What do you do when the very thing you’ve been putting off suddenly becomes impossible to fix?
That’s the dilemma too many dementia caregivers face. They wait too long to get their legal and financial house in order — and once their loved one can no longer sign documents, their options shrink overnight. The fallout isn’t just financial. It’s the loss of peace, clarity, and stability for the entire family.
This is exactly where Margie found herself.
Margie’s Story: Balancing Faith, Finances, and Fear
Margie is 68 and caring for her husband, who was diagnosed with dementia just two years ago. He’s 76, still in the early stages, but already struggling with time, numbers, and memory.
Her goal? To stop working outside the home so she can focus on him. Her reality? Living on Social Security, an annuity, and a mortgage they’re just barely managing.
Margie’s situation is all too familiar:
- Tired but still pushing through — caring not only for her husband, but helping her daughter raise a granddaughter with diabetes.
- Financially stretched — living paycheck to paycheck.
- Uncertain about next steps — not sure whether her power of attorney or living will are still valid, or even who to call for help.
She is doing her best to trust God’s provision. But as we talked, it became clear she was at risk of making the single most expensive mistake dementia caregivers can make: waiting too long to plan.
Why Proactive Planning Matters
God’s Word reminds us: “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33). Confusion in caregiving often comes when we put off hard decisions until it’s too late.
Here’s the truth: dementia is a progressive illness. If your loved one lives long enough, they will likely need 24-hour care. That doesn’t always mean a facility — but it does mean no one person can realistically do it alone.
If you wait until that point to think about finances or legal authority, you may find yourself drained — emotionally, spiritually, and financially.
Begin With the End in Mind
This is where the DigniCare Method™ helps. One of its core tools is Begin with the End in Mind (Phase 2: Clarify). It invites caregivers to pause and ask:
- If I look back three years from now, what would need to be true for me to say, “By God’s grace, I stewarded this season well”?”
- What legal protections and financial steps will safeguard both my spouse and myself?
- How can I create peace now, instead of scrambling later?
For Margie, that meant identifying one clear, doable next step: finding an elder care attorney who could review and update her documents while her husband still has decision-making capacity.
Practical Steps You Can Take Today
Here are four action steps you can put into practice immediately to avoid the most expensive mistake in dementia caregiving:
1. Review Current Legal Documents
- Do you have a durable power of attorney for finances?
- Is there a healthcare power of attorney in place?
- Are your living wills and advanced directives current?
If they were written years ago, they may no longer reflect your situation.
2. Consult an Elder Care Attorney
Don’t wait until you’re in crisis. An attorney can help you:
- Protect your home and retirement assets.
- Set up trusts or life estates where appropriate.
- Ensure your loved one’s future care won’t leave you destitute.
3. Frame Conversations Wisely
With dementia, too many choices can overwhelm. Instead of asking, “Who should we pick?” bring a few well-considered options to your spouse and guide the decision gently. This keeps the process moving without unnecessary stress.
4. Engage Community Support Early
Isolation is dangerous. Caregivers who plug into support before they’re desperate report more peace, fewer crises, and greater confidence. As Proverbs 15:22 reminds us: “Without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed.”
Biblical Truth + Practical Peace
Here’s what I want you to remember: protecting your assets and updating your documents is not about fear. It’s about stewardship. God has entrusted you with your loved one, your marriage, and your resources. Proactive planning is one way you honor Him in this season.
Caregiving doesn’t have to be chaotic. With clarity and preparation, you can avoid costly mistakes and walk this journey with greater peace.
Your Next Step
You don’t have to figure this out alone. If Margie’s story sounds like yours, take the next step toward clarity today.
👉 Register for our monthly Ask the Dementia Coach Q&A — a live coaching session where you can bring your real questions, leave with a clear plan, and know you’ve made the best choice possible in this season.
Don’t wait until your options are gone. Start now, while you still have time to steward this season well.
Transcript
Caregiver Mistakes
The most expensive mistake dementia caregivers make is not about the medical bills. It’s waiting too long to secure their legal and financial footing that the family needs.
Once your loved one loses the capacity to sign documents, your options can shrink overnight. And the fallout can be devastating, not just in dollars, but also in the peace and clarity that you lose in the process. Hey, Christian Care Companion, welcome to Dementia Caregiver Support for Christians. I’m your host, Lizette Klute, and if you are the adult daughter that is balancing work, kids’ schedules, and late-night calls from your mom’s care team, or if you’re the wife, trying to make wise decisions with and for your husband while honoring your vows he made before God, you are in the right place. I help overwhelmed Christian caregivers make the right decisions, biblically, relationally, and practically while navigating your dementia care journey. And if you’ve ever wished you can sit down with somebody who gets it, who can help you think through your next big caregiving decision without adding to your overwhelm.
