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Alte Veste Academy

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Posts posted by Alte Veste Academy

  1. Thank you so much, everyone.

    5 minutes ago, plansrme said:

    Most statues have a statutory POA that can be used. That means the exact wording of the form is written into the law, and if it is executed exactly as written, anyone in the state has to honor it. Trust me when I say that is better than the alternative. Texas's is here. Those who have noted that you need to have her sign a POA ASAP are spot-on, so use this form now, by which I mean: print it out and do it tomorrow, and consult an attorney as you are able. If she already has a dementia diagnosis, it may be too late if someone is going to challenge the POA and knows of the diagnosis. If no one is going to challenge it, I would do the POA anyway. Banks, credit card companies, etc., are not going to challenge it on the grounds that she did not have capacity. A sibling might challenge, not a bank.

    I am an attorney and have clients who deal with beneficiary designations, POAs, etc., all the time. They send all of their weird ones to me, and every single time we get a funky one in or have a question, it is because the parties did not use the statutory form. Follow the directions on the form to the letter, and you will be on the right track. You definitely need to consult with a local attorney about the credit card debt and the mortgage proceeds. There are going to be significant estate and Medicaid issues that need to be planned for. 

    The link is very much appreciated! That will definitely be priority one. For now, can this POA be done without a lawyer, just a notary?

    Thankfully, my sister will not challenge the POA. We are both breathing a sigh of relief that my mom is on board with it. 

  2. 5 minutes ago, smfmommy said:

    I agree with the others.  My mom (Alzheimers) lost her understanding of numbers first.  She 'loaned' some money to a 'friend'.  She thought it was just a $100 but it was more like $1500.  We got most of it back but it was pain.  I'd definitely take the cards and make sure she can't give money to family members without your consent.  Dealing with her finances wasn't easy and it was just my mom.  I'm sure this is way more complicated that you want right now.  Get the financial POA asap.  Soon you will also need a medical POA.

    Thank you. I'm sorry about your mom as well.

    Our plan was for my sister to have medical POA since she is 5 min away and for me to have financial POA. 

    • Like 2
  3. 6 minutes ago, Laura Corin said:

    If it's like the UK,  a financial POA simply gives you the ability to manage the assets for their owner. There's no personal responsibility beyond that. 

    You need to get POA in place ASAP, preferably before the dementia diagnosis.  Your mother must be seen as capable of making that decision to appoint. 

    That is a great point. Thank you. She is at that stage when she is losing her grasp on things but knows it. 

    6 minutes ago, Katy said:

    You need to consult with an attorney in your state. I’m sorry you’re going through all of this.

    ETA: our family attorney has always done free consultations and simply charges for paperwork or filing documents or adoption papers with the court. 

    Thank you, yes. Unfortunately, she and I live in different states. 

  4. My dad has been in the ICU since mid-October and is not expected to live. This happened right in the middle of the process of my mom being diagnosed with some kind of dementia (not Alzheimer’s apparently). She wants to do a POA for me to take over her finances. She is extremely overwhelmed. 

    How do you handle a senior’s finances in a way that keeps you from having any legal or financial liability for their debts? I need access to the accounts but do not want to be “on” them. Is there a specific kind of POA that I need to get?

    How do you prioritize spending? My mom has tons of credit card debt. She also has a huge chunk of money in her checking account (my dad did a cash out refinance on the house just before he was hospitalized to pay down the credit cards but didn’t get to it). In the same situation, I would take the money and pay off debt. But I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do in her situation now. For one thing, I’m afraid she will run them up again. When I have access to them, I could close them.

    I am wondering if credit that was only in my dad’s name will be her responsibility or not. When he refinanced, he put the house in his name only, so how is that handled? They are in TX, if that matters.

    Their monthly income is very good and will continue to be enough for her. She has excellent health coverage as well.

    But, assisted living is in her future. Even she agrees with that (which is miraculous). I think her monthly income will cover a nice facility, but credit card payments would reduce what she could afford there. So then it makes sense to pay them off. But then she’s left with no cushion for emergencies. 

