Help Aging Parents with Finances, without Sharing Passwords
Your mother’s former employer’s retirement plan still holds the fund it was assigned on her first day of work, thirty years ago. You see that the money sits in a fund that charges over 1% in expenses when there is a nearly identical index fund that charges less than a tenth of that. The SEC’s investor bulletin on fees shows the math. Compare a fund charging 1.00% per year with one charging 0.25%. After 20 years, $100,000 grows to about $179,000 in the first fund and about $208,000 in the second. That is a $29,000 difference for every $100,000 invested — even under a modest growth of 4% per year. And many index funds now charge far less than 0.25%, so the real gap can be wider still.
Before you can help, however, you need to see the fund menu and the statement. And workplace retirement plans are exactly the kind of account where you cannot be added as a viewer. There is no portal to add you to. The document has to travel from your mother to you.
So, she scans it and emails it to you. Almost every family does it this way. And not just for retirement accounts — the same handoff happens with any financial information a family needs to share, and there is plenty of it. In a Pew Research Center survey published in February 2026, 39% of people caring for an aging parent said they regularly help manage finances, such as budgeting or paying bills on time.
In other words, the question is rarely whether to share financial information. The question is in what manner you send it.
Why the information has to move
Fee decisions are only one reason. Several others come up all the time:
Retirement account deadlines. Did the required minimum distribution go out before December 31? Did the qualified charitable distribution reach the right charity? To check, someone needs to see the statement and the Form 1099-R.
Tax season. Returns, 1099s, and K-1s pass between parent, adult child, and tax preparer every spring. It is worth noting what the IRS itself expects when tax documents are emailed: attachments must be encrypted, the password must be shared some other way (such as by phone), and nothing sensitive may appear in the subject line. That is a high bar. Most family emails do not come close.
Benefits paperwork. Applying for Medicaid long-term care coverage is the extreme case. The application can require up to five years of financial records. Those records often pass among the parent, one or two adult children, and an elder law attorney.
Something urgent. Sometimes the need is not planned at all. A charge must be disputed. Fraud must be reported. A parent is in the hospital, and the bills still need to be paid this week. Fraud in particular is common. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received 201,266 complaints from victims aged 60 and older in 2025. Reported losses were $7.7 billion, up 59% from the year before. The most common complaint type was phishing and spoofing — fake emails and fake messages.
The trouble with email
Email does not end. A PDF with a Social Security number sits in two mailboxes. It also sits in every backup of both mailboxes. It stays there for years. If either email account is broken into later, everything ever sent through it is exposed — including that PDF.
Sharing passwords creates a different problem. Most banks prohibit sharing login credentials in their account agreements. If something goes wrong — even an honest mistake, such as a bill paid twice — the bank can point to the broken agreement. Shared passwords also erase the record of who did what. Once two people use one login, no one can tell the parent’s actions from that of the child.
None of this means anyone made a bad decision. Families share passwords because for a long time there was no better option. Researchers at the University of Manitoba studied older adults and online banking. They found that many older adults rely on a family member’s help precisely because the banks offered nothing better. That was a gap in how the products were built. The good news is that better options exist now, and most are free.
Four moves that get you off email
- Add a trusted contact — and know what it is. Every brokerage, bank, and IRA custodian will let the owner of the account name a trusted contact. It takes about five minutes and costs nothing. Under FINRA Rule 4512, the firm may call that person if it suspects financial exploitation, if it cannot reach the customer, or if it has concerns about health or capacity.
But be clear about the limit, because this is the most misunderstood item on this list. A trusted contact gets no access to the account. No balances. No trading. No ability to move money. It is a safety net, not a set of keys.
- Pick one channel and let everything else be a red flag. Agree as a family that financial documents travel exactly one way. The benefit is quiet but large. Your mother no longer has to judge whether a convincing email is real. The rule says documents do not arrive by email at all. So, a well-made fake fails the moment it arrives. For example, if the family channel is a secure exchange service such as Encyro, then any statement or tax form arriving as a plain email attachment is, by definition, suspect.
Extend the same idea to the phone. Agree on a family verification word for any urgent request involving money. Both the FTC and the FBI now recommend this, because a familiar voice on the phone is no longer proof of anything.
