Getting the paperwork in place
RocketLawyer
This is where our first Power of Attorney document came from. Full honesty: a generic online POA is a fine starting point, but it's not automatically what a bank will accept without a fight — see Section 4 of the binder for exactly what happened when ours got stonewalled at a branch. If you go this route, still bring the document to an elder-law attorney to check it's built the way your state and your bank actually expect (Bonus 3 has the question list for that meeting).
Visit RocketLawyerA local elder-law attorney
We didn't shop around online for this — a financial advisor referred us to one directly, which turned out to be the single most useful phone call in the entire process. If you don't have a referral yet, your state bar association's lawyer-referral service or the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys (NAELA) directory are the standard starting points. Bonus 3 in the guide is built specifically for what to bring to that first meeting.
Keeping track of two sets of finances at once
CFOSilvia
An AI tool I use to manage my own finances and my mom's side by side, without them turning into one tangled mess. Handling two households' worth of accounts, bills, and spending at once is its own kind of overwhelming on top of everything else in the binder — this is what keeps it organized for me day to day.
Visit CFOSilviaUnderstanding my own risk
APOE4 Genetic Testing
This is how I found out I carry one copy of the APOE ε4 variant — one of the risk factors associated with Alzheimer's. It didn't tell me my future. It told me enough to take my own prevention seriously, which is what Section 8 of the binder (The Legacy Layer) is built around. If you want to check your own APOE4 status, SelfDecode analyzes your DNA data and breaks down what it means for your risk.
Check Your APOE4 Status with SelfDecodeMarek Health
Custom blood panel work and ongoing testing — part of taking my own long-term health seriously rather than waiting for symptoms. This isn't dementia-specific, but it's part of the same "get ahead of it" instinct the whole guide is built on.
Visit Marek HealthKeeping an eye on things when you can't be there
Ring cameras
This is exactly how we caught more than one in-home caregiver barely engaged, eating food out of my mom's kitchen that wasn't offered to them — a story in Section 5 of the binder. If you're paying for in-home care, cameras in common areas aren't paranoia, they're due diligence.
Visit RingKeeping supplies flowing without being there
Amazon Subscribe & Save
Once driving stopped being safe, we used our own Amazon account as a direct-ship destination — groceries and supplies straight to my mom, and separately, incontinence supplies shipped straight to her in-home caregiver so nobody had to make a special trip. Subscribe & Save on recurring items (wipes, waterproof pads) means you're not manually reordering every few weeks on top of everything else.
See how Subscribe & Save worksIf you're facing the move to memory care
Paid senior-placement referral services
We didn't personally use one of these — we found our facility on our own — but services like this exist specifically to help you tour and compare memory-care options without doing all the legwork yourself, usually at no direct cost to families (they're paid by the facilities). Worth knowing they exist before you're doing this search at 11pm, exhausted, with no idea where to even start.
See an example of this kind of serviceStart with the First-Fire Kit — or the full system
Two paid options. First-Fire ($9 · Instant PDF · 30-day) gets the questions written before the tour. $9 this week → $27 when ready for the binder.
Walk into the memory-care tour with the questions already written
Scorecard in the car — First-Fire Kit, $9. Memory Care Facility Evaluation Checklist, Long-Term Care Cost Projection Worksheet, and Elder Law Attorney Question Bank — without the whole binder yet.
First-Fire Kit — $9 · Instant PDFInstant PDF · 30-day guarantee · $9 this week → $27 when ready for the binder
Full Guide
The full Dementia Stops With Me system — the binder, the sequence, and the tools for taking over a parent's finances before capacity is gone.
Get the Full Guide — $27None of this replaces having an actual plan.
These are the tools around the edges. The binder is the sequence itself — what to find, what to ask, and what order to do it in.
See Dementia Stops With Me →