OTish: Alzheimers and finances

Yes, you dont want her wasting your inheritance, poor love !

If she's perfectly able to get to the bank and ask for her money I don't see what you can do.

Can you buy her a better purse that she won't lose or encourage her to have a safe at home to keep her cash in? (You can get a safe for about £30).

We've bought her a better bag to store her purse in more safely in the past, but she always reverts to her old less safe one when we're not around...The safe's a good concept, but she also has a mad theory that someone comes into her house when she's out and looks around! And explaining that putting money in a safe would make it "safe", that wouldn't register as logic in her muddled brain, unfortunately. Besides, she'd soon get fed up with putting money in and getting it out of it and the worst thing of all - she would have absolutely no way of remembering the combination other than to write it down and sellotape it to the bloody thing!

Thanks for the suggestions though!

One solution would be to get her sectioned. A bit drastic but it would resolve the issue.

You're in a very difficult and scary place for any family, The point where you know your relative is losing the ability to look after themselves, but you can't persuade other people of that.

Have you spoken to Social Services and had an assessment for your Gran? Has her GP referred her to a psychiatrist? Does she have a CPN? (Community Psychiatric Nurse)

You need to get professional help and there are very useful and simple things that can help if you know of them. You get smart systems with alarms to make sure people take essential medication for instance. Despite the frustrations of her going back to her old bag etc try to keep patient. It can be a very scary frightening place for people holding it together. They cling to things they know that make them feel safe - like a familiar bag.

Neb

Exactly - my Dad has been to her Doctor and spoken to Social Servies, etc and the bottom line seems to be unless she agrees to go voluntarily (and she says she'd rather be shot) or injures herself, the only thing they can order, is that she be taken to hospital - or failing that, as someone else has mentioned, to get her sectioned and sent to a mental hospital.

The latter clearly isn't the right place for her, she just has Alzeimers and needs to be supervised more than we can do for her. And of course it seems ludicrous that our only option of getting proper care is if she were to injure herself!

Didn't know these bits and pieces - so thanks very much for that.

True. Fortunately, I'm very patient and can see that her brain is like a sponge that has absorbed all it ever can and so nothing new ever sinks in. I think of her brain as a corrupted hard drive - there's lots of bits and pieces floating about in it, but you can't save any new data in it or read the data back out correctly.

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned since my first post, that she lost her purse again the very next day. With even more money in it in addition to the money she already had in it (she obviously forgot she had lots of money already in it).

Fortunately and thankfully for the second day in a row, a very kind person handed it in, in tact. We are all too aware that the next time she may not be so lucky and so need to find the best solution as quickly as possible.

The poor lady was also flooded by the flat above as well on the same day. It never rains eh?!

You might get better answers to the legal side of things in uk.legal.moderated.

Would she use a credit/debit card if she didn't need a pin? You can get chip and sig cards that she would then just have to sign for exactly the same way as she presumably has to sign for the cash now at the branch.

Tim.

Yes, you're probably right, I had entertained that thought and may give that a try too.

Yes, that would be a better thing from our point of view, but being used to her habits, she only thinks in cash and would always think she would need to get some cash out before she decided on going shopping. More's the pity.

I think she did used to have a card with a PIN, but it was stolen (the PIN was in her purse with the card - because obviously she a) didn't know what it was for and b) if she ever needed to use it - which was never as far as I can tell, it was there so she knew what the number was!).

I think when it was replaced, my father requested a PIN-less one for her, but I'm not really sure what she has now - all I know is thankfully there's no PIN for it in the purse and she wouldn't have a clue where it was now if she did have one, so that's one less thing to worry about I suppose!