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© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Drivers sit in slow moving traffic leaving Boston at the start of the long Fourth of July holiday weekend in Somerville, Massachusetts, U.S., June 30, 2022. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
By Chris Taylor
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Patti Black remembers it like it was yesterday: The conversation no adult child ever wants to have.
The financial planner from Birmingham, Alabama, was worried that her elderly father Mack was becoming a danger behind the wheel, thanks to his growing memory problems. So when she and her sister told him in the fall of 2020 that they were taking away the keys, things got rocky very quickly.
“That conversation did not go well,” Black remembers. “My dad was very angry and couldn’t understand that we were acting in his best interest. But if he had a wreck, we just could not risk him being sued and all his assets being at risk.”
It is the kind of discussion that mixes every possible explosive ingredient: Family, emotions, insurance, physical danger to oneself and others plus deep-seated fears of dependence and decline.
Yet it is a conversation many families need to have. Such issues were thrown into the spotlight just recently, when entertainment icon Dick Van Dyke was involved in a car accident at the age of 97 – prompting his wife to reportedly take away the keys in the interest of safety.
The first thing for families to acknowledge is that these decisions are very much case-by-case, and that no blanket generalizations can be made. One person may represent a danger on the roads at age 65, while another may be perfectly fine at age 85.
“There are three key areas – vision, cognition and motor function – that are responsible for higher crash rates for older drivers,” says Loretta Worters, a spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute.
If you feel your elderly parent is declining in one or more of those areas, then your family has some hard decisions to make. A few factors to consider:
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF APPS
Emotionally, one main factor for seniors is the loss of independence. That can be lessened by the use of ridesharing services like Uber (NYSE:) and Lyft (NASDAQ:), which have proliferated so much in recent years. This way they can still go when and where they want and not have to rely on family members to get around town.
Financially, making that switch might be a wash: “It’s important to get them used to rideshare services before they park the car for good, so they can still…
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