About Us
Linda Conover and John Jenkins are siblings who have dedicated the last five years to caring for dependent parents. Their father suffers from fronto-temporal dementia and their mother has Parkinson's disease with Louey body dementia. In June 2007, Linda and John decided to develop an eldercare guide and website to take the mystery and stress out of eldercare for the caregiver, aging parents, relatives and friends. Linda and John are dedicated to providing other caregivers with timely information via their LiveSmart Eldercare Guide and quality related products that they have found helpful in making daily life easier and more enjoyable for both the caregiver and senior.
Linda Conover is an educator, author and presenter with a BA, MA in Educational Psychology.
John Jenkins is a banker, business consultant, and entrepreneur.
Our Story
Live Smart Eldercare grew out of a desperate situation. Linda Conover and John Jenkins, sister and brother, found themselves caught in a typical eldercare problem. Their parents, Catherine and George Jenkins had been in declining heath for years, she with Parkinson's disease and he with frontal temporal dementia. Both parents had been bright, successful people. Sadly, however, debilitating illnesses such as Parkinson's and dementia rob people of their physical and mental abilities, no matter how strongly one fights and strives to overcome.
Over time, we siblings struggled with health, financial, legal and lifestyle issues as we tried to help our parents to continue living as well as possible. As their health and abilities deteriorated, we realized that we needed to gather important and critical information.
We asked:
Do our parents have a Trust? Where are their bank accounts and safe deposit box? Do we have power of attorney to manage their finances? Do we have a key for the safe deposit box? We found British Royal Air Force pension checks in their mailbox, compensation for having served in World War II, but how do we sign for and deposit them without authorization? Do they own stocks? Who are their doctors? Where are their insurance records? How do we obtain and manage their medications and will insurance pay? Do they have long-term health insurance? Who are their neighbors and friends? Who takes care of their house cleaning, pool maintenance and are their property taxes paid up? What type of documentation management system or storage of records do they maintain? Where will they live when they can't manage their own home? Who will care for them when we are at work? How will they travel without driver's licenses?
In finding the answers to these questions, John and Linda created the LiveSmart Eldercare Guide, written from their story of gathering important information and arranging services to assist their aging parents.
What we needed was an overview of the entire aging process and how caregiving eventually becomes a part of that process. We needed to know what to do at each stage and how to move through each transition. And lastly, we needed to know how to access information and services that would assist us in that journey.
LiveSmart Eldercare Guide is your SOLUTION.
