User is struggling to help their elderly mother manage her finances due to her refusal to grant Power of Attorney. They seek a way to intervene and manage her financial situation without her direct involvement.
Elderly mother has been the victim of several scams as well as having gradually lost the ability to manage her own finances. She’s locked herself out of several accounts, is delinquent on taxes and insurance, and who knows what else. She has refused for years to give any one of adult children POA, or allow anyone to fully take over managing her finances, or share openly with us a full picture of her financial situation. And yet she wants help, and calls all hours of the day and night asking for help. Her expectation is that we physically come over and walk her through how to straighten things out on a very frequent basis. When we do that, she gets sidetracked and confused, wanders off to do other things, tries to filter through hundreds of grocery bags filled with papers she has saved, gets hostile and rude, and makes it generally impossible to make any real progress. Nobody has time to help her in this way, but any one of us would be willing to just take it all over and handle it remotely. When this option is offered, she becomes offended and goes on a tirade about her need to be independent and our responsibility to treat her with respect and dignity. At this point, everyone is frustrated and nobody is helping. The situation has become pretty desperate. We all feel guilty and helpless. Is there some way to intervene that we are not thinking of?