[villagetinker]

Originally Posted by LuckySevens

She has literally no assets, just her monthly SS check. No investments involved. I assume an Elder Care Atty would be expensive, and she cannot afford that.
She is in another state and I will pay her bills from FL. Main decision for me is to decide if I should deposit an 'allowance' (for personal items) into an out of state acct. Problem is she doesn't keep track of what she spends, and I don't want her to overdraw. She has dementia (getting worse) but is physically o.k. I wish there was some sort of easy 'refillable' card to get for her. Just trying to take care of her the best I can.

I went through this with my mother, she eventually had to go into assisted living. IMHO, you may want to look into this option now, so you have ideas of cost, and aid that might be available, etc. In my mothers case, she had to go into the home directly from a hospital stay, I literally had 1-2 days to set this up. I got lucky with the home that we picked.
Also, while she was at the home, I was able to setup an arrangement that she could purchase small items and these would be added on to the monthly bill that I was paying (out of her account, with a POA).

If your mother can handle a debit card, you can set that up to notify you of every purchase by email, and then transfer funds as necessary. This also has the advantage that the purchase will be denied if she tries to overdraw the funds.

Now a really big word of caution. make sure the joint account is setup correctly, ours was NOT, and when my mother passed away, the remaining funds ended up in her 'estate', and it cost over $2000 in lawyers fees, almost 1 year to settle a $15,000 estate. If the account had been setup correctly, this would have been completely avoided.
Hope this helps, send me a PM if you would like to discuss over the phone.