Boomer Connections This Boomer's Life

I would like to thank everyone who read, shared or like my blog on How I Became the CEO of my own company – without my knowledge.

I thought I would give you a little background on how I came to this point as the CEO of Boomer3 Solutions, LLC.  As I pointed out in my first blog I had a business empowering coach Renee’ Bobb of R.B.I. Enterprise.  She was advising me on another company I had started called Gifts on the Go Plus.  When I told her I was helping my parents organize their documents she noticed that this was one of many times when I had mentioned to her about being involved in helping other seniors in the past.   Once I told her, she said: “Rita, why don’t you write a book and start a business helping seniors.”  I asked her “Do you think people would pay for this type of service?” Her response was, “They don’t want to do it themselves, do they?  If they did, you would not be running into so many of them that need your help.”

Renee told me to just start writing and don’t worry about putting it in any particular order.  You can do that later, so I did.  Writing a book had never entered my mind, but I wrote twelve pages in one day.  This was the beginning of “Before the Stress Begins” A Simple Guide to Golden Age Care and Caregiving, which can be found at Amazon.   Since I was at my parents’ home in Alabama when I got started on the book, it helped me go a long way to writing it.  As I was helping my parents, I was also helping myself.  My siblings and I had a lot of work cut out for us with Mom and Dad’s important papers.

Because I live in Richmond, Virginia, a little over 700 miles away from Mom and Dad, I asked my sisters “Have you ever talked to Mom and Dad about having their personal documents in order?  Have they mentioned anything to you about them? Do they have a will or power of attorney or a medical directive?”  My sisters informed me that whenever they tried to talk to our parents, they simply were told that they were not the oldest.  I was.  But if that was all it took for us to talk with them, then I had the intentions of talking to Mom and Dad when I came to visit.  So we started our conversation with them by telling them how much we loved them, but we had no earthly idea what we would do if anything ever happened to either one of them.

After I made that statement, my Dad got up from his favorite chair and walked calmly into their bedroom and came back with an armful of papers that was about twelve inches high.  I asked for it and I got it.  After we went through the papers, we found and counted out 73 insurance policies.  Seventy-three!  No one should have that many insurance policies.  Although most of them were valid, there were some that were not.  There were a few paid up life and some were accidental death policies.   There were even a few that they should not have had (because of their age) and a few others that were questionable.

There were three in particular that bothered us the most.  One was a policy my Mom had taken out on herself at the age of 19.  When we were going through these policies my Mom was 67 years old.  The thing about this policy was Mom was still paying for it and it was only a $600 policy.  The next one was one my Mom had taken out on her baby brother (who at this time had been dead for eight years) and the last one, a policy Mom did not suppose to have because she was on Social Security.  It took us almost a year to go through all of these policies.  Just think of what we would have had to endure had we waited until Mom or Dad had gotten seriously ill or pass away!  Mom passed away at the young age of 77 and Dad at 90.