Cynthia Tanner’s husband was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease after she started noticing out-of-character behaviour, such as signing up for subscriptions he didn’t need or forgetting passwords.Chad Hipolito/The Globe and Mail
The first red flag for Cynthia Tanner, 74, was when she watched her husband repeatedly forget the password to his investment account.
Each time, he would call the bank to reset his password, only to forget it again days later. He became convinced his wealth management team was tampering with his account because there were trades he didn’t remember making.
The behaviour was out of character. Her husband has a master’s degree in business administration, managed large budgets throughout his career and had always been careful with money.
Then the problems multiplied. He began sleeping only a few hours a night and started making donations to charities that arrived in the mail or appeared on television. In one month, he gave away more than $1,000, roughly 15 per cent of his monthly pension income, Ms. Tanner said.
Her husband was eventually diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurodegenerative disease that affects movement, balance and cognitive function.
“I actually couldn’t believe this was happening. It didn’t feel real,” said Ms. Tanner, who lives in Cobble Hill, B.C. “How could this really intelligent person be unable to pay a bill?”
Canadians aren’t spending as many years in retirement as they used to
The biggest threat to a retirement plan isn’t always a market crash or rising inflation. For many families, it’s cognitive decline. Changes in memory, judgement and decision-making can leave older adults vulnerable to costly mistakes. Yet the warning signs are often subtle, appearing years before a formal diagnosis and long before many families have a plan in place to respond.
A recent survey from Raymond James found that 63 per cent of Canadians worry about how cognitive decline could affect their financial future. Yet only 29 per cent said they feel strongly aligned with their families on inheritance and wealth planning when brain health enters the conversation.
The survey polled about 750 people between the ages of 30 to 65 and was conducted in February.
A 2026 U.S. study from the LIMRA Retirement Income Institute found that cognitive decline can result in average household wealth losses of roughly US$124,000, driven by missed payments, fraud and poor financial decisions.
Along with making large charitable donations, Ms. Tanner’s husband signed up for services he didn’t need, such as a cable subscription. As his condition worsened, she moved him into assisted living and began acting as his power of attorney in 2022, giving her the authority to manage his assets and protect his savings.
“It was extremely upsetting to realize that your life is never going to be the same again,” she said. “I wish I had enacted the power of attorney sooner.”
By 2050, more than 1.7 million Canadians are expected to be living with dementia, with an average of 685 individuals being diagnosed each day, according to the Alzheimer Society of Canada.
In many cases, people may not recognize changes in themselves at all.
Even as a physician trained in internal medicine, Jill Rudkowski was caught off guard by her mother’s cognitive decline.
Ms. Rudkowski, 55, first noticed subtle changes in 2024. Her mother, in her 80s, was forgetting how to use the computer and misplacing belongings. Then she began insisting her banking information was being stolen and started making sizeable donations to charities.
For most of her life, her mother had been careful with her money. “All I could think was, this is not my meticulous mother,” Ms. Rudkowski said, who’s based in Burlington, Ont.
Later that year, her mother said Ms. Rudkowski could enact her role as her power of attorney. “That’s when I realized how bad things had been,” she said. Her mother, who was living alone at the time, had fallen behind on multiple bills because she was no longer able to set up automatic payments.
“It took me months to find out even where she had been making payments and what the payments were for,” Ms. Rudkowski said.
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Changes in financial behaviour can be difficult to spot because they often happen gradually and behind closed doors.
A 2025 study from British researchers analyzed banking records from more than 16,000 people in the U.K. who eventually had someone take over their finances through a power of attorney because they had lost financial capacity. The researchers compared this group with about 50,000 similar people who did not have financial capacity issues.
The study found that people’s banking activity changed years before the person had a power of attorney registration. In the decade leading up to that point, people showed a gradual shift in their financial behaviour that suggested they were becoming less active, less engaged with their finances and more financially vulnerable.
For families, one of the most important protections is putting a power of attorney in place before it is needed, said Angela Casey, a partner at estate litigation firm Casey & Moss LLP. She regularly sees the consequences when families fail to plan ahead.
Without a power of attorney, family members may need to apply to the courts for guardianship before they can make financial decisions on someone’s behalf. The process is typically expensive, emotionally difficult and lengthier than if a power of attorney had already been in place.
It also requires proving the person has lost capacity, often through a formal assessment, which can be difficult if the person doesn’t think they have experienced cognitive decline and refuses to do the assessment, she said.
Leanne Kaufman, president and chief executive of RBC Royal Trust and a board member of the Women’s Brain Health Initiative, said families often underestimate the financial burden that caregiving for someone with a cognitive decline can create.
Joey Arfin, right, walks with his mother Sarah at Baycrest Hospital in Toronto. He started to notice signs of his mother’s cognitive decline after her husband’s death.EDUARDO LIMA/The Globe and Mail
For Joey Arfin, his caregiving responsibilities intensified after his father‘s death in 2017. While he didn’t notice it at first, his mother, Sarah, was showing signs of cognitive decline after her husband’s death.
“We didn’t realize how much my father was hiding the decline,” said Mr. Arfin, 59, of Thornhill, Ont.
His mother’s memory was impacted, and she began spending heavily on bingo and cigarettes, sometimes more than $100 a day.
While Mr. Arfin has helped his parents manage their money since he was young, this additional responsibility was a lot to bear. “When you take on your parents’ financial well-being, you feel that burden and I felt that pressure.”
His 81-year-old mother was eventually moved to a long-term care centre at Baycrest in Toronto (Mr. Arfin has fundraised for Baycrest). While his mother has savings to help pay for her care, some of her care expenses are being subsidized from his own savings.
Mark Shimkovitz, a senior wealth adviser at Raymond James, worked with Mr. Arfin and his family to help manage the costs of Sarah’s long-term care. He says advisers can play an important role in identifying risks and helping families prepare before a crisis emerges.
Many families delay difficult conversations about aging, finances and cognitive decline, he said, even when they know they should have them. But having these conversations, and putting a power of attorney in place, as soon as possible is the best way to prevent issues in the future.
Alongside a power of attorney, families may also want to establish a trusted contact person on financial accounts, Mr. Shimkovitz said. Unlike a power of attorney, a trusted contact person cannot make decisions on someone’s behalf, but a financial institution can contact them if it has concerns about a client’s well-being or decision-making.
“Good planning doesn’t assume the worst,” Mr. Shimkovitz said. “Good planning makes sure you have options.”
