Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Good to see you, Mr. Clark.
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Good to see you, too. In the season of thanks and giving and now giving. I was like, thanks. It was a little bit before. Now it's giving. So.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Thanks for giving and giving yourself all that wonderful stuff. It's a nice season. I love this part of the year. Do you? Don't you?
[00:00:16] Speaker B: It is. It's a good time of year. You know, it's when. When we're recording right now it's pre Christmas, but you guys will hear this after New Year, so we're gonna go ahead and say Happy Thanksgiving to you.
Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Hanukkah.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Kwanzaa.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Happy Kwanzaa. Happy Ramadan.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Ramadan. There you go. And Happy New Year. I'm sure we've forgotten something, but.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: And Happy New Year.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: We're happy to you all. Whatever you celebrate. It's all.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: And if you're really late, Happy Thanksgiving.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: Go get a gift if you're really, really right. Wow. It's been a while since we've done this, and I am been missing it, actually, because I don't know about you, but I think this is as much therapy for me as it is. As it is a podcast, to be honest and true.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: I honestly think that's true. We are. We are both therapists for each other and for. And for you, the listener. If you want us to be, you know, you can always engage. And we do our best to try to get you the best advice or what we're thinking is best advice at the time. So the disclaimer is, we're not doctors. We're not lawyers. We are it professional. Our opinion comes with. With what we have learned over our years.
You should always check it and find out if you want to look at. And get a second opinion if you want to. But we're trying to give you the best advice we have, and some of it we've lived through. So there's. There's always that expertise.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: That's true. That is true. So, man, it's. It's been an eventful time here while we. While we've been. Been out.
Yes. Of regular recording. So what's going on with you, man? Talk to.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: The thing that's going on with me is mom is getting better with. With the way she's. Her medication working?
Well, I've had a couple of adventures with my security system. Had one today, actually. We had to rearrange an appointment and, you know, just trying to navigate the holidays when you have loved ones like myself who are in facilities or you're limited in mobility and what they can do, you have to adjust, kind of roll them with the punches. So I know you do some of that, too.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. There's a. There's a lot.
A lot going on. I've been traveling up and down the upstate of South Carolina this last month or so. Had a lot of stuff happening, and we'll talk, get into details about that. But short of it is my dad has moved houses. You know, if somebody. If you're a regular listener, you know, you've heard the saga of me trying to find a new home for him near my. Near my brother. We found one. It's. It's working out great. And we finally got him moved in this past weekend, so we'll. We'll talk about that a little bit here, too.
Gosh, we've got all kinds of things on our list today, don't we, on our. On our rundown over here. Let's see what you want to start out with. You go. You go first.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: Well, I think we ought to start out with the thing that you and I talked about a while back, which is, you know, for Thanksgivings, and there are lots of people doing caregiving. I know some of you are using this show as a way of, you know, giving yourself some time or meditate on things like that, but we want both Barry and I want to say that nobody's ever said it to you for this year, that we thank you for doing the caregiving you're doing for. For your loved one.
Sometimes that goes unsaid, and sometimes you just need to hear it. Okay. So you've heard it from us. We've actually said thank you.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: You're doing it right.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Thank you for your caregiving and for helping. Helping your relatives or your loved ones or all of those folks out, because you need to know that you are loved and appreciated and what you're doing is good.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: Yeah. And you know what? Your. Your loved one wants to say that to you. They think you know that. So we're saying it for them right now.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Yep. They may not always know exactly how to say it, or they may say it in ways that doesn't sound like it. Yeah, but they do. They do.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: But they mean it. They are appreciative. I think we need to hear that as caregivers every once in a while, just to know that. Just to hear it in your. In your own head that, yeah, somebody sees what you're doing and what you're doing is appreciated.
[00:04:04] Speaker B: That's a good thing for sure.
So, wow, let's see here.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: And we got a jam packed thing. So it's hard even to think what to go through next.
But I want to tell you, I was really intrigued by your want system and I think you need to explain it to the viewers because I think it's a good thing.
Now, all you caregivers don't tell nobody else, you know, I know y', all, but. No, I'm just kidding y'. All. You probably on the care, but. But yeah, you want to hear these rules because I think they were really cool about what, how you handle things.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: All right, cool. So I'm going to, I'm going to give you a little background. I'm going to try not to get too wordy on it. But here, but here's the deal. My dad, God, love, he has a certain vocabulary in the way that he uses when he has a need or he has more of a. He has a want, you know, he has something that needs that he thinks needs doing.
What he will say to you is, hey, listen, I want you to do X. And X might be log on to Amazon and order me this bizarre thing that he saw on a TV commercial the other day. It might be looking up some administrative detail. It might be calling the bank and asking a question that he doesn't feel comfortable asking the bank about. It might be ordering a fishing lure that he just thought of at the, at the moment. I mean, it's all over the place, but it comes out as, hey, I want you to do this. And personally, you know, I know he means that.
