I had an interesting conversation the other day with a fellow CarePartner who mentioned that her husband is responsible for some of their financial tasks. She wasn’t sure that he was keeping up with it. I get this so well. When my husband retired he took over of most of our banking activities. Our checkbook is set up in an account on his computer and, other than monthly balancing which we always do together, I left it all to him. Being somewhat of a computer geek, he set up most bills for automatic payments which really made the process easier.

The first indication that things might be difficult for him was when we started seeing incorrect entries during the monthly balancing. No payments were missed, but they weren’t always recorded or recorded accurately. I wondered if it was because he couldn’t see the entries so I increased the size of the font in the program. I couldn’t increase the size of the keys on his keyboard, nor do anything to help his dexterity which was being impacted by his disease. When his laptop started giving him other problems, he decided to hand management of the checkbook over to me. We switched roles and now I take care of the daily entries while he helps with monthly balancing.

In our case, I don’t think he was experiencing cognitive challenges that required handing off this task. Rather it was the physical changes in his vision and his fine motor skills thanks to his diagnosis. This was an ‘aha’ moment for me. It isn’t necessarily mental challenges that impact his capabilities, it could be related to his physical challenges including aging. Regardless of what necessitated the change, if we hadn’t been doing the banking together I wouldn’t have seen the difficulties he was having. Sitting together and balancing the checkbook on a monthly basis gave me an opportunity to oversee bills being paid and to make sure our finances were in okay shape. If we hadn’t been sharing this task, I’m not sure my husband would have come to me for help nor would I have been ready to pick it up when it became necessary.