Dementia's Financial Warning Signs

Dementia takes a financial toll long before diagnosis, study finds.

👋 Hello, I’m Kevin Ferguson, author of 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 my forthcoming memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Read the book's origin story.) 🍇 The Centenarian Playbook is my newsletter, which features longevity tips and stories from Grandma Kay’s long life. It also includes stories of the Gemello Winery, which her late husband, Mario, ran for nearly half a century. 📖 I’m sure you’ll find my maternal grandparents are quite lovable characters. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button.

This newsletter is published twice a month on Mondays. Every third Monday features tips on aging or living a longer, higher-quality of life.

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Dementia's Financial Warning Signs

Throughout the 2020 pandemic lockdown, I watched a lung disease slowly grip my father’s world. Months before, my brother and I tried to persuade him to move to an assisted living community. Unfortunately, he refused.

So I searched relentlessly for ways to build a safer environment around him. I had to be creative. I needed him to give up some of his independence, and that was no easy task.

On trips to the doctor, he became winded from even short walks from his apartment to the car. Climbing stairs to his second floor unit was getting harder by the day. His memory was fading, too. Either because of a memory disorder, or it was taking too much energy for his memory recall. 

“What did you have for lunch?” 

“I don’t remember,” he’d tell me, not even trying to search his mind for an answer.

He was 84, divorced and lived alone. To shrink his bubble, I started doing his grocery shopping. Once I scolded him for sneaking out during the lockdown to do his own shopping. 

The next day, he said something that made me reconsider his safety as the highest priority: “I don’t want you hassling me for going to the store. I have to do it occasionally, just to see if I’m still capable.”

“I don’t want you hassling me for going to the store. I have to do it occasionally, just to see if I’m still capable,” my dad said.

Hearing that hit me hard like a brick of empathy. It made me realize how much of his quality of life was slipping away. Could his will to live be next?

This is a common battle for thousands of people with age-related diseases, and their family members who watch and worry as their mother, father or spouse struggle with memory disorders, like Alzheimer’s.

One hard-learned lesson for me, as I helped my dad through these challenges, was in the way I tried to get him to accept help. I believed that if I emphasized the necessity of certain processes for "safety reasons," he would quickly realize their importance. However, I now recognize that difficult discussions are a process, not an epiphany — a key point Dr. Atul Gawande makes in his book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.

I kept thinking that if only I could have identified earlier warning signs, I could have started this process sooner.

Now, perhaps I have found that early signal: it’s forgetting to pay your bills. This is a common behavior among people who later get diagnosed with dementia or a similar disorder, according to a report released in May by a team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University. 

This collective team combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people’s borrowing behavior changed in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar disorder.

This research identified a common early trigger: a crashing credit score.

A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills, the New York Times reported.

People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments they would not have considered before the disease, the researchers said about the trends in the data.

My father was about to follow this trend, but as the pandemic started to gain steam pre-lockdown, I coincidentally started to have health-related conversations with him. He granted me access to his online financial accounts, so I could serve as a watchful eye for missed payments. He perhaps was anticipating these challenges, even though he didn’t want to admit so much to me. (He passed away three years later in February of 2023.)

A month before the lockdown, he agreed to have me attend a medical checkup with his primary doctor. He was insistent on driving. So I obliged. For those 15 minutes,  I didn’t so much ride along sitting shotgun, but rather held on for dear life. A lot of abrupt starts and stops along the way.

I later described the experience to my mom, who had long been divorced from my father. She was familiar with what I was going through. Grandma Kay (her mom) had fought to maintain her driving privileges well into her nineties.

My mom and her two siblings had just taken over managing Grandma Kay's medications, marking another struggle in Grandma Kay's fight for independence.

“You should ask your dad how he’s doing managing his medication,” my mom suggested.

“You should ask your dad how he’s doing managing his medication,” my mom suggested.

This triggered anxiety for me. What did I know about blood thinners, cholesterol and heart pills? Was I ready for a crash course in senior medications?

I tried to ease into this conversation, mentioning that Grandma Kay had a new trio of pill managers, then I asked him: “How are you doing with your pills?” 

Please say it’s under control, I said to myself.

“I’m doing fine,” he said. Phew!

A few months later, I discovered that was a lie. I went into his bathroom in search of a Band-Aid, and the chaos of his pillbox was in full display on the sink counter.

He used a 7-day pillbox with two boxes per day to help remind him if he took his pills with breakfast and dinner. Random slots were empty.

When I questioned him, he got defensive. “I took my pills today!”

“How come Wednesday’s boxes are still full?” I asked.

“How come Wednesday’s boxes are still full?” I asked.

He didn’t have a good answer.

Around this time, I discovered a PG&E late notice when checking his mail. This prompted me to check all his financial accounts. Sure enough, he had let a few months lapse in paying his credit card, phone and utility bills.

It could have been a lot worse if I wasn’t watching for these tendencies, like before the pandemic.

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