Managing someone else’s money

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. We selected six states (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Oregon, and Virginia) with high populations of older adults and created guides for each. These state guides provide information about the state’s unique laws and practices, as well as state-specific resources (find these guides 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. 

Experts in several states used our tips and templates to create their own state-specific guides. Find those guides at:

• Michigan: protectmymoneymi.org
  
• Texas: protecttheirmoneytx.org
  
• Alabama: states.aarp.org/msembooklet  (Help for agents under a power of attorney)

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