When you get time, would you please take a moment and do this thing for me? Because I'm having trouble with it and I can't articulate that I'm not able to do this thing.
So I know that intellectually, but. There's always a but. But that's not what I hear. And, and the thing is, is there's a timing aspect of this too, because usually I get the I wants after I've been at his house maybe, or I've been on the phone doing a long series of things for him. Usually it's near the end of the day when I'm maybe 3/4 of the way through whatever big task we're working on or thing we're trying to accomplish. And I'll be heads down, my brain's into the process, I'm working on the thing and I'll get, hey, next time you're here, I want you to do this, this, this and this. God help me, my head wants to explode at that point when I, when I hear that. And it's not that I mind doing the thing nine times out of ten, it's not a big deal, but it's like, all right, I'm doing this thing for you that you asked me to do, and you're interrupting me to ask me to do this other thing in the future that may or may not actually happen, need to happen. It might just be a one. It might not be a need. It might be just something I thought of.
And, and, and, and I've. I've tried to work on a way, and I think I have worked worked up a way to, to approach this better now other than, you know, let my head explode. Nobody wants to see that it's bad.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: Yeah. I've read your rules. I love them.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: Yep. So, so here's what we're going to do. What I'm going to try to do in the future with the I want problem, as I like to call it, is one thing is, is try to try to listen. But. And, and then there's a couple of little filters on this. First thing is, is I want. I'm creating myself thing that I have. I use Apple reminders. I'm a big fan of that. Some people use a piece of paper or a little notebook or notes or something, but I use Apple reminders. I made myself a list, and I've called it. I call it the dad parking lot.
So what I'm trying to do is whenever I encounter those I wants while I'm in the middle of something, I'm just going to stop doing what I'm doing, and I'm going to write it down on my list. I'm going to put it in my list and I'll say, dad, I can tell you what, I'm going to put that in the parking lot when I get finished with this, or we'll talk about that later. You know, I want to make sure I capture it before, before we get going. Nothing fancy. This is just one little inbox. Drop stuff in there.
So my, my, my phrase hopefully will be, let's put that on the list and we'll review it after I finish this thing that I'm doing. So, you know, that seems reasonable. Right? My brain, I think my brain's going to thank me for that later because all those interruptions, I like to, I don't like to miss something. I like to get it on my list somehow or another. So I think that'll help me.
My, my brother kind of helps out with a lot of stuff too. And I'm going to let him know about this list thing that we got going on to kind of help, to kind of help keep up with things. But what I want to do with that list is about once a week or so and if none of these are urgent usually, but just something that gonna happen to me. So once a week or so I wanna review that list and go through and put a little filter on it. And the filter may be.
Is this nuts? Is this something he just thought of out of the, out of the blue? Is this a real need? And, and honestly my own filters are. Is this something that he wants that I don't really agree with here and I'm not sure I want to spend the time to do this thing because I'm not sure it's a real need and what I'm, what I've been doing with that lately. And I'm going to add this to this filter is what I call the three times rule. If it's one of those questionable items or questionable tasks, I wait till he asks for it three times before I actually do it because there's, there's a lot of check a lot of cases where it's just a whim, it's just something that popped in his head. And if I run after every one of those, I'm going to go nuts. So I've only got so much self control, I've only got so much energy and I'm going to try to help, try to help use this new system and these filters to kind of help me determine what's something that really needs to happen and when does it really need to happen. Just like really any kind of other productivity system. One I'd like to think of is called getting things done.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: But I can't help myself. I think this is a great rule. I think it's a great rule because I know you and I have talked about things where we heard somebody say this is what I want and we did it and then they went okay, right. You know, it was like a.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: I went through all of this to get it done.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: And now you. So it, it needs to be a driving force in their lives to, to put more work to it. I think this is a great way of doing it. So I love, I love your list.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: So I will report back to see how this goes. But I think, I think it's going to help. It's helped me that similar things have helped in other parts of my life. So we'll see how it goes.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: Well, I think you should mention the last part too, which is the big, small and whim part of that. I think you should say that.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Well, I guess this is it really, that if when we're going through and we're sorting these items or reviewing them later, I'm going to try to look at them with things like is this a big item? This, is this something that I need to handle for sure. Then I'm going to assign it to myself. Is this a small thing or is it a local thing? Like right now in our new new world order here, I live a lot further away from my dad than my brother does. Actually, my brother lives just a couple of miles from him. Now. There are administrative things that I, that, that he's not going to be able to do, but I can from a distance. And they're usually, they're big things that deal with legal stuff or banks or you know, lawyers and all that. I can deal with those. And so I'm going to jump on them because I know that's a thing for me. But if it's something that's local, you know, I can't come over and fix his, fix his plumbing or if there's a problem with, you know, the electrical panel or he remote doesn't work. Or the remote doesn't work. Exactly. Or having trouble with things like that. I got to delegate those. So I gotta, I gotta give my brother a call, say hey, could you handle these things? And so that I'm gonna try that. And then honestly, if I go through and it was just a whim, I'm gonna delete it till I hear it a couple more times. I'm not gonna let it take any residency up in my brain. It needs to go away.
