My Parents Are Getting Older. What Should We Be Doing Now?

The worry usually arrives quietly. A parent forgets something they would not have forgotten before. A bill goes unpaid. A conversation reveals that they have been managing something difficult without mentioning it. Nothing has gone wrong yet, but something has shifted, and you can feel it. According to AARP, nine out of ten older Americans want to stay in their own home as they age. What most of them have not done is put the legal and financial structure in place that makes that possible, or prepared their family for what happens if circumstances change. That gap is what this article is about.

There is no single right moment to have this conversation. What tends to matter most is whether it happens before a crisis forces it, because the options available to a family who plans ahead are meaningfully different from the options available to a family who starts planning after something has already gone wrong.

FREE WEBINAR

5 Things to Know About

Estate Planning

When You Turn Sixty-Five

Save the Date

Friday, Sep 18^th at 2:30pm

The Conversation Comes Before Everything Else

The 40/70 rule is a simple guideline that has circulated among elder care professionals for years: families should start talking about aging, future care, finances, and legal planning when adult children are around 40 and parents are around 70. It is not a deadline. It is a prompt. Some families need these conversations earlier, particularly if a parent has a new diagnosis, a recent fall, memory changes, or increasing difficulty managing daily routines. What the guideline captures is that waiting for a crisis is waiting too long.

Nine out of ten older Americans want to stay in their own homes as they age, according to AARP research. That preference is understandable and worth honoring. Honoring it, however, requires preparation: the right legal documents, a realistic picture of finances and care costs, a family that knows what the parent actually wants, and a plan for what happens when staying at home becomes difficult or impossible. A preference without a plan is just a hope.

The conversation works best when it starts from curiosity rather than urgency. What does your parent enjoy most about their current home and routine? What concerns them about getting older? What have they seen happen in other families that they would want to avoid? What do they know about their own finances and insurance? These questions open the conversation without making it feel like an intervention. They also produce information that is genuinely useful for planning.

If siblings are involved, having the conversation together, or at least having it consistently across the family, reduces the risk that one sibling ends up carrying all the weight while others remain uninformed. Within families, the caregiving load rarely distributes evenly among siblings. Getting everyone on the same page early is one of the most practical things a family can do before care needs escalate.

The Legal Documents That Need to Be in Place

This is where the conversation translates into action, and where the difference between planning ahead and planning after a crisis becomes most concrete. Several key legal documents require your parent to have legal capacity to execute them. These documents generally must be executed while your parent has the legal capacity required for the particular document. If capacity is later lost, the family’s options may become substantially more limited and court involvement may be necessary.

A durable power of attorney designates a trusted person to manage financial affairs if your parent becomes unable to do so. Without it, a family member who needs to step in to pay bills, manage accounts, or make financial decisions may need to go to court for authority to do so, depending on the circumstances. A power of attorney can be drawn narrowly or broadly depending on what your parent is comfortable with, and it remains in effect even if your parent later loses capacity, which is what the word durable means in this context.

A healthcare proxy designates a trusted person to make medical decisions if your parent cannot make them. This document gives that person legal authority to speak with doctors, authorize treatment, and direct care. Without a proxy directive, healthcare providers may not know whom your parent wants to make healthcare decisions on their behalf, which can create uncertainty or disagreement when important decisions need to be made.

An advance directive records your parent’s own wishes about life-sustaining treatment, resuscitation, and end-of-life care. It does not make decisions for anyone. It tells the people who will be making those decisions what your parent actually wanted, so the family does not have to guess under pressure at the worst possible moment.

A will directs where assets go at death and, if there are still minor children in the picture, nominates a guardian. Without a will, New Jersey’s intestacy laws make those decisions. A trust may also be appropriate depending on the size and nature of the estate, what assets are involved, and what the family’s goals are around privacy, probate avoidance, and multi-generational planning.

None of these documents are complicated to understand. They do require legal capacity to execute, and they require a conversation that parents are sometimes reluctant to have because it feels like planning for something they do not want to think about. Framing them as protecting choices, rather than preparing for decline, often makes the conversation easier. These documents give your parent control over who speaks for them if they cannot speak for themselves. That is a form of protection, not a concession.

