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Handling Aging Aunt's Finances
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AUTHOR: Brian White on 10/26/2025
FIRST: DAN SMITH on 10/26/2025 | RECENT: William Perry on 11/1/2025
IT’S IMPORTANT TO BE familiar with what happens with Social Security benefits when someone dies. Otherwise, you may find yourself in a long, painstaking battle to get the payment to which your loved one was entitled. I found this out the hard way.
My father-in-law Bernard died in September 2015. My wife was his executor and the agent under his power of attorney (POA). But I’d earlier served as POA and executor for my mother,
I FOUND OUT A YEAR ago that my Aunt Ina Lou, then aged 95, had designated me as her agent in her financial and medical powers of attorney. She also named me as executor of her estate and the trustee for her trust.
She wasn’t well and needed more help than her thoughtful neighbors could provide. Within months, my brother, my wife and I had our aunt settled in an assisted living facility near her townhome in Burke,
THIS PAST SPRING, my brother Phil made the six-hour trip from our hometown in North Carolina to northern Virginia to visit our 95-year-old aunt, whom we know as Aunt Ina Lou. We hadn’t heard from her in a while, which was unusual.
Since we were children, she’d always sent us Christmas and birthday cards, and she’d missed some recently. Phil tried calling several times, but she hadn’t been answering her phone. This wasn’t particularly surprising since our aunt is almost deaf.
BUILDING A NEST EGG is relatively easy: Save as much as you can starting as early as you can. Invest in a diversified mix of low-cost mutual funds. Rebalance periodically. And tune out the noise.
By contrast, determining how much you can safely spend in retirement is far trickier. Consider three strategies.
First, there’s the much-discussed 4% withdrawal rate. In the first year of retirement, you spend 4% of your portfolio’s beginning-of-year value. In subsequent years,
MY FATHER-IN-LAW William retired from Duke University after teaching there for more than 30 years. He had a good pension, which—along with Social Security—covered all his expenses at the continuing care retirement community (CCRC) where he spent most of his retirement. Almost to the end, he was mentally sharp. I saw no need to inquire about his finances. I was mistaken.
In summer 2014, my wife noticed that William, then age 96, had left a large check for a matured life insurance policy on his desk for a couple of months.
AS MY WIFE AND I approached our June 2014 retirement, I set out to consolidate and simplify our investments.
The first account I dealt with was my 403(b). Fidelity Investments was handling the 403(b) plan for the University of North Carolina System, which is where I worked. But while Fidelity was the administrator, the plan included several Vanguard Group funds, to which I’d been contributing. This was where I had the majority of my retirement money.
IN SUMMER 2012, MY boss of 17 years announced he planned to retire the following year. I had enjoyed working for him and considered him both a mentor and a friend, and I had some trepidation about working for a new manager at this late stage in my career. While I enjoyed my job and was good at it, and I liked most of the people I worked with, it was a stressful, demanding position,
BY EARLY 2009, I HAD been investing for 22 years. My wife had invested for a bit longer, and our savings were starting to seem like a significant chunk of money. I was reasonably happy with our investments. Still, I knew that—for those 22 years—we had been paying too much in investment expenses, thanks to the high-fee funds in our employer-sponsored retirement accounts.
Another source of frustration was that our money was spread over seven financial accounts and 14 mutual funds.
WHEN I BEGAN investing in 1987 at age 33, I knew very little about the financial markets. As a new University of North Carolina employee, I just started having money taken from my paycheck each month and put in North Carolina’s 457 plan for state employees. A 457 plan is a deferred compensation plan, similar to a 401(k) plan, but the plans are offered by state and local governments, and they’re subject to somewhat different rules.
I LIKE TO THINK of myself today as a pretty savvy investor. But I wasn’t savvy when I started out. Despite attending business school and earning a master’s degree in computer science, I knew nothing about managing money or saving for retirement, so I initially made a number of blunders—but also one particularly lucky choice.
My first real job after college was in 1987, as a systems programmer for the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Comments
I got a chuckle, too, and I think Humble Dollar contributors should have carte blanche to add humor to their articles.
Post: Are you and your spouse synchronized?