I invite you to our next Ask the Dementia Coach session on Saturday, August the 23rd at 12 p.m. Eastern. This is not a workshop or a lecture. It is a live guided coaching session where you can bring your real questions, leave with the plan you can act on right away and walk away knowing you have made the best choice you could in this season.
The Importance of Legal Preparedness
For your loved one and for yourself. So let’s talk about today’s conversation because if you’ve ever wondered how to protect your family from costly mistakes in dementia care, you’re going to want to hear this episode. So let’s dive into a dementia caregiver support in action episode, 278, where we talk with Margie about how to avoid some of the most costly mistakes that dementia caregivers make.
Nice to meet you, Margie. Nice to meet you. Wonderful. I am very excited and glad that you are here. And I’m so happy that you came. So what we’re going to do, and it’s okay if you do get emotional. What I am going to do, though, is I’m going to take you through these questions, okay?
And if you do not want to answer, you do not need to. This is your space to share or not share as you want to. So nothing is required to answer. And if you do not feel comfortable, you can just say, I’m not comfortable. Okay. That’s fine. Yes. So let’s say it’s six months from today and things are easier in your caregiving journey. What would that look like for you? Currently, my journey is not too difficult. My husband is in early stages. I think in six months, I would like to not work outside the home. Okay, hang on to that. Okay, that’s my goal. Anyways, financially, that’s a little challenging. Okay. But trusting the Lord will make that work. Of course. Now, before you continue, I’m going to ask you, and I’m going out of order with you just a little to help me understand. You said early onset. How old is your husband? 76. Okay. And how long have you known?
Maybe two years, but the last six months has been really significant. And has he got an actual diagnosis? He does not want to have an MRI or go to a neurologist. He thinks everything’s okay. He’s just getting older. And he is but he can’t tell time or finances or all the all the things that’s super helpful now without you disclosing your age are you and your husband close in age or is there an age difference i’m 68 he’s almost 10 years yep yep so there’s a little bit of an age difference And you mentioned particularly not working outside the house as a goal and financial. Who do you have that supports you? Do the two of you guys have children? We have four.
Two biological for me. They’re all stepchildren for him. I was previously married. My first husband passed away. So I have two stepchildren, which I raised. They’re all adult children. Okay. Wonderful. Of course. I guess I’m old enough. So one’s very close, but she is a single mom with a type 1 diabetic daughter, which I care for as well a lot. So I have a high, oh, it’s not, truthfully not stressful because the Lord helps me that I work with homeless and vulnerable people. I’m with something called mercy. What will help you accomplish the goal of not working outside the house as well as then be able to still meet your financial goals? That was the first part of it. What would it take to set you up for that not working outside the house? Since I only need to trust the Lord that he would provide, I don’t see financial help coming from anywhere else. We don’t have any bills, just our mortgage, but we live on a limited retirement. I’m on social security, he’s on social security, and we have an annuity from his job.
So I truthfully don’t know. we kind of live paycheck to paycheck as it is. Okay. So may I give you my best recommendation for where you are right now today? Sure.
Asset Protection Strategies
Okay. I 100% know and agree we need to trust in the Lord to provide. And he also gives us ways and means of doing that. You know, it’s not, we need to, we need to be strategic and we need to think this through and we need to look at where we are. Right. So have you and your husband set up your financials in a way to protect your assets? No, I don’t know, actually. I don’t think so. We only have a house and one car. We don’t really have assets other than our home. Well, let me unpack that for you just for a second, because based on what you shared with me, you do have assets, okay? Yes, sir. An annuity is an asset. A house is an asset.
The annuity would come to me if he died. If we both died, it’s gone. It does not go. I understand, but what I’m trying to say is those are assets.
Okay. And assets need, particularly in the case of dementia of any sort, needs to be, if we are able.
Protected in order for you to, you a global you, not you, Margie, for a person who is navigating this to not necessarily totally blow up their financial future and their financial picture by dementia and dementia. of caregiving. So my best recommendation for you is in light of what you said that you do not know, what the picture looks like is that you likely need to sit down with an elder care attorney and explore whether in your particular situation asset protection makes sense because there are ways to structure your assets so that you do not necessarily need to liquidate everything you own in order to provide care. So let me propose it to you in this way. If your spouse, if your husband lives long enough with this process, he will require 24-hour care. If he lives long enough with this process, he will require 24-hour care. That does not mean facility-based care. It just means that he will have to have somebody with him 24 hours a day.
