Excerpt From the Caregiving Book ‘My Mother’s Money’

“It would be a lot easier if your mom could come in with you and fill out our bank forms,” she said.

“I’m sorry, but that isn’t possible,” I replied. I offered to get my mom on the phone or a video call, or have the bank’s special forms certified by an online notary, but none of that was any good. The woman even remembered my mom — the value of a local branch — but still no dice.

“These are valid forms,” I insisted again.

The representative said she would try to work it out if I could come back for a two-hour appointment another day, with the forms, my father’s death certificate, and my mom’s trust documents. So we set it up for a few days later, while I went home to try to put my hands on my dad’s papers — which turned out to be the easiest part of the process because my mom had them in a labeled folder on top of her desk.

When I went back, it did indeed take two hours for the customer service rep to make her calls to the corporate office for them to approve the request. There was a lot of photocopying and scanning, much hemming and hawing. I had to go back a third time for a scheduled appointment to finish the job and get access to the safe-deposit box. But I got it done. After that was all wrapped up, I had online access to her checking and savings account at that bank and could sign my name as power of attorney on her checks, the proper and legal way.

I was lucky I knew enough about the process to stand my ground, but that’s not always successful. I reached out to an Indiana-based elder law attorney, Jenny Rozelle, because she had posted a reminiscence about suing a bank to make it accept her client’s power of attorney form to access his mother’s bank account.

“I knew the document was good because I drafted it,” she said. “So I told them, ‘You should be able to accept this. It’s not something from the internet.’ It was fine.”

When the bank still said no, she threatened to sue under an Indiana statute that requires financial institutions to accept such documents, which Rozelle said most states have. Still no. So she did it. “A lot of people don’t have the means to file suit for something like that, but I filed suit. Things settled pretty darn quickly after that. The moral of the story that I tell people is that I knew we would win, but what drives me nutty is that we had to do what we did to get to that point,” she said.

Fortunately, my mother and that particular client of Rozelle’s had not kept the needed power of attorney documents in their safe-deposit boxes, which many people do, along with their wills and other important papers. When this is the case, the people helping can’t even get started because they can’t get into the box. This happens so often that Rozelle can’t even keep track of how many times she has had to go to court to request access for a family as a first step in the process.

That first experience enacting a power of attorney wasn’t one I wanted to repeat, but there was a list of other banks to deal with, plus credit cards, insurance accounts, and utility bills for which I had to go through the same sort of back-and-forth process where everyone said no at first and I had to keep calling to make it work. Everyone says you need these documents — and you do — but nobody ever tells you how hard they are to use.

“There’s the legal world and the real world” was how the New York estate attorney Eric Einhart explained it to me when I asked for a MarketWatch story on why it was so difficult. One thing I did right was to go directly to my mother’s branch, where they knew her in person. Doing it all on the phone or online, if the institution is web-only, is even harder.

“During COVID it was challenging. And it’s difficult to do it from a different state. You can email or upload documents to a secure website, but all of that is easier said than done. It’s exponentially easier to walk into a brick-and-mortar branch and talk to a person,” said Einhart.

Another issue that many people run into when trying to use power of attorney forms is that they get stale quickly. If the principal person puts one of these into their estate plan and years go by, state law could change by the time they are needed. The person might also have moved. Power of attorney requirements are much different in Florida than they are in New York, as an example. You can find out your state’s rules through the comptroller’s office or other state agency that governs banks.

Another impossible situation that many people face at banks, particularly when transferring ownership of accounts, is paperwork that needs a medallion stamp. A medallion stamp is akin to a notary certification, but you can’t just go somewhere and pay $4 to have a clerk check your ID and physically stamp your paper. The medallion stamp certifies the financial institution’s high level of confidence that it has positively verified a customer’s identity, and not every branch has somebody who is qualified to execute the stamp. Even if it does, it typically provides the stamp only for customers and only for documents it deems valid, because it is wary of taking on liability.

The medallion stamp is almost mythical because so many people can’t get it done. It’s a prime example of how complicated the financial world has become. In the three decades that attorney Howard S. Krooks has been practicing elder law and estate planning in Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania, he has not found the process of estate administration any different or harder; it’s more that financial rules have changed so much that it’s a burden on people to get through basic tasks such as transferring accounts after a person has passed away.

For him, the buck literally stopped with a medallion stamp. When his mother died, he had everything set up to pass seamlessly through a trust and beneficiary designations so the family would not need probate, but they nevertheless got jammed up trying to transfer IRA assets because one of the account custodians demanded a medallion stamp on the paperwork the beneficiaries needed to sign. He and his siblings searched far and wide to get it done and couldn’t locate a bank willing to provide the medallion guarantee.

“I asked, ‘Why are you requiring this? You’re driving people crazy,’  ” Krooks said. He called repeatedly until he got an empathetic person who told him that the bank will sometimes look the other way if a notary stamp is provided in lieu of the medallion guarantee, and the family got the transaction done. “You may say that’s not rocket science, but there are plenty of people who assume that what is required cannot be changed and don’t have the wherewithal to keep calling and fighting,” he said.

I got the same sort of runaround when I faced that challenge. At the same time as I was dealing with my mom’s affairs, I had to get a medallion stamp to change my name on a 529 college savings plan account that I had neglected to do in the years after my divorce. College was closing in for my oldest, and I didn’t want to have any problems withdrawing the money. I first went to the bank closest to my house and asked, but the people there said no.

I went into midtown Manhattan, the land of banks, to a big branch of a bank where I am a customer. The people there said it did not provide that service there but directed me to a different branch a few blocks away. When I got there, the customer service representative asked, incredulously, “Who sent you here?” And then laughed when I mentioned the branch. They sent me to a third branch one avenue over, and they flat out said no. I stopped on the way to my office at a branch of the brokerage firm I use for my retirement accounts to see if the people there could help. “We don’t do that here,” said the young man who handled the office.

I called the 529 plan’s customer service and told them I gave up. They told me to mail in the form unstamped with a note to explain, and a few days later, my name was changed.

Excerpted from My Mother’s Money: A Guide to Financial Caregiving, in agreement with Crown Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Beth Pinsker.