Link to comment from January 18, 2026
Looking at a couple of your past posts and comments, I agree that some folks are giving you the down arrow for just about anything you say. The same is true for mytimetotravel, which suggests (but certainly does not prove) a misogynist connection. However, I never paid much attention to the up or down arrows before, and they seem rather pointless. Ignoring them will take away their miniscule power.
Post: The “Mean Girls”/Junior High Bullies at HumbleDollar
Link to comment from January 18, 2026
I have had 30% of my equities in international stock for the last ten years. Jack Bogle went 100% US, while Vanguard Target Retirement funds have 40% international, and I go in between the two.
Post: International allocation
Link to comment from January 18, 2026
I write very few checks these days, and when I do I always mail them at the Post Office. I also use a gel pen, which is supposed to be much harder, if not impossible, to wash off checks. However, I am a stamp collector, and I use the mail quite a lot to buy and sell stamps on eBay and Hipstamp. I have sent several hundred orders via email and never had one lost. I buy more than I sell, and I have had a few lost over the years, some from the US and some that I purchased internationally. Of course, I don't know if the internationally purchased stamps were lost once they made it to the US. I have voted early since that became an option. I submit my tax returns electronically. I am a VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) preparer, and I always tell folks who want to file a paper return that refunds are handled much faster if you file electronically. However, I rarely have a refund, because I deliberately plan to owe some so that, if someone files a fake return in my name, my refund will not be held up. (IRS will always accept your payment, but they might hold a refund.) I arrange to owe less than $1000 each year (after estimated taxes) to avoid penalties.
Post: The future of mail and how it affects finances
Link to comment from January 4, 2026
My 98-year-old aunt, who is a retired schoolteacher and for whom I am POA, had to pay an additional $4883 in 2025 because I sold her house in 2023. She did not complain a bit, since she is unaware of the house sale or IRMAA. I forgot about IRMAA when I sold the house, but it was still the right thing to do. When the house sale pushes you well into IRMAA even after the $250,000 exclusion (for a single person), you have made a bundle.
Post: Enough with IRMAA complaining
Link to comment from December 30, 2025
Google's AI says "one analysis found a 50% decrease in cash payments between 2016 and 2023" in the US. I use cards (or card accounts online) for practically everything now, though I continue to carry some cash in my wallet. Why not get the cash back rewards (and pay off the balance automatically every month)?
Post: Cash Delivered to Your Door: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Link to comment from November 22, 2025
I have had investments with Vanguard for at least 25 years. (Neither my memory nor my records go back further.) I have always been happy to have my investments there, and over the years I have shifted all of my stock and bond investments into Vanguard. On the few occasions when I needed any help moving funds into Vanguard, they were easy to contact and very helpful. I have had no problems navigating their website, though I admit to being an IT geek. Vanguard used to provide access to financial planners for free if you had over a certain amount invested there (half a million, I think). I used that as a sounding board when I was considering retiring at 60, and their help was quite useful. I even got to talk to one of the advisors whom I later saw on one of their online video interviews. Unfortunately, they no longer offer that free service, but the 0.3% charge is quite reasonable, though I have not tried it. I did taxes for a friend in 2018, and he had at least 40 different losing funds at Fidelity. I checked, and these averaged .72% expenses. I don't know how many other funds he had. He was paying at least 0.5% for financial management, but it did not appear Fidelity was doing much for the money. They did have him harvesting tax losses in each of those funds. However, a good financial manager would have recommended, as I did, that he dump those 40+ high-fee, actively managed funds. I recommended that he shift into a small number of Fidelity's or Vanguard's low-fee index funds, but my friend refused to discuss it. You can take a horse to water... I'm pretty sure Vanguard would have given him better advice for less money.
Post: Vanguard Complaints?
Link to comment from November 21, 2025
I always keep some cash stashed at home. Having lived through Hurricane Fran back in 1996, when power was out for a week, I put together an emergency stash containing 50 ones, 30 fives, 20 tens, and 5 twenties. I also keep some larger bills on hand for paying the few things that still call for cash, and I replenish this when it gets down to a few hundred. The smaller bills come in handy if your power is out for a week. It is good to have close t correct change if whoever is selling does not have change. It is also good to have at least 100 miles or so worth of gas in the car, because gas pumps don't work when the power is out.
Post: A Question of Cash.
