Guides for managing someone else’s money
Millions of Americans are managing money or property for a loved one who is unable to pay bills or make financial decisions. To help financial caregivers, we’ve released easy-to-understand Managing Someone Else’s Money guides.
About the guides
We created guides tailored to the needs of people in four different fiduciary capacities:
- Agents under a power of attorney
- Court-appointed guardians
- Trustees
- Government fiduciaries (Social Security representative payees and VA fiduciaries)
Each guide contains information on the fiduciary’s responsibilities and tips on how to spot financial exploitation and avoid scams. Also, each guide includes a “Where to go for help” section with a listing of relevant agencies and service providers.
The guides are not intended to provide legal advice or serve as a substitute for your own legal counsel.
State-specific guides
Because people’s powers and duties as a fiduciary vary from state to state, we also created six sets of state-specific Managing Someone Else’s Money guides. These state guides provide information about the state’s unique laws and practices, as well as state-specific resources (see states listed below).
To make it easy for legal and aging experts in other states to adapt the guides for their states, we developed a set of tips and templates for creating state-specific versions. The tips summarize what we learned by collaborating with lawyers and other professionals to produce several state-specific versions. Below you'll find a Microsoft Word template for each type of guide.
Order or download the guides
For each guide, you can:
- Download the guide as a PDF, which is best for web viewing
- Order a free printed copy through GSA
- Order these materials in bulk
Power of attorney
This guide is for people who have been named in a power of attorney to make decisions about money and property for someone else.
Court-appointed guardians
This guide is for those who have been appointed by a court to be guardians or conservators of property, giving them the duty and the power to make decisions on someone’s behalf.
Trustees
This guide is for those who have been named as trustees under revocable living trusts. In these cases, ownership of some or all money and property has been transferred to a trust and, as a result, the person named as a trustee has the power to make decisions about what is in the trust.
Government fiduciaries
This guide is for those who have been appointed by a government agency to manage income benefits, such as Social Security or veteran’s assistance, for someone.