    Thoughts?

     

    • Sad 4
  5. 27 minutes ago, Terabith said:

    I'm trying.  I'm a little bit worried that they like everyone else more than me.  They don't really seem to come to me for snuggles, and they get annoyed when I interrupt their very busy cat lives to pet them.  He is very sweet.  

    The super ironic thing is that once Obama was the kitten doing this to our older cats and getting rebuffed just as thoroughly.  

    Have you tried brushing them? We’ve got a kitty who is less into pets, but it’s his siren song for us to run the brush over our hands. He comes running and is purring right away and napping/cuddling soon after. 

    • Like 3
  6. Thank you all so much! I’ve added so much to my cart! I’ve got my fingers crossed she’ll love some of them and that my middle child/pup will share nicely. LOL

    1 hour ago, stephanier.1765 said:

    All that mud, though! 😂🤣😂 I'm sorry for laughing but that innocent face surrounded by all the tell tale paw marks is cracking me up. No advice but all your pups are adorable!

    Right!?! Mud is not something we have ever had a problem with before she arrived! That morning she found a small area under a jasmine bush without enough granite and went to town. That was a rough, rough morning for me. I can look at it now and laugh, but OMGosh I was fried that day.

    35 minutes ago, Toocrazy!! said:

    Older lab now, but when he was younger and chewed a lot, we’d freeze his food in the strongest kong like a popsicle. 

    Such a good idea! It’s so hot here, and she loves ice, so I’m sure this will be a hit. 

    • Like 1
  7. I have a 2 year old black lab (who is a saint), a 1 year old shepherd mix (3/4 saint, 1/4 sinner), and a 4.5 month old malamute/German shepherd mix (currently 1/2 saint, 1/2 sinner, which is pretty good for such a young pup, I think, lol). The pup is DD17’s, but I do a lot of the caretaking because of school and the fact that DD, whose bedroom is upstairs, has had a broken foot for 4 weeks. That’s tough navigating on crutches. 

    Looking for favorite safe chews, for sure, but also intellectual stuff to keep this girl engaged. We do have some of those find-the-treat puzzles, and she solves them far too quickly. No “hard” ones yet though, so what are your favorites in that category?

    I am very tired. On the bright side, she was a brilliant potty-trainer! 

    Required pics as payment… 

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    • Like 11
  8. I have a 2 year old black lab (who is a saint), a 1 year old shepherd mix (3/4 saint, 1/4 sinner), and a 4.5 month old malamute/German shepherd mix (currently 1/2 saint, 1/2 sinner, which is pretty good for such a young pup, I think, lol). The pup is DD17’s, but I do a lot of the caretaking because of school and the fact that DD, whose bedroom is upstairs, has had a broken foot for 4 weeks. That’s tough navigating on crutches. 

    Looking for favorite safe chews, for sure, but also intellectual stuff to keep this girl engaged. We do have some of those find-the-treat puzzles, and she solves them far too quickly. No “hard” ones yet though, so what are your favorites in that category?

    I am very tired. On the bright side, she was a brilliant potty-trainer! 

    Required pics as payment… 

     

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    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1
  9. On 7/21/2022 at 5:53 PM, Hilltopmom said:

    Air conditioning!

    Yes! And solar here, which we got in the spring and makes me not feel guilty about keeping the house cooler this summer. All y’all can just put on socks and a sweatshirt if you’re cold. This desert-dwelling, peri-menopausal woman is tired of being so dang hot all the time.

    On 7/22/2022 at 6:02 AM, TheReader said:

    Another bird lover here...watching the birds that come visit our feeder every morning is such a delight! 

    We have an large urn water fountain outside the dining room window that attracts so many birds all day long. It’s so great to watch them make good use of the water in the scorching heat. There is almost always a line! 

