When a parent is injured or ill and you’re suddenly in the position of caring for the person who used to be the one caring for you, it can be a jarring experience. Whether it’s the first time or the start of a long-term situation, there’s enough to worry about without remembering account numbers and when the electric bill and mortgage are due.
That’s why it’s helpful to know the location of your parents’ essential life documents – like their medical information, wills, financial statements, and insurance policies – before you need them.
But is it possible you’re not especially eager to spend hours sifting through file folders, scouring online accounts, and tracking down long-term care plans? Luckily, using a cloud-based vault makes it much easier for you – and your family members – to be organized ahead of time.
Here are three reasons to use a cloud-based vault so you’re in a better position to help your parents when the time comes.
1. Help your parent receive the best care possible
Whether they’re in their third year fighting cancer or facing the sudden uncertain prognosis of an infection, it’s tough to think about the long-term prospects of a parent being sick. Along with helping them navigate their medical situation, you may need to step up to handle other daily life management tasks for them as well.
To be available to be the best advocate for your parent’s health – whether rushing to the emergency room, staying by their bedside post-op, or taking them to a chemo appointment – it’s helpful to have easy access to information that outlines and supports their desired plans of care, including:
- Personal identification documents, like social security cards.
- Digital records for medical information release, health insurance, hospitalization indemnity insurance, and long-term care insurance policies.
- Last wills and testaments and durable powers of attorney.
- Medical records, including prescriptions.
- Medical care team roles and contact info including homecare providers, hospitals and doctors’ offices, pharmacies, and medical equipment sources.
Thinking about collecting these materials can be daunting, but actually digitizing them can be surprisingly convenient. Prisidio’s vault makes getting organized as easy as picking up your phone.
That’s because you and your parents can use Prisidio’s app to digitize and categorize items like your insurance card as you’re going about your life, without disrupting your regular schedule. Is your parent checking in for their annual physical? When the desk assistant hands back their insurance card, they can take a pic in Prisidio before putting the card back in their wallet.
For adult children with less tech savvy parents, you can set up their vault and update its contents one bit at a time, whenever there’s a moment to open your app over the course of any days, weekends, or weeks you spend with your parents.
And no matter who captures that snapshot of the insurance card, it takes only seconds to place it in the Healthcare folder in Prisidio’s Documents tab. From there, simply tap to connect it to anyone in the app’s People tab, to designate who shares access – including you, your parents, or other trusted contacts like siblings or close friends.
2. Stay as present as possible while you help your parent
When a parent is sick, helping them get well is your top priority. Staying mentally present helps you help them – whether that means offering comfort or acting as their patient advocate with physicians, taking care of household and financial tasks, or reaching out to their social and professional communities to keep the people closest to your parents in the know.
Prisidio’s digital vault helps you do that. It serves as a single access point for information on:
- Household and recurring expenses. This includes everything from mortgage or rent payments to utility bills – and even regular charitable donations.
- Insurance plans. This includes information about homeowner’s or renter’s insurance, car insurance, and pet insurance.
- Pets. Including veterinary records and contact information for pet sitters or kennels.
- Emergency contacts. Whether family members, personal friends, or advisors like lawyers.
- Every day contacts. This includes friends, neighbors, business associates, and advisors such as accountants and insurance agents.
- Places. Such as workplaces, places of worship, favorite restaurants, or membership clubs.
- Things. Possessions such as valuable items or cherished heirlooms that your parent wants the family to know about, including the story of the item’s significance and its location.
You likely store some of this information – say, the petsitter’s phone number and email – digitally, while documents like deeds are in a safe or safety deposit box.
Prisidio helps you organize by centralizing all of it. You can scan a whole document or business card using Prisidio, or add contact information directly from your phone’s Contacts app to the People tab in Prisidio. Then, open the Places tab to identify a document’s or item’s physical location, such as a safety deposit box at the bank or fire-safe box in the garage.
You can further use the Places feature to connect the dots between that physical safe and the location of the key or the password manager on your desktop, which stores the safe’s combination along with passwords to your parent’s banking and brokerage accounts.
3. Focus your emotional energy on your parent’s transition to recovery
Once on the road to recovery, your parent may transfer to a long-term care or rehab facility. And when they return home, they may attend regular outpatient appointments, have homecare service providers, and/or update their home with new amenities like ramps and railings.
Whether you live out of state or nearby, with Prisidio, you can be confident that you have on-the-go anytime access to the documents that help you support their transition – along with the contact information for a trusted real estate agent and attorney. So no matter where you are, you can be in touch with their representation and connect to all the pieces of their life that need managing.
