Customer Reviews

The Retirement Nightmare: How to Save Yourself from Your Heirs and Protectors : Involuntary Conservatorships and Guardianships (Golden Age Series)

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As a lawyer, I found this book to be a tour de force compendium of the guardian and conservatorship laws in our country. For both lay readers and lawyers, it is an invaluable reference tool - comprehensive and clearly written. Full of actual stories of actual individuals, it also makes for eye-opening human interest drama.

If you are elderly, or even think you may someday become so... then...you need to read this book and keep it close at hand as one of your most valuable reference sources. Dr Armstrong draws on her tragic family experiences with involuntary guardianship litigation and combines that with excellent and scholarly research, to produce a book containing historical background, the law, a broad range of case studies covering most aspects of the subject, and many answers/recommendations concerning this potential problem that we might all someday face. The appendices covering the various state laws and hundreds of resources for the elderly, are alone worth the cost of admission! I found the book to be alarmingly informative and I feel much more knowledgeable and secure now that it is sitting on my research shelf.

This is a must read book about the truth of the rampant fraud and abuse of conservators and guardians. While this author writes about family members trying to get "Granny's dough", she does touch on another perverse type of guardian, that is a "court appointed" guardian. In Florida, and in many other states, they only require a high school education and a 40 hour course. But whether educated or not, from the lawyers/guardians in the recent New York case, to the high-school educated sociopaths here in Pinellas County, Florida, they are getting away with fraud and abuse.
To avoid a guardianship in the State of Florida should be of paramount importance. Find out how to protect yourself and your loved ones with alternatives: health care surrogate, durable power of attorney, mediation and more. Consider that if you leave your parents to fend for themselves, and ignore the deterioration associated with aging, a guardian can gain a guardianship over them and their assets, without informing you. That guardianship will nullify the most meticulous of plans. To really cover your aging parents, make sure they create a "Pre-need" guardianship and name someone they trust, this is the only way predators in the retirement homes will not be able to force guardianship on them. Also create an irrevocable trust.

Retirement Nightmare isn't your typical retirement guide on how to save up enough money or make investments: its focus is on how to protect yourself from heirs, and chapters survey involuntary conservatorship and guardianships with an eye to revealing how incapacitated seniors fall victim to the statutes designed to help them in their old age. Advance planning is recommended as the key to avoiding situations such as the author's own experience and those described in courtroom cases.

This book is shocking, and alarming. Diane Armstrong's account is disturbing and tragic. The message will leave you outraged and frightened.

Money is a great motivator; your money is the lure. Money changes people. Your heirs and (presumed) protectors may use your money to take care of you or themselves through involuntary conservatorship/guardianship proceedings. Suddenly another person will decide how to spend your money, how to manage your property, who makes your medical decisions, where you live, whether you are allowed to vote, and other important rights.

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is

To have a thankless child!

--William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4.

You worked hard for your money. You deserve to enjoy your retirement years hosting grandchildren, traveling and writing your book. This powerful and much-needed book will frighten the elderly and elevate the frightened. DanPoynter@ParaPublishing.com

Dr. Armstrong has produced a document vital to the safeguarding of personal dignity in today's world. In language accessible by anyone reading the book, she dissects complex legal matters and lays them out in plain view for all to understand. This book should be required reading for all people tasked with ensuring our personal rights within the framework of our various legal systems. It should also be recommended reading for anyone when the natural course of life puts them in a position of reliance on the ethics and goodwill of others...even those 'nearest and dearest' to them. When we are vulnerable... that's when we need help. This book gives us the ammunition to help ourselves. Everyone intends to survive the journey to the retirement years; this book exposes some of the ambushes that others have found there and lays out steps each of us should take to avoid those ambushes. As proof that fact can be scarier than fiction, this book will curl your hair quicker than anything King has ever put on paper.

I hope lawyers and people that just want to run a Business are not the only ones that read this book



My grandmother was first taken over by the company named nancy doty, now she is controlled by Tiffany O'Shea. In the two months that nancy doty took control of my grandmother she charged her around $90,000. 24 thousand went to 24 hour $20 / hr. cargivers. around 20 thousand went to nancy's lawyer which charged her before she was guardian and after she was guardian. There were many other excessive expenses which were charged to my grandmother. Doty's parking tickets. When she picks up perscriptions 90 to 100 dollars an was charged. Sometimes she would have her daughter and the brother of her ex-son in law buy groceries and do accounting and charge my grandmother $70 dollars an hour.
in court her lawyer tried to make false accusations against my mother saying she had credit problems and Financially abused my grandmother.
A friend of my mothers the person that designed the nike swoosh carolyn davidson whose son works for Doty, said doty wanted to become a guardian because as an RN she saw eldery people's things being stolen. I think it is because she became greedy.
After all the expenses being incured by doty I worry about her paying for where she is now.
My grandmother lived many years by herself and never having problems in her house. But a doctor said she needed 24 hour care. So is that a reason to wastefully spend someones money for two months of guardianship. Her guardian ship started in feb 2008. now it is aug 2009.

She got the idea that my grandmother was abused because she lived simply and frugually and still had some money left. doty's always has the newest of every thing.


Doty's job is to find elderly people with a little bit money take over them, drain their money as fast as she can and then hand them off to some one else.


she uses her lawyer to pick a part a present guardian so she can take over all the bank accounts. She goes in the house and starts taking pictures of rooms that do not look tidy and were manly used for storage and she gives it to her lawyer. Who really on cares about how much money he will get if they take over this elderly person. So the the lawyer will work all the angles and go after the present person any way they can including making up personal attacks, so they can keep paying their mortage on their huge house in west portland.