    • Like 3
  10. I had one, the GE Opal with the side tank. I LOVED it. LOVED IT! Named it Olaf, took amazing care of it, cleaned it once a week as instructed in the manual, proclaimed it my favorite purchase ever and one that I would never live without. I’m a middle-aged, constantly hot woman living in Arizona, and I LOVED it. 

    I’m feeling lazy, so I just copied and pasted a review from Amazon that was almost exactly my experience.

    Beware!! Black sludge no matter how you clean it 
    By Chelsey on June 10, 2022I really loved this ice machine when we first bought it. It worked great, for about 5 months. Then I started to notice the ice was getting black stuff in it. We use distilled water, I clean it a cycle with bleach, then water, then 2 cycles of vinegar, then another water. Each time I would notice the black I’d clean it. And for a few days I wouldn’t notice anything, then it would return. I called support and they told me that I was doing everything right and they didn’t know what it was. Told me to call support specifically for the ice machines. As time has gone on, it has gotten worse. We’ve only had it 9 months now (ordered it September 9th) and now when I clean it, the black stuff is back as soon as it starts making ice. So we decided to pull it apart and found that it’s making black sludge that I’m assuming is some type of mold! Not happy since we’ve been getting sick a lot recently and my gut is telling me it’s the moldy ice 😭 I would really like my money back because these things aren’t cheap, and we haven’t even had it a year! All of this is completely aside from it being super loud and squeaky! It wasn’t in the beginning but has gotten worse. To say I’m ticked is an understatement.”

    So, bottom line, Olaf has passed. 😔 He has not been replaced. It was too much money to have only served a year, and that with the last few months worrying about what we were consuming. DH is great at troubleshooting, disassembling/fixing things, etc. and tried his best to take it apart to see if we could figure out what we were missing in the cleaning process that caused the sludge mentioned below kept returning, but we couldn’t figure it out. There are areas in the machine that are just inaccessible and impossible to clean. Even the underside of the top part where the cubes come out cannot be properly reached to clean, something I recognized early on and should have been a red flag. 

    • Thanks 1
  11.  

    20 hours ago, SusanC said:

    They do love to read, and will continue to read, BUT without some prodding, they will stay in their YA niches.

    There are tons of new YA novels based on the classics, some of them decent and lots written from a different perspective (time, class, race, culture, etc.). What if you did paired texts? YA reading generally goes faster than reading the classics, so you could compare/contrast quite a few. This would also get you reading books that interest your kids in the same way you want them to read the classics (which presumably interest you, although that’s not always the case with me these days LOL). You can google for classics paired with YA books, and quite a bit comes up. Also, the NYTimes has “Text to Text” pairings of classic novels and current stories that brings modern relevance to older books. All of those connections are interesting for our kids and look good in a course description. LOL 

    • Like 1
  12. Did you look at the syllabus for this class? They have the topics broken down by week, scheduled into 32 weeks. I would take that as my lead. With books 1-3 in hand, I’d go through and schedule compatible lessons, pulling from the books incrementally as much as possible. 

    For those who are unaware, this is Preparation for Rhetoric Writing, a WWS 1-3 condensed class that has been offered for years at WTMA. My DS19 took it in 8th grade, and it was quite doable. It was a good middle-school finale to let him focus on content writing and personal style in 9-12. 

    • Like 4
  13. My 1 year old shepherd mix had surgery to correct luxating patella on her left leg in February and is scheduled for her right leg in July. Hers was fine until it wasn’t and went downhill fast, popping out so many times a day, and at a certain point we could not easily pop it back in. She was collapsing into a sit in an awful way so often. Then it took a while to get in with the surgeon, and we wished we had gotten her scheduled sooner. Since you’ve already had the surgical consult, I’d absolutely keep the surgery appointment. 

    One thing I recommend is having large potty pads on hand for where she lays down the first while after surgery, when she’s on the heavier drugs. I wasn’t told until pickup that she might be so out of it that she may not realize she needed to pee until it was too late to get up in time, and she needed our support for the first while to get up and out. Definitely kept those on hand for July!

    Best of luck to your pup for a healthy recovery!

    • Like 1
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