So I don't know, we'll see. I'm hoping it's gonna work. It's like Merlin Mann, I think is one of the podcasters that I listen to a lot. He likes to call it. This is my new thought technology. So I want to see how this works.
[00:11:39] Speaker A: I think I'm incorporating it. As a matter of fact, I think some of it I already do. But now your four step plan makes a lot of sense. So we're throwing that in the show. Notes, y' all can go back and read it. It's really good, guys. I read it a couple of times already. I'm like, oh yeah, I'm doing this. This is definitely worthwhile.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: I can't take all the credit for it. Between my early in the morning sometimes I have these conversations to roll through these, these ideas with Chat GPT, and it helped me kind of solidify all that down into a small thing. So. So, yeah, that's where we're going on that one for sure.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: Well, speaking of ChatGPT.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: For those who don't know, I'm in the middle of Christmas season. I'm actually through a lot of my gift giving already. I'm actually way ahead of the job.
And. And I have been watching a lot of YouTube lately. I know you have too, of course.
And I found one of these videos and it has spurred me on a list and I put a lot of information in the show notes about it. Maybe too much, so you decide. But there was a video that came on and what it said was, 80 gadgets for the elderly and disabled that you can buy on Amazon.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: I went through that thing. It's pretty cool.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: It's a 30 minute video. It's a good read. But what it does is it goes through all 80 of these items and it gives you just a snippet, like a mini commercial of it for 20 seconds to show you what it does and what it looks like and gives you an idea of about price.
All right, so I forced. Went through all of it and I actually bought a few things for my loved ones based on what I saw. But I thought it would be cool to make a guide out of that. So what I did was I used some, some.
Some AI helpers on this. So I had actually taken all 80 of them. They're in the list, they're in the show notes. I also asked that AI to categorize them by category, to give you pricing and to pick what it thinks are the top seven.
And I thought I would list the top seven for you to sort of see. And so, you know, let me make sure I find it because we got to show this a little bit. But. But yeah.
[00:13:45] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, gotcha.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: So I'm headed toward it right now. There it is.
All right, so here are the top five. There was a medication dispenser.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Mm.
[00:13:58] Speaker A: Prevents mismanage and alerts. There was a patient lift. So if you're a caregiver and you're dealing with somebody who weighs a lot more than you, there's this lift, helps you move them around.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: There was a toilet seat lift that helps people move from the bathroom back and forth. And it was very inexpensive support rails that you can install a shower chair that you can put in the bathroom. That's the top five for caregiving. Priority shower chair with the back.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:23] Speaker A: And then there are Some really cool ones that don't cost a lot of money. Some of them were between 40 and 80 dollars.
Like a stair cane that allows people to move up and down stairs evenly with a cane.
So it's actually. When I saw it, I went, oh, that's cool. So my mother has a couple of steps in her house. Not a lot, but she has trouble lifting the cane up. So this one, you just put it on a stair and it lifts you up. It's actually stair stepped to fit in that. It was only 40 bucks.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: Sweet.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: So really nice gifts that are out there. So we've taken. I've taken some time and made this guide for you to go through. I've also put the video in. If you want to look at the video. It's from an organization called Homefix.
Have a lot of viewers, like 22,000 viewers on it.
But it was. So some of them are insanely expensive. And you wouldn't want to do it like a power wheelchair. If you need that. I guess that's something you can get. All of them apparently are things you can get off of Amazon. So you can order them from Amazon, man. There's. And there are 80 of them.
Yeah, it's really cool. So I got intrigued by going through that. I actually made a list with all 80 of them and it has price references on each one of them. So you can look at it like there's some that are $10 and some that are thousands of dollars. So. And this. And actually some. Some of it's pretty cool technology because maybe you could see it and go, oh, I need to talk to somebody about that because maybe that's something that I need for my loved one. Like obviously the one that's a stair. A staircap which actually lifts somebody upstairs. You have to do some installation on that. But maybe you have never thought of that as something that is available to you. So look at the list, see if it gives anything on it. I know it would be more appropriate if you see it before Christmas, maybe give it something to Christmas. But you know what? Some of these gifts are good anytime.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: They are timeless all year long. I mean, there's always birthdays. You never know.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: There's always birthdays. There's always things just to do to show people you love them.
Yeah. So we grouped them out and they have a very good list.
