An elderly person, like aging baby boomers, often have difficulty managing personal bank accounts and paying costly insurance premiums.
Some estimate that 1 in 3 senior households have little or no income due to various common causes. Others live with next-to-nothing after their necessary bills each month are paid.
Personal finance management for the elderly is important to maintain enough funds for them to live comfortably throughout their golden years without sacrificing their health by forgoing insurance payments or neglecting other basic living needs in the process.
Read some valuable tips for managing older adults finances by using money management apps and other practical online tools and apps that all seniors can benefit from.
List of 6 Tools that Can Help Older Adults Manage Their Finances and Benefit Descriptions
1. Economic Checkup
The National Council on Aging offers a wonderful website for seniors that can help with budgeting, organization of finances, saving money, investments and more. Use online tools and money management apps to input personal information. The calculator tools will give customized advice on how to set-up a budget, manage bills, learn how to invest, plan for retirement spending and cut monthly spending. Seniors get information about any government or community resources that they could qualify for to reduce overall cost-of-living expenses. There are even tips for making money either from renting out a room, providing a service or returning to work. This website includes information on how to get back into the workforce, help seniors acquire necessary job skills and helps them find the right job.
2. Mint
Seniors can use a convenient personal finance online tool called Mint.com. This helpful and popular website and app has a number of various functions that can help keep your finances easier to manage and stay ahead of different finance matters. This app/webpage allows seniors to connect their finance related accounts in order to track overall financial status, spending and account statuses all from one place.
Mint can configure senior’s daily or usual budgetary and spending habits. This online finance tool helps elders make a workable budget and stick to it all in one online location. Seniors often run into difficulty with finances due to the need to remember all of the intricate steps necessary to pay the right bills on time at the right monetary amounts. It can get hard for seniors to remember details of multiple accounts and bills. This handy site can be set-up to automatically send alerts when bank accounts get low on funds and when bills are coming closer to due dates.
3. Silver Bills
Most of us have forgotten about a bill or other financial need at some point in our lifetimes. It can be a serious danger if this happens to seniors and a light bill is shut-off. Sadly, there are too many cases where seniors became ill or have died due to this common financial error. Many medical supplies and equipment need power to operate effectively.
Silver Bills is designed to ease the complex and multi-faceted levels of bill management, and seniors are not even required to be online in order to use it. After a simple enrollment process able to be completed online or by regular mail, all of a senior’s bills can be paid by this service on time. All financial accounts and bills are linked, and seniors can get instant alerts of any changes. Costs approximately $75/month.
4. Personal Capital
This app tool can keep track of various investment details on a convenient personalized online dashboard. It can monitor investments, fees and related finance details, and it can help figure out necessary finance changes to stay on-track with future retirement and investment goals.
5. PocketGuard
This nifty free-of-charge budget-help app allows easy-to-set-up budget limits for a number of financial categories like spending limitations for clothing, grocery shopping and utility payments. It tracks and tells seniors exactly how much cash they have available and can project and calculate all setup finance details ahead so seniors won’t overspend because they forgot about a bill coming due shortly.
6. Budget Simple
Seniors can also use a free online budget tool called Budget Simple. Unlike many other similar online finance tools, Budget Simple is safer from stolen identity information incidents because seniors can manually input sensitive personal and financial information. It allows more future budgeting options that are user-friendly, and offers simplistic budget tips/advice on an interactive interface.
How to Help Elderly Parents with Finances
Adult children concerned about their parent’s current or future financial status can help with some easy proactive financial planning steps.
1. Do regular check-ins that include financial concerns.
Plan ahead, and initiate these finance-related conversations with your elderly parents sooner than later when catastrophic finance events can wipe-out-savings swiftly. Open communication and regularly planned financial checks can prevent serious adverse finance situations.
2. Help your parents decide and set-up a practical budget plan with rules that they can manage and consistently live by.
Set goals and outline clear steps to achieve these financial goals to keep spending habits under control. Encourage parent involvement. Set-up and help them understand and use some senior online tech-types of financial/budgeting tools like Mint, PocketGuard etc.
3. Provide assistance with senior cost-cutting strategies that could help them manage personal finances, budget and spending requirements.
Use finance tools and strategies to assist senior parents in identifying which spending habits are necessary and which ones are non-essential and can be reduced or changed. Let them in on the decision process for better understanding and compliance.
4. Senior parents can designate a child to look after their financial-related needs by securing power of attorney legal documents ahead-of-time while of sound mind.
This should be discussed well-in-advance with other potentially involved family members such as other siblings if possible to avoid hurtful family disputes.
Low Income Senior Housing & How to Finance Elder Care
Seniors can finance their future elder care needs by re-figuring monthly/yearly finance needs to stretch every dollar. Great money-saving options to reduce living expenses include setting-up reverse mortgages, and using practical housing tools like Silvernest to advertise and find compatible roommates. The extra cash for renting out available rooms can help seniors stay in their comfortable homes longer. This extra income can be used to fund future health/housing and other financial needs.
There are some outstanding lower-income types of senior housing that can reduce monthly home/property upkeep chores and responsibilities as well as provide an easier and more enjoyable living arrangement that meets the exact budget/living expense needs of each elderly person. Senior communities, assisted living facilities and other value-based senior housing options exist that can reduce living expenses and responsibilities. Many include fine added amenities like community pools, senior care services, maintenance and more.
What is Financial Abuse? How to Avoid Financial Abuse with Seniors
Elderly persons are often targeted by unscrupulous individuals that use financial and identity theft scams on unsuspecting vulnerable elders to bulk them of finances. Some caregivers trick their patients into turning over monetary and valuable assets that can be devastating. Learn about common scams that target seniors, and use preventive strategies to avoid these and other unfortunate financial abuse situations.
As baby boomers become older, they can use online money apps to get better organization of their finances. Older adults finances can be managed better with some planning, effort and assistance.