Understanding Long-Term Care Costs and What They Mean for Your Family

Long-term care is one of the most significant financial risks a family faces as parents age, and one of the least understood. The average cost of the most expensive type of long-term care in 2024 was over $127,000 a year. Medicare generally does not cover custodial long-term care when that is the only care being provided. Medicaid covers it for qualifying individuals, but qualifying requires meeting income and asset thresholds that are, by design, low.

For families where a parent has accumulated meaningful assets through a lifetime of work, the gap between what care costs and what any program will cover can be significant. Long-term care insurance, where it is still available and the premiums are manageable, can offset a portion of those costs. For families whose parent does not have long-term care insurance and whose assets fall in a range that makes Medicaid planning relevant, the timing of that planning matters considerably.

New Jersey generally applies a five-year lookback when reviewing certain transfers for long-term care Medicaid eligibility. Transfers for less than fair market value during the lookback period can result in a period of ineligibility, although exceptions and special rules may apply. The planning strategies that may help a parent qualify for Medicaid coverage without depleting the family’s entire asset base are highly fact-specific and depend on timing, asset type, family structure, and applicable state rules. They are most effective when the conversation starts before a care need has arrived, not after.

What to Look for as Parents Age

Beyond the legal and financial planning, there is the practical dimension of monitoring how your parent is actually doing. Changes that happen gradually can be easy to miss, particularly when visits are infrequent or communication happens primarily by phone.

Things worth paying attention to: unopened mail or unpaid bills, changes in home cleanliness or personal hygiene, weight changes that suggest difficulty with meals, driving that seems different or has led to new dents or scrapes, medication management issues, social withdrawal, or memory changes that go beyond occasional forgetfulness. None of these individually signals crisis. Together or with increasing frequency, they signal that the planning conversation should not be postponed.

It is also worth knowing what your parent’s baseline actually looks like. A parent who has always been organized and detail-oriented showing signs of financial disorganization is a different situation from a parent who has never particularly tracked paperwork. Having enough contact with your parent’s daily life to recognize change is itself a form of planning.

How Siblings and Family Members Fit In

Families rarely divide care responsibilities evenly, and the division that emerges without planning is usually a function of geography, availability, and the path of least resistance rather than deliberate choice. Women are five times more likely than men to leave the workforce due to a caregiving situation, with the lifetime financial toll approaching a significant sum in lost wages, pension contributions, retirement savings, and Social Security benefits.

Having an explicit conversation among adult siblings about who is responsible for what, before those responsibilities become urgent, is one of the most underrated things a family can do. Who will be the primary contact for medical providers? Who will manage finances if a power of attorney is needed? Who will coordinate care logistics? Who will provide day-to-day support and who will provide financial support? These are not conversations that have to produce conflict. They are conversations that tend to reduce conflict later by establishing expectations before exhaustion and grief are part of the equation.

When to Involve an Elder Law Attorney

An elder law attorney is the right resource for the legal and Medicaid planning dimensions of aging parent planning. They can review or draft powers of attorney, healthcare proxies, advance directives, wills, and trusts. They can evaluate whether Medicaid planning is relevant and, if so, what strategies may be available and on what timeline. They can help a family understand what protections exist under New Jersey law and what requires affirmative steps to put in place.

The right time to involve an attorney is before the conversation becomes urgent. A parent who is healthy and cognitively intact can participate in their own planning, make their own choices about who they want to speak for them and what they want their documents to say, and execute documents with their own signature. A parent who has lost capacity cannot. Planning that happens before a health crisis is planning that the parent actually chose. Planning that happens after is planning the family has to manage without them.

Plan Well. Live Better.

The worry that arrives quietly when parents start getting older is usually the right instinct arriving at the right time. At Milvidskiy Law Group, we help New Jersey and New York families turn that instinct into a plan: the documents that give parents control over their own care, the legal structures that help families step in when needed, and the Medicaid and long-term care planning that accounts for what the future may actually cost. Learn more about our elder law planning services or explore how we approach estate planning for aging families.

This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Elder law, Medicaid, and estate planning are highly individual and depend on circumstances and applicable law, which may change. We encourage you to speak with a qualified attorney to discuss your specific situation.