Resources That Helped Us

Not a product list. This is what my family actually used — some of it constantly, some of it once and never again — while taking over my mom's care and finances. Take what's useful, skip what isn't.

A note on how this page works: everything below is something we genuinely used, or a real category of service worth knowing exists, not a paid placement. As affiliate relationships get set up over time, some of these links may start earning a small commission if you use them — at no extra cost to you. That'll never change what's recommended here, only how the link is tracked.
Documents & Legal

Getting the paperwork in place

What we used

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 RocketLawyer
Worth knowing exists

A 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.

Health & Prevention

Understanding my own risk

What we used

23andMe

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.

Visit 23andMe
What we used

Marek 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 Health
Home Safety & Monitoring

Keeping an eye on things when you can't be there

What we used

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 Ring
Daily Care Supplies

Keeping supplies flowing without being there

What we used

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 works
Facility & Placement Help

If you're facing the move to memory care

Worth knowing exists

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 service

None 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 →