April 15-30, 2015: What not to do as an elderly person's POA

Okay quick recap. My sister in law, Sonya became the POA for my mother in law, Carol, who was 71 at the time and in an assisted living facility. Sonya believed she could care for her mother better than the professionals and got control of her mother's bank account, with disastrous results. Sonya being a person with little self control, poor financial habits, and what looks to me like a serious Wal-Mart addiction or at least a shopping addiction, gutted her mother's retirement fund, leaving the old woman broke and in an elderly rooming house. The son and brother of the women, Mike, my husband was forced to become the conservator, discovered it was near impossible to care for his mother 3000 miles away and moved her to the DC area, where she died. This blog is to document and show how Sonya ruined her mother one shopping trip at a time.

 

Okay, April 15th has six transactions. The insurance premiums the the only obvious one for Carol. Yes there is a Safeway expense for $102.35, but there was a Safeway expense the day before, on the 14th, mentioned in another post.  A few days later on the 18th there is another transaction for Safeway. Sonya is buying a lot of food for what really should be for one person. Carol's money should be used for Carol, not to feed her grandkids.

There is a transaction for every day except the 19th, apparently Sonya let the debit card cool off that day before she put it to work again. The 20th she's buying beauty supplies for work at Cosmoprof. Once again, this is money that should have been used for Carol, not Sonya's business.Thankfully Carol's medicare premiums got paid (see CMS Medicare).

 

On the 22nd there is another transaction from Safeway for $218.83. I seriously doubt that was all for Carol. And there is a T-Mobile payment, the second in the month of April. To her son's knowledge, Carol did not have a cell phone. This might be evidence of Sonya paying to keep up her son. So the only thing that appears to be clearly for Carol is the $15 spent on the 21st at Kaiser.

 

In the first April blog post I complained about supposedly Sonya's Wal-Mart shopping addition. Well it looks like she decide to go a tad upscale to Nordstrom. "No cheap clothes for us kids! I got your grandma's money and we're going uptown!" I could imagine her saying as there are three transactions for Norstrom on the 24th.

There is one deposit, for $300 on the 30th, I will assume that's Sonya chipping in . All in total there where 5 deposits for April 2015. In an earlier blog post, three of those are from Carol's resources totaling $39,451.76, compared to Sonya's $700, a little less than 2% of what was deposited. That little 1.74% she added to her mother's account lent a scant 'truth' to the lie she told her brother that she was adding her money to her mother's upkeep.