Let's compare Februarys 2016 vs 2017

I know I said I was going to go over August to December 2016 under the conservatorship but I think with this post I will have made my point about the financial abuse and I'll turn to the lies and mistreatment by the abusing adult child towards their mother, brother and step mother. I wrote this blog to vent my frustrations. I know that at some point I will forgive Sonya for what she did to her mother, but I need to work this out of my system.
So let's look at just page 1 from Carol's account when Sonya, her daughter and the one with the POA, in February 2016.

And compare that with page 1 from the Conservatorship under Mike, Sonya's brother, and the son of the victim, Carol.

Mike did not use his mother's account to fix his 2001 car. Mike did not use it to let me ride around in Ubers. There were eight withdrawals. One and two were on Feb 6th for Dr. Wong, Carol's doctor. That check was for $361.00 but the total charge was $368.50, so $7.50 for a cashier's check? Man, that is cheap for a cashier's check, Wells Fargo charged me something like $20 for a cashier's check. Three and four were the charges of $23.75 from the Riverdale, MD post office, to FedEx something to Kirkwood Villa on the 26th and 28th. This is where I will criticize Mike. He doesn't think holistically or look too far ahead, which is where there will be inefficiencies in his dealings. A mailing that late in the month is probably for rent for Kirkwood Villa and maybe reimbursement for medications. To be fair, he found communicating with Rose, the woman who ran Kirkwood, difficult to understand and everything was a crisis that had to be dealt with, with a grand gesture. For some odd reason it did not occur to him to have automatic payments...... He just doesn't think that way, that's why I am in charge of the finances in our house.

I digressed.

I accounted for 4 of the 8 withdrawals. Four checks were written. One was for $3,300, that was for Kirkwood Villa. I'd have to hunt down Mike's register but I'd bet they were for medicines and services for Carol. I can't remember if this was another period where Carol lost her Medicare part whatever because the Medicare people weren't sending anything to Mike. It will take me a while to get that memory from Mike because it was so frustrating and traumatizing to him. Let's just say he knows the 1-800 number for Social Security by heart. ...digressed again... So Mike was using CVS's scripts service to get medications mailed to his mother and would pay by check. Okay another complaint about my beloved, if there is a quick and easy way, or a hard and complicated way, he'd pick hard and complicated.

So the first with the charges for Ubers and Wal-mart is NOT how to care for an elderly family member's accounts. The second IS reflective of how you care for them and their finances. You use their money to help them, to make sure their rent shows up by the 1st so they don't get kicked out. So you use their money for postage.

May 2016- The end of Sonya's spending party

It wasn't until June 1st when the bank, credit union actually, finally, finally, cut Sonya off from her mother's accounts. The conservatorship wasn't wine and roses for Mike, the brother of Sonya and the son of Carol. But what it did do was end Sonya's POA over Carol, allow Mike to talk to the bank, and in the beginning get some limited access to the money in those accounts. There was a lot of back and forth with the bank in June and it was all painfully slow, and add the fact that this (finances, Medicare, elder care, the legal stuff) was not in Mike's wheelhouse.

Despite knowing the end was near, Sonya kept spending the money, her mother's money as if it were hers, which it was not, all though May 2016.

To see a better image, click the individual picture.

April 2016- Still spending

Mike, the brother of Sonya who had POA over their mother Carol, was still in the dark in April 2016. The bank, because Mike had no legal standing at that time, was being very vague about their mother's finances. All he knew was that there was about $20,000 in the account. He was hoping to become the emergency conservator of Carol in May if not earlier, and with that money get his mother out of Kirkwood Villa and maybe back to the Atria, where she was before Sonya got her hands on their mother's money. At this point he was still believing the lie that she was simply mismanaging the funds. With Sonya no longer caring for their mother Carol, he thought that money would still be there when he took over Carol's care, he was wrong.
Below are images from the April 2016 bank statement. I will focus on this and May 2016 in a later post. To see a larger view, click on the individual images.

March 2016- Token amounts, an accidental MF'er and theories

In March $16,216.12 was spent. Sonya, since it appears she hadn't gotten her mother Carol's CalSTRs pension to direct deposit into this new account Sonya created at the end of December 2015, is the only one depositing.  She covered about 10% of that month's spending. Little matter, because this account had Carol's money in it and Sonya was spending, squandering, her mother's retirement fund with purchases and charges that had nothing to do with the care of her mother.  Of that $16K, $3300 (check #107) went to cover Carol's care at Kirkwood Villa, one of the cheapest place to dump and old woman in San Jose. But all those other charges, wasting away her mother's money and making a bad situation worse.

When Sonya closed the account in December and opened up a new one in her mother's name, it messed up a few reoccurring charges that later came to bite Mike (Carol's son & Sonya's brother) in the butt when he became their mother's conservator. Besides screwing up the CalSTRs pension, it also ended the payments to Medicare. Most people on social security, it seems, have their monthly payment taken out of their SS payments. Because Carol was on a pension and did not have SS payments her monthly Medicare payments came out of the account Sonya closed, for whatever reason. After 6 months of no payments, or as soon as Mike became the conservator in June, Carol, the diabetic with Parkinson's lost her medicare, particularly the parts that cover prescriptions and doctors visits. That was the first of many crises. Kaiser Permanente wasn't getting paid for their Medicare parts either. This endangered their mother's health. For about a week Carol was fcuked, because Mike had no clue of how to get insulin to his mom from the opposite side of the country with no Medicare. Sonya had fcuked over her mother, she thus was a motherfcuker.