It groups about 10 different categories, some five to 10 on the list. And I just thought it would be a cool thing to include. So we're putting in the show notes and you can y'. All look at it.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: I'm looking through this list. There's some things on here I want. I mean, wow. Yeah, the one that's kind of intriguing me right here, it's gyroscopic couch, console tray. Oh, that looks cool. It's like, almost impossible to knock over, I guess. Or you could put. You know, it's gonna take care of things like that. Oh, that's slick. I love it. Love it. Yeah, I think this could help out a lot of folks. I believe there's a lot of good stuff in here that our folks will be interested in. So, yeah, we'll put it in the show notes and do our links for everything that we need to put them on there. So. Yeah. Cool.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: And they do other videos for other things, like, you know, 50 things that are available on Amazon for this. But I saw this one that went, oh, this is cool. We need to incorporate that.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: So Bobby's got some interesting things to talk about about Medicare calls here in just a few, but I just got a quick update. There was an episode or two back. We talked about a weird Medicare scam where. So my wife got her Medicare statement and just happened to be looking through it, and there was a charge for like $16,000 to Medicare on her behalf for catheters, medical catheters. She has absolutely no need for those things, does not use those. And there's. We're wondering why it's on there. So she called and reported. It turns out, yeah, they had seen. They just were appreciative to have getting a report about that thing and said, yeah, this is a scam. Thank you for letting us know about it. And we. They kind of took it off, you know, that sort of thing. Well, not too long ago, gosh, a week or two ago, friend of the show, Steve called me and said, hey, or called, actually, my wife said, hey, is this the kind of thing that you saw on your. Your Medicare scam thing? Turns out he had the exact same thing. It was a medical. It was. It was for catheters. It was a big charge to his Medicare thing. So I got to do it. A little bit of digging. And as it turns out, this. This is like a big story. It's being called one of the country's largest health care fraud cases ever.
So what it comes down to is federal authorities have charged 11 individuals for their involvement. Excuse me, their alleged involvement in a scheme that fraudulently. Fraudulently, and I can't say that word, billed Medicare for 10.6 billion.
That's billion with a B y' all come on now, mostly for medical supplies like catheters that were neither requested nor received by seniors. The crime ring, which are reportedly operated out of Russia and Eastern Europe, used the personal information of over a million Americans to submit fake billings.
And the Department of Justice stating that it represents the largest loss amount ever in a health care fraud case.
Can you believe that? 10.6 billion. My goodness.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Well, so that leads me into this other conversation about the incense. When I was home for Thanksgiving with my mother, I was inundated. We were inundated by calls that were coming for asking about Medicaid and trying to get her basically on Medicaid C. So a couple of things I want to make sure that our users know if you. And forgive us if we're talking to people not in the country who may not understand what we're talking about.
Medicaid is actually a healthcare system for our government, provides typically for elderly, but can be for other people with need that provides healthcare for this. Now, it's not a complete system. It's not a complete overall system. But what it does do, it's broken up into really four parts. It's Medicare A, which is insurance. Medicare B, which is medical insurance, which is your doctor visits and your outpatients and things like that. C, which is Medicare Advantage, which things you can do with a private insurance plan. It gives you plans for drugs and dental and hearing. And then D is actually prescription drugs if you have particular need for that.
So there are a lot of, there are a lot of people who already get A and B without doing anything.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Just to clarify, this is Medicare. Medicaid is a different thing altogether.
[00:20:31] Speaker A: Yeah, Medicare, Medicare.
And so there are lots of people who call about Medicare C, because you can add it as an option. It's from a private insurer. Some of those calls are probably legit, but there are a lot of calls, I bet that were doing things, setting up the information for what you just talked about was a huge medical scam through this. So if you get in the data with these calls, you have to tell your loved one first what to do if you get a. Don't engage, don't invite information, don't say yes, don't, because that confirms a name. Make sure that you never share your, your Medicare number, your Social Security number, your bank information or your date of birth.
They can do it in subtle ways. They can say, how old are you? And if you're, if you're. You say like, I'm 58. Then they, they work it back and they'll get some information from that.
Use call blocking whenever you can. Block unknown callers. Use tools out there. We talked about some of them, but they're AT&T armor Guard, Adv and Call Filter Mobile Scam Shield. There are lots of good ones out there. We may do a show on those and talk about them a little bit more.
Call block when you can for seniors. And if you're a caregiver, there comes a point where you have to look at your, your care, your loved one and say they need to get 500 calls from these people over and over again and you need to make it, you need to have a plan on what to do about that. Now you can use things like the don't call list, but that doesn't stop scammers, it only stops legal people who are doing things. And when you find I think you have a scam, report it. Because the more they know about what's happening to them, to people, the better they can fight those items. So I'm sure that's how they got involved with doing that one you're talking about.
