Milo Benningfield, a San Francisco financial advisor, helped his mother-in-law with her finances, and as she aged, she started calling him without reason to ask if she was running out of money.
“You find yourself wondering things like, ‘Are you worried about running out of money, or is it bigger than that?’” he says. “As an advisor, it’s a little scary to think, ‘Oh, my gosh, I used to know this person and I see her becoming someone different.’”
Increased anxiety about money and changes in perception of investment risk are signs that a senior may need financial help, neuroscientists and financial advisors say. Two other key signs are problems with everyday math and a reduced attention span for completing everyday financial tasks.
Anyone who is age 60 or older will have some cognitive aging—“senior moments” where you misplace your car keys or it takes a few tries to remember a password, occurrences where your brain moves just a little slower. If you’ve always handled your own finances, you may find yourself taking more time to complete the task.
How can you tell the difference between harmless senior moments and needing someone else to handle your money matters? It’s tough, says Dr. Luke Stoeckel, a program director in the division of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging. For a cognitive baseline, you can compare your mental abilities to your peers, he says.
Also, be honest with yourself about the frequency and severity of these mental lapses. Here are three key things to keep in mind.
1. Reduced memory and attention span. If you find your mind wandering more often or you have trouble remembering newer information, it can be a sign of cognitive loss. Paying attention to information is a requirement to form memories, Stoeckel says.
Missing payments or taking longer to gather important financial documents, such as preparing taxes, is an additional sign, says Dr. Daniel Marson, professor emeritus in the department of neurology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, whose research focused on loss of financial skills in neurocognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s.
Benningfield, the financial advisor, says he makes notes if he feels clients are forgetting information or feeling overwhelmed to see if a pattern is developing or if it is just a one-time occurrence.
2. Problems with everyday arithmetic. Marson says those with declining mental capacity have problems figuring a tip on a restaurant meal or calculating a medical deductible, for example. They may have trouble understanding interest rates or minimum balances, something “that wouldn’t have been a problem five years earlier,” he says.
3. Declining sense of investment risk or abnormal fear of it. Marson’s research shows people with cognitive decline had more difficulty identifying risks in investment opportunities.
“They were aware of the positives of an investment situation, and they tended to overly emphasize benefits or returns and tended to minimize or overlook the risks,” Marson says.
Stoeckel adds that an increased tendency to make impulsive financial decisions or a sudden lack of interest in financial matters can indicate cognitive changes.
Susan Elser, an Indianapolis advisor, gets concerned if a client abdicates responsibility for investments after Elser and the client discuss risk tolerance and preferred asset allocation.
“Once people start to just seem a little overwhelmed with decisions like that, that’s when we really want to make sure someone else is making those final decisions for them,” she says.
You’re not destined to get dementia if you have some cognitive decline, Marson and Stoeckel stress. There is a wide spectrum of cognitive aging. Two of the newer diagnoses are subjective cognitive decline and mild cognitive impairment. People experiencing subjective cognitive decline see changes in themselves that could be signs of a cognitive change but haven’t yet been noticed by others, Stoeckel says.
Mild cognitive impairment is an early stage of cognitive change which is more than normal aging, he says. Others may have noticed some changes, but the decline hasn’t impacted functions. It may be a precursor to diseases like Alzheimer’s but it isn’t destined to lead to full decline. Only 10% to 20% of people diagnosed with the condition develop dementia, while the rest remain the same or improve a year later.
Even if your symptoms are mild, have a physician perform a cognitive assessment, the experts urge. Treatable afflictions such as vitamin deficiency, urinary tract infections, hearing or vision loss, and depression can masquerade as cognitive decline. Elser says she’s seen major life shocks like the death of a spouse overwhelming the survivor for at least a year or more.
“Most people after that first year or two will come out from underneath the cloud,” she says.
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