Link to comment from November 3, 2025
David, you make a good point. It got me thinking about whether it still makes sense to do things the way I have been doing under current conditions. In 2010, as I was working to simplify my investments, I decided to keep my 457 account, rather than moving that into Vanguard, because it is not subject to North Carolina income tax. In addition, funds rolled over from an IRA to the 457 would also not be subject to NC income tax. Unfortunately, the 457 has a very limited set of investment options, and their bond options have not performed well. The only fund they have that has essentially the same holdings as any of my four preferred Vanguard funds is the NC international stock index, so that is where I put the money. To answer your question, the reason I did not have all the equities in a Roth is as follows: Between my retirement (at 60) and my wife starting to get Social Security seven years later, I did Roth conversions each year, getting us to the top of the 12% tax bracket each time. Our overall asset allocation is 40/60, and our Roths are 40% of the total investments. 14% of the total is in our taxable account, in the Total Stock fund. Another 13% of the total is in my 457. That leaves just 13% of the total to be invested in stocks, and since the Roths are 40% of the total, we must have some bonds there to reach our admittedly conservative overall allocation of 40/60. NC income taxes have dropped since 2010, when they were 7.75% for those with over $50,000 and an additional 2% above $100,000. NC income tax will be 3.99% in 2026. Also, I found out yesterday that since 2016, funds rolled over into the 457 are now subject to NC tax. I decided to run the numbers under the current conditions. I made a spreadsheet that computed the tax I will pay on the funds 457 funds if I leave them as they are, versus moving them to my IRA and shifting money into a Roth, keeping the asset allocation the same. As long as stocks beat short-term bonds by around 2% on average, it makes sense to have the stocks in a Roth and pay the NC tax on them. In addition, transferring the 457 funds to Vanguard simplifies my accounting, and that will get increasingly important as I age. I appreciate your question. You saved me some money down the road.
Post: How do Couples Rebalance with Multiple Accounts
Link to comment from November 2, 2025
My wife is not as interested in finance as I am, so I do all the asset allocation and rebalancing, but I show her my spreadsheets each quarter and she is happy with the arrangement. She has detailed instructions on how to handle things should I be incapacitated. We look at all the investments as “ours” as opposed to individually held. We have no children, and we are agreed on what happens to whatever is left after we both have died. In 2014, after we retired, I moved all of our investments into Vanguard, except for my 403b, which is through the state of North Carolina and (because of when I opened the account and a fortuitous legal ruling) is not subject to NC income tax; I would lose that tax advantage if I were to move that account to Vanguard. At Vanguard, we have a joint taxable account that just contains Vanguard Total Stock Fund. In addition, we each have an IRA and a Roth, and each of these contains a subset of four funds: Total Stock, Total International Stock, Short-Term Treasury Index, and Short-Term TIPS. We also have a joint Vanguard Cash Plus account, several jointly held T-bills at Treasury Direct, and credit union accounts we use for short-term expenses. I have a spreadsheet with the accounts and holdings on the left, types of holdings on the top, and totals for each class (e.g. total US stock) on the bottom, along with a line below the totals showing the percentages held in each class. I have a second spreadsheet with rows for each of the classes, the current percentage in that class, the desired percentage, and the dollar amount needed to adjust the class to the desired allocation. Most of the money is in IRAs or Roths, and I do all our rebalancing within these, since there are no tax consequences to making moves within these tax-advantaged accounts. For simplicity, and to get only Admiral shares (which have lower expenses) in each fund, we have a minimal number of funds in each account. The 403b just has an international index fund, and I generally just leave that alone. Our IRAs each have just Short-Term Treasuries and TIPS. My Roth has just Total Stock and Total International, and my wife’s Roth has both stock funds and the Short-Term Treasury Index. To shift funds from one class to another, I do the shift in an account, e.g., my Roth, that has funds in those two classes. I used to rebalance quarterly, even when we were not far off the desired allocation. Now I still update my spreadsheet (and an associated balance sheet) quarterly, but I only rebalance when we get too far off. If there is a sell-off exceeding 20% (as in the 2020 lockdown), I take Jonathan’s advice and rebalance early to get stocks at bargain prices.
Post: How do Couples Rebalance with Multiple Accounts
Link to comment from October 31, 2025