Is your aging parent making one of these money mistakes Canadian experts call a red flag?

However, Christopher Liew, a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) and Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) charterholder who writes for Blueprint Financial, told CTV News that money habits are often the earliest warning sign of cognitive decline — and the stakes keep rising.

Here are five money mistakes worth watching for in an aging parent, and what Canadians can do before a slipping memory turns into a financial crisis.

What actually counts as a warning sign?

The clearest tell is a break from someone’s own baseline. A Johns Hopkins-led study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that people later diagnosed with dementia were more likely to have missed bill payments up to six years before diagnosis, and to develop subprime credit scores up to two and a half years earlier — well before memory symptoms were obvious.

A parent who has run the household books with precision for decades and then racks up a late fee or mails a payment to the wrong company, has changed — and change is what families should be watching for, Liew says.

The fix does not need to be complicated. Move recurring bills to automatic payment while a parent is still capable of setting up the arrangement themselves, so the system is already running if things get harder later.

Why is sudden generosity a red flag?

Loss of judgment does not always look like confusion — sometimes it looks like generosity. Large cash withdrawals with no clear purpose, a run of gift-card purchases or money flowing to someone the family has never met are common patterns, according to Liew. Declining judgment can leave older Canadians more vulnerable to romance scams, fake investment pitches and gift-card requests, which are notoriously hard to trace or recover.

In fact, investment and romance scams are two of the most common — and costliest — scams across the country. Of the $704 million that was lost to reported fraud in 2025, $351 million was via investment hoaxes and $63.3 million from relationship scams.

What does confusion with accounts look like?

Forgetting which bank holds a registered retirement income fund (RRIF), phoning the same branch three times with the same question or handing a debit card and PIN to a neighbour “to save a trip” indicates something more serious than an off day, Liew notes. These slips can expose a parent to both honest mistakes and deliberate exploitation.