The reality of the matter is one person alone cannot do it well. They burn themselves out when they try. People can do it, but it cannot be one person by themselves. So not all people living with dementia end up needing 24-hour care because some of them pass away before they get there. But if we plan for the worst, which is he will need 24-hour care at one point or another in this process, how am I going to accomplish that? And we backtrack it from there. So the first thing that you need to consider is truly looking at your assets, asset protection. There are multiple ways an attorney can do it. They can use trusts, they can use a life estate, there are other things depending on each different state that a person is in.
Then there are a few people who are financial people who help you figure out how to not run out of money in this process. Okay? There is a local person here to me that does that. He calls himself the financial social worker. Right? And so what he’ll does is he looks at people’s assets.
House, car, annuities, life insurance, all of these different things, and tries to structure it in a way so that if your husband needed 24-hour care and you were not able to provide it for him at home, how can we structure it so that we don’t put Margie in the poorhouse for having given up all of her assets, all of your hard-earned assets that your husband and you worked for in order to provide that care? So that is what I would recommend that you start with related to your particular
Navigating Legal Documentation
problem right now, and that is really looking at your legal stuff. Do you have a health care power of attorney? Do you have a durable power of attorney for financial decisions? Have you made the living wills? Really, honestly, the first place for you, Margie, is to go and speak to a estate planning attorney. Okay? Okay. So what’s one step that you can take today or what’s one action step after today’s conversation that you can take after we just went through this today? Find an elder care attorney and set up some asset protection check. gone. I think I have a durable power of attorney. I’m not sure. We do have a living will.
I’m just not sure how.
Current. I mean, we’ve made them a long time ago. Right. It’s very, very important before your husband gets to the point where an attorney can say he does not have capacity to make these decisions.
To have these looked at, revisited, and then changed, if he still does, to reflect where you guys are now. Everybody should be reviewing their documents once a year and ensuring that things are are up to date because things can change, right? For example, I mentioned a client earlier. Their mom had a durable power of attorney. It was her husband and then her brother, and there were no subsequent people. And so her husband’s deceased. If her brother dies, her children have to go to court and get conservatorship and guardianship. So I would strongly encourage you to expend the time and effort, even though things are overwhelming to go through and and do that now set yourself up for success in the future okay would you suggest i do that with him or on my own he i would suggest in light of what you have said you pull all of the documentation together you look at it first and if it needs to be adjusted then you know when you call the attorney’s office you explain the situation. He would need to go with, and he would need to be a part of the conversation, but start with the documentation first.
And then the way you need to probably consider navigating it is it needs to be a directed conversation.
So what I mean by that is if the durable power of attorney already is you and the people that are suitable successors, maybe we don’t need to change his. But if they’re not, then maybe, you know, because sometimes we pick somebody from 10 years ago that was a friend that we’re no longer in contact with, right? If that’s the situation, identify the people who they should be and present it to him and say, what do you think about these people? And then have a conversation. You know, it’s kind of like the analogy of going to a restaurant and you have a hundred things that you can choose on the menu versus, okay, here’s a shorter menu, choose three things. So your job is to take it from a hundred to three. Okay. When you say directed conversation, that would be… You will be guiding the conversation?
To get the result that you want, which is the updated paperwork if it needs to change. Okay. Okay, so what I mean by I directed a conversation is there is a particular outcome. You know what the outcome needs to be, particularly if the documentation needs to be updated. And your job is to help guide him through that without lots of overwhelming information that shuts his brain down and he cannot make a decision. So whereas before Margie, you and he would sit and you’d have a conversation, well, we could have this person, or what about this one? Or the conversations we have to narrow down the options and solutions, we do not want to do that with him. We want to give him the narrowed down solutions and then help him make the best decision off of those. And if he’s not able to, then it becomes a situation of does he really still have the capacity to make that decision?
Community Support and Resources
An attorney can help, competency and capacity or legal and medical determinations. But your very first next step should be to consider going and speaking with an elder care attorney about what your particular situation warrants and needs. Okay? Okay. I hope that was helpful.
Yes, definitely. Thank you.
People who are really benefiting from the community are the people who joined earlier on before they need it and that have been active and are participating in the community because then they already know what questions to ask and they have a place to come and they’re not constantly wondering what do I need to do? How do I need to do it? So people listening are interested in tapping into or learning about the community. I’d invite you to just go to the website thinkdifferentdementia.com. There’s a link for you to schedule a 20-minute call. There’s no pressure. I’ll serve you regardless of whether you join the community or not, but it is a way for you to take this relationship a little deeper, a little bit more hands-on support, because really the research also shows it’s longitudinal support over time. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. I would highly recommend Lizette. She’s awesome. I appreciate that endorsement.
