Identifying and dealing with dementia in financial planning clients
Right now about 5.5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease – and 5.3 million of them are 65 and older. That means that one person in ten is afflicted with this specific type of dementia, and there are other forms of cognitive impairment as well that also affect financial decision making. One in 10 people age 65 and older (10 percent) have Alzheimer's dementia.
Just as they are becoming more vulnerable, the world’s elderly are amassing a large share of the world’s wealth. Data released by the U.S. Census bureau finds 584,000 people were potentially liable for the estate tax in 2013. Out of that very wealthy group, the very oldest – people in their 80s and 90s – controlled $1.2 trillion in wealth or 17 percent of the total, despite making up only a tiny slice of the population. People under 50, representing about 43% of the population, accounted for just $1 trillion.1
“You have this concerning confluence of two trends, one, the amount of money accumulating over time, and two, people’s ability to make decisions starting to decline,” says Chis Heye, co-founder of Whealthcare, a software platform for assessing impairment and implementing financial planning solutions to deal with it.
Financial planners have a fiduciary duty to protect their clients from the kinds of bad decisions that dementia can produce — and because they see clients every few months, rather than every day, financial advisors may be the first to spot signs of incipient dementia. This puts financial advisors in the front lines of dealing with a fast-growing epidemic of diminished capacity. In fact, if you do not already have clients with cognitive decline, you likely will in the future, when as many as one in ten elderly people will have some form of impairment.
A new white paper from Premier Trust provides with you with insight on how to spot dementia and steps you can take to deal with it to protect your clients from their own decline.
For more information download “Are Your Clients Losing their Minds?”
1 SOI Tax Statistics, Personal Wealth Statistics, 2013 [Latest data available] https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-personal-wealth-statistics
