Top 10 Elder Financial Abuse Resources April 2012
1. Protecting Your Parents’ Money: The Essential Guide to Helping Mom and Dad Navigate the Finances of Retirement
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Are you ready for the inevitable day when you will have to act as parent to your parents?
Protecting Your Parents’ Money is the essential financial handbook that will help you navigate this confusing and difficult transition, providing a game plan for tackling complex issues like estate planning, retirement income and savings, and long-term health care. Most important, it will help bridge the communication barrier between parents and adult children, which often makes the process much more difficult than it needs to be. Important topics include:
- Personal Finance 101, the Senior Years: The essential definitions and workings of the myriad investment options and financial requirements your parents will deal with in retirement.
- The Move: How to find the right nursing homes or retirement communities, comparing costs and factoring your parents’ assets into the mix.
- Understanding Medicare: What it is, how to qualify for coverage, and what it means for your parents’ finances.
- Elder Fraud: How to look for telltale signs that your parents have been victimized.
Protecting Your Parents’ Money provides the comprehensive guide every loving son and daughter will need to understand and help manage Mom and Dad’s financial concerns.
2. New Times, New Challenges: Law and Advice for Savvy Seniors and Their Families
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As to driving and sex, while there is both good and bad news, one message stands out: never at the same time.
The topics may be sobering, but the style is not. It’s a good read, often funny and even, on occasion, profound. Charles Sabatino, the director of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law and Aging, writes that the book is ”an encyclopedic legal reference with the down-home philosophy and wit of Will Rogers, wryly enriched by poetry, humor, and existential musings.” Doctor Andrew Weil finds the book ”entertaining and uplifting with very practical and sensible suggestions.” He will use it himself and will recommend it to patients, friends, and loved ones.
Whether you buy this book or not, the time is now to face the new challenges that are hurrying near. How? Sit down for an hour and write a letter to your family, covering such things as end-of-life care, living arrangements in the case of disability, and who gets the grandfather clock. (There is a suggested model in the book.) Discuss your letter with loved ones. You will save you and your family, money, confusion, and heartbreak. Challenges, unaddressed, fester.
Professor Hegland has spent his career teaching law, mostly at Arizona but also UCLA and Harvard. He has degrees from Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Harvard. Author of several legal books, he is known for his wit and clarity. Robert Fleming has spent his career practicing elder law. He lectures nationally and authors a legal treatise used by many of the nation’s elder law lawyers.
They know their stuff. And now you can too.
3. Outsmarting the Scam Artists: How to Protect Yourself From the Most Clever Cons
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A practical guide to avoiding the most common scams, from a fraud-fighting expertU.S. consumers lose billions of dollars each year to scam artists—and the next victim could be you. While anyone can be targeted, many victims are older. In AARP’s Outsmarting the Scam Artists, renowned fraud-fighter Doug Shadel offers practical advice for consumers who want to protect their money as well as the financial assets of their parents and families.
Despite the rise of scams, many people are embarrassed to admit they’ve been victimized. The author helps break the cycle of shame by including accounts from the people who’ve been scammed as well as tips from a surprising source: convicted con artists who reveal how they’ve defrauded people like you.
- Get practical tips to combat all kinds of scams, from simple lottery tickets to non-existent oil and gas deals and religious ponzi schemes
- Learn how to protect yourself by securing your mailbox and fraud-proofing your trash
- Get inside the head of sophisticated scam artists to discover how you can become the type of individual they avoid
Scammers are everywhere. But with Outsmarting the Scam Artists in hand, you can protect yourself and your money.
4. FINANCIAL ABUSE OF THE ELDERLY; A Detective’s Case Files Of Exploitation Crimes
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Statistically, senior citizens account for a third of all fraud victims in the nation. Fraud is in essence deception. But there is another type of financial abuse called “exploitation of the elderly” and it differs from fraud because by definition, it is the using of someone, the selfish or unfair taking advantage of an elderly person who suffers some type of physical or mental infirmity.
Definitions of fraud found in dictionaries, or state and federal laws, are essentially based on deception. When referring too the theft of physical property, fraud is basically defined as the false and deceptive statement of fact intended to induce another person to give up a valuable item he or she owns. Scams, confidence games, rackets, hoaxes and shakedowns are common terms used to describe misrepresentations and trickery used by con men or women to entice their target into making bad decisions.
This book contains a select group of historical cases that illustrate the true nature of these vicious exploitation crimes.
5. Crimes of Persuasion: Schemes, scams, frauds.
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In-depth fraud coverage of computer crimes such as pyramid schemes make this crime library of internet crimes the cyber crime location for the schemes and scams that con artists perpetrate.
