Robert Brokamp

If an illness or death befell your parents, spouse, kids, or any other close relative, would you be able to access their financial information and handle their affairs?

If something happened to you, would your spouse and family know what to do and where to find everything?

If the answer is no, as it is for most people, then Beth Pinsker has a roadmap for you.

Beth is a certified financial planner, a columnist for MarketWatch, and the author of My Mother's Money, A Guide to Financial Caregiving.

Beth, welcome to Motley Fool Money.

Nice to be here.

Thanks, Robert.

Let's start with the story of your mom and your journey to becoming her caregiver.

And your mom was in a situation where she had back surgery.

She became incapacitated.

She didn't have cognitive decline, but she had medical issues that basically made it very difficult for her to manage her affairs.

So you live in New York.

She lived in Florida.

You had to fly down there and basically try to figure out where everything was and how to do everything.

So there are really two aspects of this, right?

There's first of all, making sure that your affairs are in order and then working with your relatives to make sure they do the same.

So let's start with, you know, what you could do on your own.

Where should people start in terms of getting everything laid out of their own situation so that someone else can take over either temporarily or maybe permanently because you've passed away?

You talked about in the book about creating a couple of things.

One is a cheat sheet.