She and her two older siblings tried to have that talk with their mother, a retired microbiologist, on several occasions, but she would promptly steer the conversation in another direction. Then in February, their mother died unexpectedly at age 74 after falling down the stairs of her home in Santa Fe, N.M. And since the family never had the money conversation, once they finally learned their mother had a mortgage, it was already in default.

The mortgage bank said it couldn’t divulge any private information to the family without a death certificate, which was still pending because the exact cause of death wasn’t immediately obvious. So Ms. Crawford and her two older siblings didn’t know how much was owed, or whether they had to catch up on any missed payments.

The bank was willing to withdraw the money owed from a family member’s checking account, but Ms. Crawford, a 43-year-old mother of two young children in Berkeley, Calif., said she and her siblings were unwilling to do that without knowing the exact amount. Besides, they figured, it shouldn’t take that much longer for the death certificate to arrive.

But two months after their mother’s death, there was still no certificate. Around the same time, Ms. Crawford found a package for a loan modification on her mother’s doorstep — the loan was indeed in default. Ms. Crawford’s sister called the bank again. But this time, she decided to throw out some random numbers to the sympathetic bank representative, who responded with “higher” or “lower.” So Ms. Crawford’s sister was able to figure out that they owed about $3,500, and she made the payment.

“There is this period of gray where you are navigating this legal process but the whole system keeps moving and you have to pay the bills,” said Ms. Crawford, a freelance editor.

The three siblings had also had to rummage through boxes and file cabinets when they all initially gathered at their mother’s adobe-style home. They found some items where you might expect them to be — credit cards were in a wallet; a will in her office. But the car insurance policy turned up in their mother’s knitting bag.

“There was always this impression that money was very tight for her, even though we knew from the divorce from my dad that she was well established,” said Ms. Crawford, whose father was a hand surgeon and died just weeks before their mother. “In an ideal world, you have the conversation and take the emotion out of it.”

A lot of the family’s difficulty came from the delay in the death certificate, which the estate planning lawyers I spoke with said was not typical. Had their mother been willing to talk more about her financial affairs, it would have saved them a lot of stress and frustration. Yet there are many adult children just like them, who may eventually need to step in and handle their parent’s affairs for several months or far longer, even during their lifetime.

Here are some ideas on how to get that conversation started, along with several financial and legal fixes that would have made life easier for families like Ms. Crawford’s.

THE TALK “Finances tend to be one of the trickiest topics because people do have traditional ideas about what you should and shouldn’t talk about,” explained Amy Goyer, a caregiving expert at AARP, who is also handling her own parents’ affairs because her father has Alzheimer’s. “It’s a difficult thing to talk about,” so acknowledge that with your parents.

Before you even broach the topic, adult children should think about the sort of information they are seeking, she explained. After all, you need to know much more than whether a will exists. Are there powers of attorney or advanced health care directives in place? What does their health insurance cover? Do they have life insurance? Have they made a list of every single account that they owe or collect money from?

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/your-money/aging-parents-and-children-should-talk-about-finances.html?partner=rss&emc=rss