Dementia Decoded

What happens when a real-life financial heist unfolds inside your own family—at the expense of someone you love? In this jaw-dropping episode, we sit down with technology and finance veteran Charles "Chip" Wallace, author of The Caregiver's Game: Unraveling Financial Deceit in the Shadows of Dementia. Chip shares the terrifying true story of how an in-home caregiver used pandemic isolation and his mother’s cognitive decline to execute a systematic, multi-million dollar theft right under the nos

What happens when living alone isn’t safe anymore, but moving into a facility is off the table? In this episode, Dan Deak, founder and CEO of Home Halo, joins us to share how his mother’s unexpected fall inspired a dignity-first, non-medical in-home care model. Navigating care for an aging parent who prizes their independence is one of the toughest challenges family caregivers face. Most agencies impose rigid shift minimums and high turnover, making parents feel institutionalized in their own l

Family Dynamics + Downsizing: Surviving the Legal and Emotional Estate Minefield Dementia care is hard enough. But when you add a house full of 47 years of physical belongings, a vague estate plan, and mismatched sibling dynamics, a difficult transition can instantly turn into a family crisis. In this week's episode of Dementia Decoded, I sit down with Heather Nickerson, a former CIA intelligence analyst and the co-founder/CEO of Artifcts.com. Heather’s entire career pivoted from national secu

When managing an Alzheimer’s or dementia journey, we meticulously audit medications, medical files, and care schedules. But how much time do we spend auditing the physical space where all that care happens? In this episode, I sit down with veteran architect Martin Kimmel, principal and co-founder of Kimmel Architecture, to pull back the curtain on how geriatric environments are engineered. The hard truth is that physical architecture is never neutral—it is either a proactive tool that supports

When a fierce, independent parent develops dementia, the traditional support systems treat the journey like a jigsaw puzzle with a missing box top. They tell you to have "caring conversations" or wait for a DMV intervention—passive strategies that fail miserably in the trenches of real-world caregiving. In this episode of Dementia Decoded, I sit down with psychologist, member of the International Memoir Writers Association, and author Dr. Sarah Church Vosburg to unpack the unflinching reality o

Are you trapped in a grueling cycle of caregiving firefighting, constantly waiting for the next emergency to force your hand? In this episode of Dementia Decoded, we are dismantling one of the heaviest burdens a family caregiver carries: the silent promise to \"never put a loved one in a home.\" Host Jen Fink opens up about the messy reality of late 2016 when her father was hospitalized and moving her mom—who was navigating advanced vascular dementia—into her own home was a bad option for ever