White collar crimes such as prime bank fraud, pyramid scams, internet fraud, phone scams, chain letters, modeling agency and Nigerian scams, computer fraud as well as telemarketing fraud are fully explained.
This crime report on organized crime topics include credit card fraud, check kiting, tax fraud, money laundering, mail fraud, counterfeit money orders, check fraud and other who’s who true crimes of persuasion.
6. Fleecing Grandma and Grandpa: Protecting against Scams, Cons, and Frauds
Price: $38.95
Falling for a scam or con is humiliating for anyone, and can have terrible consequences. But for the elderly, being the victim of fraud can be disastrous, and they are the most common and vulnerable targets of everyday scams, cons, and frauds. From identity theft to gambling scams, from power of attorney issues to pyramid schemes, there is no dearth of creativity in the ways some criminals will relieve the elderly from their money and their homes. Here, Alt and Wells describe the most common scams, offer the stories of actual victims, and detail ways to protect yourself and your family from becoming easy targets.
What makes the elderly such easy marks for con artists? How can they avoid the common traps? Knowing about them is one place to start, and this book helps readers to understand and identify the most common scams perpetrated against the elderly. Because such cons are so hard to prosecute, it is important to know the methods criminals employ to separate innocents from their hard-earned money. This lively, vivid account of one of the most insidious forms of crime will help families and individuals protect themselves and their loved ones from the machinations of those who view them as easy marks.
7. How to Survive Identity Theft: Regain Your Money, Credit, and Reputation (Step By Step Guide)
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Identity theft is at an all-time high. In one notorious case, a criminal racked up more than $100,000 of debt in the name of his victim. The thief bought homes, motorcycles, and handguns in the victim?s name. The victim and his wife spent more than four years and $15,000 to clear his name.
Money, credit, and even lives are at stake when an identity is stolen. Yet many people don?t know what legal protections exist. You need to learn what to do when your name, credit card number, or other information gets into the wrong hands. Security expert David Holtzman offers you clear, concise advice on how to reduce the chances of fraud and what steps victims need to take to reclaim their lives. An extensive resource list offers tools to draw up a plan to rebuild credit and reputation.
Thieves are roaming the Internet. But with this essential guide, their victims can even the score!
8. Alive and Kicking: Legal Advice for Boomers
Price: $24.95
If you are getting older (or hope to), this book is for you. It will save you and your family money, restless nights, and heartbreak. Do I really need a living will? What are living trusts and should I attend a free seminar? How can I protect myself from scams and identity theft? How can I care for my aged parents? What are assisted living facilities and what about nursing homes? How can I recognize elder abuse and what about guns in the home? How can I fight age discrimination? What will be my insurance needs? What are reverse mortgages, Roth IRAs, durable powers of attorney, and disgruntled heirs? Will I have to give up both driving and sex? Need I worry about estate taxes? Should I avoid Probate? Most important, how can I get my family (and myself) to discuss the real problems that will face us? Here they come, ready or not. Not to worry. You don’t have to read the entire book. What you need to know right now is in the first four chapters. The rest can wait. This is a serious book about serious times, but, if you re not up for an occasional joke, or poem, just put it back.
9. The Sociopath Next Door
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Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband? Your sadistic high school gym teacher? Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings? The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own?
In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize that your ex was not just misunderstood. He’s a sociopath. And your boss, teacher, and colleague? They may be sociopaths too.
We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people—one in twenty-five—has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt. How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief characteristics is a kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or interesting than the other people around them. They’re more spontaneous, more intense, more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky to identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally, sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn early on to show sham emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to others’ suffering. They live to dominate and thrill to win.
The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one or more sociopaths already. Part of the urgency in reading The Sociopath Next Door is the moment when we suddenly recognize that someone we know—someone we worked for, or were involved with, or voted for—is a sociopath. But what do we do with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game.
It is the ruthless versus the rest of us, and The Sociopath Next Door will show you how to recognize and defeat the devil you know.
10. In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People
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Subtitled Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People, this is the international bestseller from Dr.In Sheep’s Clothing is used in thousands of psychiatric clinics worldwide.
Dr. George Simon knows how people push your buttons: your children–especially teens–are expert at it, as is your mate. A co-worker may quietly undermine your efforts while professing to be helpful, or your boss may prey on your weaknesses. Manipulative people have two goals: to win and to loog good doing it. Often those they abuse are only vaguely aware of what is happening to them. In this eye-opening book, you’ll also discover * four reasons why victims have a hard time leaving abusie relationships, * power tactics manipulative people use to push their own agendas and justify their behavior, * ways to redefine the rules of engagement between you and the abuser, * how to spot potential weaknesses in your character that can set you up for manipulation, * 2 tools for personal empowerment to help you maintain greater strength in all relationships, and much more.
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Copyright 2012 David Masters
