also fighting for her, for her for her parents.

And I try to have a nuanced take on that and in the context of the novel money, readers have commented there is there is light, there is hope, and there’s humor in the context of that particular story. Irrespective of whether or not you read my particular book, if I the main thing I want to communicate to listeners is that you know, their clarity can really help prevent some of these worse outcomes. So as much as it is sort of a hard topic, it’s worth looking at. And I find it funny too, because you know, for fiction anyway, we read stories about you know, soldiers dying on battlefields and you know, post apocalyptic healthscapes, and you know, hard things too, and we can find you know, beauty and find that very interesting.

But there is something extra I find when it’s about you know, seniors and and you know, like sort of life transitions like that. I think it plays also into sort of our cultural avoidance of wanting to even think about our mortality, right, and I think that doesn’t help us. And so you know, hopefully having the courage to look at these things through literature, through stories, through through anything just helps us open up, keep going with our eyes open, and protect ourselves. So again, the one thing I hope listeners listening to this takeaway is that if there’s that one thing in the back of your mind you’ve been thinking you really need to do, but you haven’t done it, I’m going to assign a deadline of one week to make at least one phone call or one action to to move that along, because nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, so I want to call my lawyer or get my will updated, or you know, look into you know, you know, care options as you know well, but having to do it at the last minute, or you know, if there’s a sudden health turn and there’s you know, everyone stressed in the family.

It’s in those moments when you know, when we’re stressed, where some of our worst inclinations can come out. And if you can prevent that because you’ve looked at things well in advance, you can that can be a wonderful gift to your family, and it can it can bring peace. I interviewed one senior who said that, you know, if her adult children ever fought over you know, possessions in the house or such after she died, she would haunt them from the afterlife. And I think there are more practical strategies you can take, have things in place, things are clear, there’s no misunderstand and you’ve talked to all your children and their spouses in the room at the same time.

Nobody says, well, I thought mom want this. No, I thought mom wanted this. That kind of clarity can be a wonderful a wonderful tool of peace in a family. Right, Well, lead in, We’re going to take a quick break just to recognize our sponsor.

When we come back, I want to certainly learn a little bit more about you know, your book, and and we’ll talk about maybe things that could help prevent these types of issues that we’ve been talking about. So we’ll address that when we come back. All right, So, do you know anyone who may be concerned about an older driver? Well, Senior Care Authorities Beyond Driving with Dignity program is a facilitated self assessment program for older drivers. This program has been designed to serve as a vital tool to facilitate older drivers and their families as they make the appropriate decisions regarding the future of one safe driving career.

If the individual is a safe driver, an advisor will provide a him or her with strategies and how to remain a safe driver as they progress through the aging process. If driving retirement is the appropriate decision, then the individual and their family are offered possible alternatives, resources and a specific plan to ensure a smooth and successful transition from the driver’s seat to. The passenger seat. So to learn more, you could go to www.

Dot Beyond Driving with dignity dot com and connect with a senior care authority advisor right in your area. So we’re back with Ann Kavlovic, who is the author of the novel count On Me, which portrays elder abuse in a family, and welcome back. So whyn’t you just share with our rears anything more you’d like to any thing more on the book and how they can get the book? Sure? So well, I could read the blurb. That’s probably the best way to give you a few Filipp Burke for the book count On Me, exposes how a family can fracture when aging parents grow frail and debts from the past resurface.

Tia is raising a baby when her older brother Tristan gradually takes over their ailing parents’ bank account, house and medical decisions. As Tia uncovers the harm to her parents and tries to set things straight. She confronts how money and love were entangled in her family and whether her own mothering now goes to opposite extremes. Filled with insight and humor amid the hardship, This is a story about how we come to feel entitled to someone else’s money, what it takes to break cycles across generations, and how human relationships can rise above the transactional.

So it’s published by Gerdica Editions, which is a Canadian press. It is available in the US at the major chains like Amazon and Barnes and Noble Online. I always try to encourage people to go to their local bookstore if they can. They’re they’re kinder to authors and kind of to to humans all around.

It might for smaller bookstores in the States, it might need to be ordered in that that that is possible, and also folks can usually you can go to your local library and request a title if it’s not already in and that helps authors too. Yeah, great, great, wonderful. So let’s let’s talk about you know, we talked about some of the you know, challenges with elder abuse and the fact that financial abuse is more prominent than physical abuse. So we’re going to put the ampsis more on the on the financial and and the vast majority my understanding occur at home and not in a nurse entirement home.

So tell us your thoughts on how adult children and parents can you know, begin, you know, those difficult financial conversations before a crisis occurs. I think, like many things, we tend to be skittish about. It’s it’s much better to dive in the avoidance of it is more painful than just going into it. So you know, having a chat about you know, I’m thinking hopefully very far ahead in the future, but I’d like, you know, gathering kids around.