There are a lot of pro tips you should convince your seniors about. If they say they're from Medicaid or they're saying they're hauling on behalf of Medicaid, Medicare rather they're not. Medicare never does that. They don't call you unless you initiate it. They're kind of like the IRS on that.
So you know that they're lying. Hang up, block their calls, do what you can to block those items. So my father in law, we were, we were in a situation where his phone is set up in a way that he can't get to all of these items but you have to get out of it to update it. And so we did it every month. We were stunned to realize he had thousands of calls in a month, hundreds of voicemail messages. So they are relentless. I've heard some of them on the phone with my mother and they're not even nice about it. Like they're, they're mean. You can tell they're unprofessional. You can do so just gotta be care of that. And if you're someone who is, you know, you have a parent who's elderly and you begin to notice that there's lots of phone calls happening, intervene.
[00:23:04] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Pay attention because even the conversations can be really harmful. So we're gonna put some this information into the call ups too so you can look at it. Some really good steps in here and really some explanations of what Medicare does and what it Is. So if that's useful to you, please use it.
Yeah.
[00:23:21] Speaker B: You know, there's. There's so much around all of this stuff that involves a telephone or a communications medium somehow or another, seeing a lot of things with a particular relative of ours that this person's having trouble, who had no trouble over the years of being able to text and being able to take and make phone calls and do things. There's a. Lately there's been a decline of being able to get into their phone. You know, they know they've known the code for years, and all of a sudden the code come. Come every once in a while, just disappears. You know, they. In their brain, they can't get there.
And, you know, that's a. That's a factor that has come up lately. As a matter of fact, I know one person, or actually a couple people that are friends of the show who've had a. Gotten to the point with one of their loved ones that they've honestly had to kind of take their phone away for during certain periods of the day because they will do make outgoing calls at random times for random reasons and not even understand why that's happening. And gosh, you know, just talking with them, that's been a very hard thing to do, but it's also been a very necessary thing for them to do. Staying in contact and communication around these phones is. It's been. They're. They're a lifeline for some, but they're a hindrance for others. And it's, you know, it's something we all got to kind of look out for.
[00:24:43] Speaker A: Yeah. And you have to understand the mentality of a lot of people when they're in this situation, that even when you have caregivers who are there for majority of the day, most of the time they're there by themselves. And so some of this is loneliness that deal with. Just want to talk to anyone.
[00:24:57] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: And some of the scammers take prey on that, so they don't. They ask disarming questions. They act like they're friends, and they just get the information they need over long conversations.
I know that my mom, if I. If I didn't have somebody there, could get a call from somebody, and she might just have the conversation for five or ten minutes that might tell her where she lived, you know, her birth date, how much money she has, all kinds of things like that that you just don't want to do. So sometimes you have to. You have to take a plan that limits that, and that's their own protection.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, classic.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: Unfortunately, if you're in that kind of.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: Situation, confidence scheme, things like, I've seen people like ask, well, you just had a birthday, didn't you? And no, my birthday is in January. Really?
[00:25:43] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:25:43] Speaker B: Mine's on January 12th. Well, mine's on Twitter. Dawn's on January 13th. Imagine that. And bam, there you go.
[00:25:49] Speaker A: You know what? Gotten information that they can use against us.
Also, Medicare numbers are valuable, just the numbers.
So you have to be careful. And particularly this time, from October to December, there's open enrollment. And so a lot of these scammers use that as a cover to come in and actually do nefarious things. So.
[00:26:10] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Well, man. Yeah, that. That's. That's all.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: There is a way safely do that. If you need to check a plan, there's a way to safely do it. And there's some information in there. One of. It's basically 1-800-Medicare. You could call that or visit their site, and you can actually plan for somebody to come in and actually talk to you about it. You don't have to wait for somebody to call you just, you know, do it that way.
All right.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: So speaking about phone calls and thinking about these kinds of.
Kind of scammy sorts of things, as I said earlier in the beginning that, That I just moved. My dad's helped my dad move houses, so he's moved closer to my brother, as we said, into a. Into a town that he used to spend a lot of time in. And it all turned out to be a pretty good thing. But, you know, there's a lot of things that we run into about, you know, trying to make sure we've got all our bases covered about all the things about the move. And I thought what it would be a good thing to do for, for the. Our listeners is to give them some resources, a place where they can go to get information about, you know, what do you do when you move houses? It might. It may have been a long time since you've done that or your parents maybe never have done that, and it might be time to kind of bone up on the list. So I've got a couple of checklists, one from the New York Times Wire Cutter page and one from NerdWallet, which is another site that I go to a bit. Both of those are really good for these kinds of this kind of information. And I would put links in the show notes to things about checklists about this and about what you can.
