I don’t even know where to start with this. My parents are elderly and have been married for over 60 years. We thought they were financially comfortable- Dad had a significant inheritance from his family. He also worked hard to build his own successful business from scratch which he sold his interest in to a business partner when he retired for a significant sum. Mom never worked but she managed the household - cooking, cleaning, sewing, etc....and she took care of the finances. Mom has long had a compulsive buying problem. It’s a bit of a hoarder situation (the house is mostly livable except for one bedroom which is piled with junk and she filled up a large storage trailer outside) but we thought they could afford it and it was just an eccentricity. Otherwise lived pretty simply - driving cars until they wore out and living in the same simple house for 60 years. They gave generous presents (typically $100 to their children and grandchildren for birthdays and Christmas) but nothing extravagant.
Mom had a fall a few weeks ago and ended up in the hospital with a broken hip which required surgery. While she has been in the hospital, Dad started opening the mail. Mom had always been the one to get the mail. Dad realized that he is basically broke. Their bank account was overdrawn by a few thousand dollars, they had several credit cards with high balances, and their retirement investment accounts were almost empty. At first we thought Mom had fallen for some sort of scam. But we started helping Dad go through paperwork which was covering the dining room table and realized that Mom had been falsifying statements for the investment account. The forgery wasn’t particularly good but it showed a balance of over a million dollars, and that’s what Dad thought they had. We dug through old papers in the storage shed and found that she had been doing this at least since 1991. It may have been going on longer but that is the oldest falsified statement we found. We confronted Mom about falsifying statements and she admitted to it. Additionally, we just found that she recently cashed in her and Dad’s life insurance policy. She forged Dad’s signature on those papers. She also recently pawned almost all of her jewelry. We don’t know the actual value of the jewelry but she received $17,000 from the pawn shop, so I’m sure that’s only a fraction of the actual value. We ran a background check and found out that they have at least $100,000 in credit card debt.
We found several years of credit card statements and those purchases all seem normal. We aren’t sure exactly where all the money went. We haven’t confronted Mom about this just yet because she just had surgery this week. We speculate that perhaps she was day trading. She used to watch CNBC all day and keep meticulous notes about stocks. Dad is heartbroken, but he still loves Mom. He just doesn’t know what to do. We are all in shock and never expected anything like this had been going on for such a long time. We have opened his own bank account and moved his social security and other residual payments to be deposited in that account which only he has access to. He owns a fair amount of land which he could sell off to cover the debts, but we are at a loss on how else to move forward. If we pressed charges against Mom, I don’t think we would be able to recover any of the lost money, but would the life insurance company be able to reinstate Dad’s policy if it was fraudulently closed? Any other advice? They live in Texas by the way.
Written By: Riviera_Sunset
Source: http://bit.ly/2v9ScBD
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