I think it’s really helpful if you have more than one child or extended family to you know, gather the important people together at the same time if possible, and try to have those conversations as early as possible, and you know, state maybe state your intentions as you know or what like if from a senior’s perspective, what you might be thinking of doing, and seek the input of children. Sometimes we make assumptions about, you know, who wants to take on what responsibility, and it’s it’s always better to make sure that you know, if there’s the one child who wants to do it, that that is clear. We often tend a default to thinking that the female child will be the one to take care on the work, not necessarily a healthy assumption, and that can build a lot of resentment to So if the parents sort of make, you know, set the tone of you know, we are intending for you all to split this load or hoping that you would, I think that that can go very far. And you know, also seeking counsel from from people that you trust that can that can be a lawyer.

Sometimes bankers and lawyers, I will admit, can give conflicting advice, and I would tend to favor the the input from a lawyer to understand how to handle, you know, someone’s particular situation. One example I’ve come across a lot in my research is that folks often think that if we, you know, split the will equally between children, that that’s fair, that’s fine, that’s simple. But often if one child is sort of you know, less outwardly successful than the other, it can be tense either way because that you know, that child who’s less well off can say, well, shouldn’t I get more? I don’t have the fancy job of you know, sister so and so. But if parents do sort of split things separately, then the child, who you know has done all the right things so to speak, can also then feel resentful saying, well, you know, I have kids of my own too, why should why should I get less? So? Knowing your particular context and seeking wise counsel and how best to deal with it again can also be a very a move for peace, because we all want to think that, you know, generations after us are are in harmony.

Yeah, and it could be more than uh, just the money part of it. It could be the jewelry mom’s jewelry, or you know, dad’s things that he has, his golf clothes, or I’m just you know, you know, so talk to us about that as well, because that needs to be address. It’s not just it’s easy, not easy. But if everybody agreed to split the dollars down the middle, now you’re dealing with a number of uh, ancillary items that he still has to be addressed.

You have recommendations for the for the parents themselves to kind of handle maybe handle that themselves, and who they want to give certain things to. Yeah, I mean I think it’s hard for me to give advice, you know, to everyone and broadly because it’s so contact specific, but in general, you know, open dialogue about these things is usually better. And I think just recognizing that it’s not just dad’s golf clubs, or it’s not just mom’s jewelry. And as perhaps he knows in my novel, jewelry factors in very heavily because it was the one inequity between the siblings.

You know, everything was supposed to be split equally, but the daughter was to get the jewelry, and so the jewelry wasn’t about the monetary value of the jewelry, which wasn’t actually very high, but the emotional attachment to it, or that confusion between you know, this as a symbol of love versus you know, actual love between a parent and child, tensions just can run really high when you know a parent is facing these sort of you know, end of life decisions or a sudden turn in health that wasn’t expected. So it becomes so emotionally layered that it’s no longer a rational discussion about, you know, like how how to best how to best handle things, and so if you again planning ahead, it’s not a bit like a broken record, but you know, for emphasis. It can help take some of that emotional charge out. Of things, right right.

So, uh, and we’re unfortunately, I mean I talk to you about this for quote a quite a while. We’re running out of time. So, you know, is there something maybe I haven’t asked you you wish I did that you’d like to address. I think we’ve we’ve covered most of it.

I I just hope. I guess the one thing I could say is you know about shame, and I think shame is not our friend in this context. Shame kind of what often keeps seniors quiet. There’s a line in my novel where the senior is asked, you know, well, why didn’t you call the you know, the elder abuse unit of the police, or the or the helpline or these sorts of things, And she says, well, how could I explain that I raised a son like this? But like with many forms of abuse, shame ends up being somewhat of an accomplice.

And as Giselle Pellico said, no like shame should take change sides. So if someone is struggling, I hope, I hope this would encourage you to let go of that shame a bit and have the courage to reach out to some of the resources that are available to hopefully help, whether that’s a friend, whether that’s your local police unit, whether it’s a banker, lawyer, various organizations that exist, professionals, companies like yours. And there are some resources on my website which will be specific, but but give folks an idea. My website is my name so and Kavlovic dot com.

Now that’s a tricky one to spell, but maybe it’ll be in the show notes. All right, well we’ll tell them it’s uh ann A n n C A v l O v i C dot com and Kavilovic dot com. That’s right, all right, grat well, and thank you so much for joining us on Boomers Today. I really appreciate it.

And Kavlovic check out her novel Count on Me, and uh, thank you everybody for joining us, and we will talk to everybody next week. You’ve been listening to Boomers Today with Frank Sampson. To learn more about today’s show, visit Boomers Today Radio dot com and join us next time for another edition of Boomers Today.