At the time Mike was unaware of this in March. He thought, he believed his sister was trying to do right by their mother. He even bought her BS excuses of why she was leasing or whatever a luxury SUV. I can't find any texts from this month that are a complete sentence. But it was in this month we looked up Sonya's cosmetology license. We discovered her license was suspended due to "Family Support". She lied about that to her brother, said it was a mistake. He, wanting to make up for all the years he doubted her and other baggage issues, chose to believe her blatant lies. Folks, this is family and you'd rather believe a lie than know you're related to a horrible human being.

 

So theories...

Looking at the March 2016 bank statement, it looks as if Sonya might have given access to the account to her teenage son, that would explain all the Uber rides and iTunes purchases. That's one theory. Another theory is that Sonya was mentally delusional and believed that this was her account, with her money.

March 2016

These are images from the March 2016 bank statement. At this point in time Carol, the mother and victim is no longer living in the same house as Sonya, the retirement fund stealing daughter. There is no excuse for this much activity with Carol's account, considering the majority of the funds are not being spent on Carol.
For a better view, click on the images below.

February 2016

I liked the Hawaii post, where I focused on particular things in the January 2016 statement, so I will do the same thing here. I will post February 2016's statement excerpts, then have some extra posts looking at particular aspects of that statement. So if someone wants to look at a particular page they can click on the image and a larger, readable image should pop up.

So if you're just joining Financial Eldercare Abuse Observed, welcome. I'm your hostess Mari, the wife of Mike, who is the son of Carol/Carole who was a victim of financial elder abuse at the hands of her daughter, Sonya. Sonya was the POA (Power of Attorney) for her mother and in a little over a year managed to squander Carol's retirement fund. This blog is here to document this abuse, provide an outlet for my frustration with trying to clean up the mess Sonya made, and hopefully inform others who are going through the same thing with their family members.  

Sonya is in deep, deep denial about what she did. Like any family member accused of abuse of another family member they will deny it and as Sonya did with her brother Michael (Mike), try to gaslight their victims and other family members.

Anyway, here are February's statement pages.

 

January 2016- Sonya goes to Hawaii with Carol's money!

Sonya, the POA for Carol, her adoptive mother, took a little trip to the island state of Hawaii in January 2016. 

Why not? 

Carol was either in the hospital or rotting in Kirkwood Villa, which I called old people prison. Apparently Sonya's two minor children were with their biological father, maybe. We have no clue, because that situation is so messed up, I don't even want to bother. Maybe she went with her loser boyfriend, maybe not, I don't know. When you're 3000 miles away and the family member in question only calls to yell at you, and lie to you (didn't find that out until later) you really don't know what is actually going on. So, Sonya took a little vacation, but she did not take a vacation from financially abusing her mother.

 

 I'll take a guess that the January 12th Hawaiian Ticket is a luggage fee, I have no idea. But I did notice 3375 Koapaka Street appears again on January 13th, but instead of saying San Jose it is for Honolulu, HI. I should note that Carol did not go to Hawaii. Anyway, maybe Sonya might have realized there would be a paper trail or she didn't want to use Carol's debit card in Hawaii, so on the 13th she took out $1000 of spending money at 200 Hamakua Drive, in Hawaii. Clever, we'll never catch on.

 

From what I can tell she was still in Hawaii on the 18th, maybe. On the 16th she spent $44.64 at Pho My. Who makes up these restaurant names? What did she run out of the $1000 she withdrew on the 13th? Considering Sonya's spending habits, that could be a possibility. On the 18th there is that Hawaiian Ticket, this time for $60, and Lahaina Chicken for $18.51 This is followed by an iTunes charge. Gotta have some tunes or a cool app for the plane ride back to San Jose, CA and stealing more of your mother's money.

January 2016- Carol's Money, Sonya's spending.

As the person with Power of Attorney (POA) Sonya was supposed to administer her mother Carol's funds for the care of Carol. Instead, Sonya squandered her mother's retirement funds, which ultimately left Carol alone and destitute. Sonya and Carol lived together from April to December 2015 and from the start Sonya began spending her mother's money as if it were her own, and as if it were lottery winnings. 
I have documented what happened with Carol's account in 2015 to show how her pension and retirement funds were taken and spent. I also pointed out charges to debit card associated with the account that were obviously not for the care and well being of Carol. I can almost hear Sonya's excuses that she contributed to the account, that she gave up her career, and that it was really her account. Yes, Sonya contributed but her contributions were token amounts. It was akin to going out to eat where Carol paid for the meal and Sonya covered the tip. The career Sonya gave up was going from chair to chair as a cosmetologist. According to her brother, he doesn't think Sonya has worked at any one salon for longer than a year. She proposed opening up her own shop, with her mother's money of course. Considering Sonya's instability, that probably would have failed.
The year 2016 brings something new. Because they were living together in 2015, one could claim that most of the spending was for the benefit of Carol. In 2016 there can be no such claims. At the end of December 2015 Carol was in the hospital and then Kaiser put her in the cheapest elderly housing for someone in Carol's condition, Kirkwood Villa, at $3300 a month. So almost all the spending seen below is Sonya spending away her mother's retirement fund and making Carol destitute.
Click on the images below to get a better view of the bank statement. I will have another post to discuss specific egregious charges.

Dec2015-January 2016- Take the party to a new room, same venue

It's the end of December 2015. Carol, the mother/elder care victim, has run away from her abusive daughter Sonya, but the abuse goes on. We see in the image that Sonya has transferred $68,166.79 from one account into another, new account on the 28th. I do believe at this time Carol was in a Kaiser Hospital. So in some way this acknowledges a change. But in other ways Sonya just keeps spending her mother's retirement fund like it is her own personal piggy bank. She took $93.86 from a small account and put the money in this new account. As well as $25 from another tiny savings account. 
It should be safe to say, the $663.98 of withdrawals, is spending Sonya did for Sonya, with Carol's money.