What you can think about as you're getting ready for the move. And they've given you good things about like, you know, two months before do this, two weeks before do this. And it gives you a nice list that you can go through. I'm not going to go through any details on those, but I think it would be worth taking a look at that if you're thinking about moving or you're thinking about moving a parent to a new place or to assisted living facility and all those kinds of things. One thing I've encountered as part of this is we as we bought the new place and immediately, as soon as the closing was done, I mean it wasn't a day or two after this we start getting inundated with scams about needing you to buy a new home. Warranty is one. The other ones are we want to give you mortgage protection insurance or I would need to is it, it's urgent that you contact us about your mortgage. And you know, it got me, man. I bet at least in the first week we've got at least 15 or 20 of those things. Paper mail, not getting calls, but paper mail with urgent looking things and things that look very official.
Yeah, both of those have been a real eye opener for me and kind of unnerving for me to see those things.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Well, the closing of a house and property is a public filing and so there are people that are looking just.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: For that 100% and matter of fact I noticed that when I helped some relatives out with, when their loved ones passed away and I kind of helped them through a lot of probate.
As soon, as soon as you're listed as a, as a personal representative or executor, we used to call them on in the court. That's, that's public. And bam. I started getting inundated with things about hey, are you thinking about selling that property over at XYZ address?
[00:29:19] Speaker A: There are people looking for those opportunities. Some of those leads are legitimate, legitimate leads from people trying to improve their business. I, I understand that.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: Yeah, you get.
[00:29:27] Speaker A: But there know some of them are not. And so when you create a foundation, when you create a charitable organization, you get inevitably all of a sudden you will start to get mail from that in the name of that organization.
[00:29:38] Speaker B: So yeah, it happens.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: But nefarious is what the world we live in and it's the truth. It's, it's really, it's, it's almost like a skill set that degrades over time.
You know, I'm sure my parents felt that way with probably phone calls and probably regular mail. But now it comes to every place that you go to. So your email is full of it. Your text messages are starting to be full of it. Now, the thing about that is it really makes it hard for you to deal with that, especially if you're not looking for it. So you have to be that new guard for your parents and loved ones.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: Well, there's some other things about the move too, that, you know, they're not necessarily on a move. Ultimate moving checklist that, that, like some of these things that I'm going to point you to, but things that I've run into kind of on a, I don't know, an elder tech direction that, that I've encountered. So one things that I thought was, was going to be my biggest hurdle was moving the TV and getting the TV to work properly. All right, so that doesn't sound like a big deal, but you know how it is.
[00:30:48] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I know how it is.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: And my dad is actually having to go through a change on this because things are not work, weren't, didn't work out exactly like I wanted them to. So I'm going to, I'm going to go ahead and call out a company. My, my, my dad has Spectrum for his TV and Internet now. And I'm, I'm not calling them out in a bad way. I'm calling them out actually in a good way. So we, I did a little lurking a couple of weeks ahead of the move and called those guys and they work really good. They said, where are you going to go to? I told them, said, oh, we already have Spectrum there. That's fantastic. So what do I need to do? So all you got to do is pick up your equipment, take it up there, plug it in.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: Oh, that's good.
[00:31:24] Speaker B: And on that day, it's going to work. And sure did. It actually worked. I just plugged in the modem. I, it took that. I have a router that plugs into the Spectrum modem. I took it with me, I plugged it in. The TV automatically saw it as far because it's a smart TV and it connects to it over the Internet. So it connects to a lot of things over the Internet. So it just automatically saw that. His laptop automatically saw it when I got it, got it installed and put in the right place and arranged exactly like it was at the old house. That kinds of stuff. Those kinds of things. So what made that happen was one, we had a company that was. Made it really easy to go move your equipment. The other thing was, is that when I moved the equipment, I had a Separate router that was my router or that I had set up that the SSIDs, like the wireless access points, names and passwords didn't change. So everything that was adjusted to that just actually moved with us and just turned right back on. That was a cool thing. One thing that I did run into in this is that where in his old house, he had a TV that was actually connected to a cable box, a spectrum cable box. And he liked to watch all his TV that way because it was familiar.
He had the big remote that had 7,000 buttons on it and he knew where everyone the buttons were and he did a great job with that.
But when we moved to the new house, there were coax cables all over the house. You know, like you do it like back in the day, this place didn't have it everything. So what we did was we were able to load up the Spectrum app on his smart tv and he can get to all the same channels through that. But there is a little bit of a learning curve. He's actually doing great with it. He's doing better than I thought he was going to do with it.
Of going from a 7000 button remote down to a. I'll go ahead and say it is a Roku tv, which is a very small remote.
It has a handful of buttons on it and you can get anywhere and do anything you need to do. But it is a learning curve. That's something to think about if you're going to change out from traditional cable systems to something that's over the Internet. So that was something I ran into.