One caution: whatever channel you choose must be easy to use. If it is not easy, it will be abandoned within two weeks, and everyone will quietly go back to email.
- Organize by who sees what, not by what it is. Most people sort documents by type — taxes here, insurance there. Sort by audience instead. One folder for the CPA, one for the attorney, one the siblings can see, one that is just your parent and you. A simple test: if you have to stop and think about whether someone should see a file, the file is in the wrong folder.
Two habits make this endure. First, name files so they still make sense a year later: 2025-Tax-1099R-Fidelity.pdf, not scan_04.pdf. Second, keep the documents that rarely change — the will, the trust, the powers of attorney, the deeds — separate from the statements and tax forms that arrive every year.
One thing never belongs in a shared folder: passwords. Those go in a password manager, such as 1Password or Bitwarden. Both support a shared family vault and emergency access.
- Do not make a one-time reviewer create an account. Suppose your brother in another state needs to read the trust amendment once. If he must sign up for something and invent a password just to read it, the document will end up as an email attachment instead.
So, when choosing where shared documents live, look for these things. Files should be encrypted during transfer and in storage. The recipient should not need an account for a one-time review. And nothing should be left sitting in an inbox. Modern secure file sharing products such as Encyro let you easily send an auto-expiring link — your brother clicks it, reads the document, and there is nothing left behind in his email to protect. As an alternative, you could also use your CPA’s, your attorney’s, or DMM’s client portal, if it allows additional users.
Get started this week
- Add a trusted contact at every brokerage, bank, and IRA custodian.
- Turn on view-only access where the institution offers it.
- Schwab View Only Authorization (form APP81688): the viewer signs in with their own login and can see up to ten years of balances, statements, and tax forms. They cannot trade or move money. Note that this access ends at incapacity or death, so pair it with a durable power of attorney.
- Fidelity Inquiry Access: view balances and account information. The person receiving access must already be a Fidelity customer — if they are not, Fidelity itself points you to duplicate statements instead (see the next item). It is not available for NetBenefits workplace plan accounts.
- Vanguard Information-only Access: view balances, holdings, transaction history, and performance, with no ability to trade, withdraw, or make changes. The recipient needs their own Vanguard login. For most personal accounts, the owner can set this up online under Profile & account settings, and the access takes effect once the recipient accepts it.
- Wells Fargo Guest User: Log in to your Wells Fargo account, and in the search box near the top, enter “Guest User” – press enter and then click the search result that has “Add Authorized Users” or “Account Access Manager” in the title. The guest user can then see balances, activity, and statements for the chosen accounts — but cannot make transfers or payments. The owner can edit or delete the access at any time.
- Ask for duplicate statements. Both the SEC and the CFPB suggest asking the bank or broker to send a second copy of statements to an adult child or an accountant. This is the one option that works everywhere — including the workplace plans that offer no view access at all.
- Freeze credit at all three bureaus. It has been free since 2018, and it does not affect anyone’s credit score.
- Turn on transaction alerts. Most banks offer automated transactions alerts at thresholds you select. Enable these and have them sent to both your parent and to you.
- Agree on the one channel (instead of email) and the verification word (for phone).
Getting help the whole family can trust
There is an old rule that banks, accounting firms, and auditors all live by: separation of duties. The person who handles the money should not be the only one keeping the records and reporting the results. When one person does all of it, there is no independent check on any of it. Splitting the roles removes the opportunity for a costly error — or a theft — to go unnoticed. Families benefit from the same rule.
That separation also solves another problem families rarely say out loud. When one adult child handles everything, the other siblings see only what that child tells them. Even a well-run arrangement can start to feel opaque. A Daily Money Manager’s regular reports give every sibling the same information at the same time. That protects the child doing the work from suspicion, just as much as it protects the parent from harm.
A DMM can also do the unglamorous setup work: build the folder structure, establish the one channel, keep it all current, and gather the documents for the kind of fee comparison this article started with.
Aman Kansal writes for Encyro, a secure document sharing tool. Learn more or sign up for a free account. Encyro is an affiliate member of AADMM.
