How to get their bills paid when they won't let you?
My mother has always been, even on the best of days, a Difficult Person. She has vascular dementia sitting at DBAT stage 5, although no offical diagnosis because she's never in her life accepted there could ever be anything wrong with her body or her behavior.
I've seen all this coming from miles away, and she has a solid estate plan and I have both medical POA and financial POA.
A couple of weeks ago I think she took a tumble that she was too embarrassed to tell me about. I noticed pretty abruptly her cognition fell off a cliff -- suddenly she can't figure out the thermostat that's been in the house since 1975, and shortly after asked me why she was getting a bill for electricity from the power company when she knew her furnace was gas.
**The big question, the reason I'm here, is she's also now refusing to pay any credit card bills on the grounds "I already paid at the store!"**
She's always been sharp with money; she's well-off and she watches her investment account like a hawk, and goes to the local bank two or three times a day to get her checking account balance. We've been struggling with a while with her making a purchase, forgetting about it, and then disputing the charges.
I don't know how to proceed here, because if I use my POA powers to pay the bills she is likely to 1) dispute them anyway and 2) actively revoke the POA.
I don't want to take steps for full guardianship, and I think she would have a nuclear meltdown if I tried for a conservatorship. Please share any advice or experience you have with how to navigate using their money to pay their own bills when they actively don't want you to.