Other things are like different heating systems. So in his older house, he had a traditional H vac with a thermostat on the wall and all the things. And he was used to doing that. We had put him a smart thermostat a year or two back. And he actually just uses it like a regular old thermostat. He doesn't like it when it changes on its own. So he likes to push the buttons in the morning and get it to be a certain temperature and that kind of thing. The new house has a completely different system. It's a mini split system. It has multiple heads in different rooms and you have a remote to change everything.
So which is actually slick in a lot of ways. But it's a different pattern.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: Yeah. When they change makes it difficult sometimes.
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's taken him a few days to get used to that. But he, you know, after he called me a couple of times in the middle of the evening and one time I decided to say, listen, hey, Brad has a meeting. Spit system. Go over there and see him. Give him a call. He's two miles away. He can come look at this.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Delegate, delegate, delegate.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: Yeah, delegate. Exactly. And that actually worked. So he called me the next day. Yep, we got it straightened out. I think I understand it now. It's just completely different. It's not bad. It just takes a little longer to catch up and do the thing. I'm like, okay, that's wonderful.
So, all right, so that's heating systems. Other things you don't think about is you'd think by this day and age, microwaves would all be standard. They're not.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: No.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: So they're not. But luckily his was very close and he was able to pick it up really quickly.
His range, his stove, oven, that kind of thing is he went from an electric range to a gas range.
So that's a little different for him. And he, he's always wanted to cook on one of those, but, you know, it was a little bit of a learning curve. My brother, who actually has a gas range, came over, kind of walked him through how, how, how it's different, how you actually have to have an igniter to light the. Light the, the, the. The burners and all that. And he's doing great with it. It's beautiful. But that was a big change. And then lastly, I'm sure there's hundreds of other things, but technologically, one of the last things is the dishwasher. He had a dish, kind of a. More of a traditional dishwasher with a couple of buttons on the front. And I. And he was. He loved it. It was great. This is the one of those where all the buttons are on the top, where you have to hit everything, every button before you close it. And it is a different, different animal. It really is. So one thing I recommend if you're helping somebody like that, is take pictures of every control panel everywhere.
[00:35:49] Speaker A: Everything.
[00:35:49] Speaker B: Everything. I have pictures of the heat remotes. I have pictures of the control systems on the, on the stove or the microwave.
[00:35:57] Speaker A: What room?
[00:35:57] Speaker B: Everything.
[00:35:58] Speaker A: What rooms are called? The room.
[00:36:00] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:36:01] Speaker A: This is the living room. This is the den. Believe me, if you're trying to do that over phone, it just. It.
Yeah. That's not the den. That's the living area. I mean, you do need to. So decide.
[00:36:12] Speaker B: Yep, that has been a thing too. It really has.
Case in point, there's one room that some kids. It was used to be a kid's bedroom. And there's a picture of a moose on a Piece of art on the wall. And I've been calling it the Moose Room because he's like, what are you talking about? Go in there and look on the wall. Oh, I see. It's the Moose Room. Yeah. Okay, I get this.
[00:36:35] Speaker A: Common terminology helps always.
[00:36:37] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Proper.
I call this a new house for him, but the house itself is actually kind of old. It's like in the. It was built in the 40s, but it's been renowned, remodeled multiple times. And it's actually fairly modern. But the wiring in it is weird. And there's a million light switches that do things that you don't think that that would do, that they should do at the place that they're located. And so there's a lot of that going on. I've been taking pictures of the inside of the. The. The electrical panels, so I know where that kind of stuff is and what. What the major appliances brands are and model numbers and all that. And I highly recommend that to anybody who is going through this sort of thing. Get as much detail as you can and stick it away in wherever you keep your notes. But take pictures, use a cell phone.
[00:37:22] Speaker A: Certainly helps.
[00:37:23] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So that's all been interesting and quite a. It's the culmination of a long project.
I've been thinking about this for well over a year, and getting all the dominoes lined up and then starting to see them fall. Starting to see them fall over is pretty satisfying. Now there's still a lot to do and it be. But I'm.
This weekend was culmination of a lot of things. We had a lot of help. My brother had a lot of friends who came to the rescue to help us move the big stuff. And that was wonderful. They were so kind.
And I want big shout out to all those guys for helping us out.
There's still a lot to do with getting rid of his old place and getting it sold. But, you know, the. The. There's not time pressure on it right now. So we're. We're going to kind of take a few weeks off over the holidays and chill on all that.
[00:38:10] Speaker A: I totally get it. So as you can see, my mantra over there is one of them is chill, chill.
[00:38:17] Speaker B: I love it. Chill, freeze, cool, frosty cheer. That's what I'm talking about.
[00:38:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Why not?
[00:38:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:24] Speaker A: So I don't know if you want to do this last.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: All right, you got one. It's a little, little, little.
[00:38:29] Speaker A: This one's a little sensitive, but I think it's a necessary conversation. So I'm In a situation where I'm caretaking for my mom, and when you caretake for someone of the opposite sex, there are some things you have to think about. And if you haven't thought about them already, you might have thought about them, but not sure how you approach them. And so what I did was I made. I went to some guides and I got some rules for caregiving for opposite sex caregiving. And there's. There's like seven things here. I'm gonna read them all, but they have lots of details in them. I'm not gonna go through all of them. Actually, there's more than seven, but I'm only gonna do the top five. So. Because this could get really lengthy. Dignity at all times.
So your mantra should be, if you were. Would be embarrassed to do this in public, doing it in private doesn't take that embarrassment from the person you're caregiving. So you should always speak respectively, you should always expose what. What's necessary for care.
You need to make sure that the private areas are covered and think about where that is. And so if you're a man, there are things that women, that women have that they don't want to expose, and you need to think about that.
Get consent. Every time. Every time.
Make it a part of your habit. Don't assume consent in any place, shape or form, even if it's your mom, it's your parents. I think the respectful thing to do and the thing that makes people comfortable is that you respect their consent as part of the process. So make sure you do that. Explain about what you're doing. Pause. If they hesitate, are you okay with this? That kind of thing? So those, those kind of things are really important. Make sure you clearly communicate what you're doing and make sure you're calm about it. If you're not calm about it, then you're not ready to do it.
And so find ways to make sure that you communicate your demeanor to them in a way that calmly does that. Don't avoid teasing. Try not to be sarcastic. Don't infantile the conversation.
Don't start talking to them like they're a child, because that sets up for bad or things. So be reasonable and be calm about it. And if they show hesitation, stop.
Appropriate physical boundaries.
Only touch what's necessary for care.
Don't prolong it. Use gloves when appropriate. And even if you're a caregiver and you're an infant, you really need to point it. But even if you're intimate with them, I'm her son. It's still not appropriate for me to touch her in places that you shouldn't touch. So you need to be careful about that and then normalize the situation without minimizing feelings.
You don't want to dismiss this by saying this is not a big deal or you shouldn't feel that way. But you also want to make sure you acknowledge your feelings and then make sure your privacy and modesty tools are available. So use chairs, use towels, use adaptive clothing, use screens when you can. And there's a lot of lists of other things on here that have similar kinds of motivations, but I think this was a really good list for me to say. Yeah, it also affirmed some of the feelings I had because I'm probably pretty protective of her. But hearing and seeing this from other people made me think this is something that I need to pay attention to. So just something down there to pay attention with. Exactly. Bottom line is be professional, keep it routine, use humor very carefully and check in with her, your personal emotion. And so I think it's a really good list and so we're going to throw it in there and maybe that'd be helpful to you.
[00:41:44] Speaker B: I think that's a good thing to do. It's. It's a weird topic. Not a weird topic. It's an uncomfortable topic.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: It's uncomfortable.
[00:41:51] Speaker B: Yeah, but it doesn't have to be weird, put it that way. Yeah, yeah.
[00:41:55] Speaker A: And there's some, some things on the male, if you're a female doing with a male, there's some things on the male side of that that could be uncomfortable. So sure.
You know, think about that, talk to some people about it and especially talk to your family about it and see what rules you can use together.
[00:42:09] Speaker B: Yep. Cool. Cool.
I think that's good advice and I think we got it. We're going to have a nice, well loaded up show notes today that you guys will like.
[00:42:21] Speaker A: A book.
[00:42:21] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And as always, we'll, we'll have a link in our, you know, in the description in YouTube or in the description also for the audio podcast that will link you off to our Show Notes document in Google Docs. And actually that's where all of our stuff is. It's a long running list and our latest episodes are at the top so it'll take you directly there. But we have it kind of separated out in sections for each episode so you'll know how to get there. But it's one easy link to get there, so I think you'll deal with it and enjoy it. All right, cool. Can you think of anything else to talk about here.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: Oh, that's enough, isn't it? I mean, we've been talking.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: We've been talking for 42 minutes. What is it? It's crazy.
46 minutes. Wow, that's a long one for us. But yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of details on all of this stuff that we could go into more deeply, but for now, I think this is pretty good. We will hopefully get this out. You should be listening to this early in January, and then we should be back to our regular schedule after that of every other week. We'll try to get a new episode out. And as always, if you like what we're doing, if the information here is helping you, please give us a positive review on Apple Podcast or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we can always use the thumbs up and the engagement on YouTube. Ask us a question, leave us a comment. All that is good for the algorithm and it helps us get a wider reach overall. Help.
Help us help you put it that way. There you go.
Grow the community for sure. All right, thank you. I am Barry and this is Bobby for care, tech and tips. So take care, y' all have a.
[00:44:04] Speaker A: Great holiday and we'll see you next time on next Episode.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: All right, bye now. Ban.
