About · the desk
Who keeps this ledger, and why
Who Pays for Mom is published by OwnersFirm, a St. Louis company that builds reference desks for families in this metro. This one is written for a single reader at a single moment: the daughter who does almost everything for her mother and pays for most of it, awake after a group text with siblings who will not agree on money or on who does what.
Why it exists
Search for "siblings won't help with elderly parent" and you will find a wall of pages that either sell you something in the second paragraph or tell you to communicate better. Neither helps at 2am. This desk was built to be found by that search and to be useful to the person who ran it: a fair-minded older cousin who has refereed this before, takes your side on the labor, stays neutral on the people, and turns every grievance into a line item that can be assigned, split, paid for, or declined on the record.
How it is paid for
One slot on this site is paid, and it is labelled every time it appears. New Plan Care, an independently owned non-medical in-home care company based in Chesterfield, Missouri, is a client of OwnersFirm and pays for that placement. It was not ranked against anything, because nothing on this site ranks anything. The articles are not for sale, no company other than New Plan Care appears in a paid capacity, and the only form on the site sends a name, a phone number and a town to New Plan Care so someone can call back about hours. It sends nothing else, to nobody else. Call (314) 405-0887 if you would rather skip the form.
The rules every entry follows
- Every fact links to its public source. Government pages, statutes, and major nonprofits, in the source's own numbers and year. The sources page lists each one with the date it was checked.
- No prices. New Plan Care does not publish an hourly rate, and neither does this site. Ask by phone.
- No reviews, no ratings, no testimonials, no invented families. The daughter in Ballwin, the brother in Dallas and the sister in Kirkwood are the shape of the problem, not people.
- No medical advice. Help at home is non-medical. Every entry says which questions go to the physician.
- No legal advice. Every entry that touches a power of attorney, a contract or a court says where the lawyer comes in. None of them explain how to sue a sibling.
- No comparisons. No facility, hospital, hospice or company is criticized here, and no company is called better than another.
- Desk byline only. There is no clinician on this site and no named human author, on purpose.
The ledger
Every entry carries a two-column table, who does what and what it costs, drawn like the household ledgers this site is named for, with blanks where a family still owes itself an answer. Every entry ends with the same one-page family meeting agenda, adapted from the Family Caregiver Alliance, which you can download as plain text. Print it. Send it a week ahead. Let someone else chair.
Corrections
Public pages move. If a linked source has changed since the date shown on the sources page, the date tells you what this desk saw and when. Nothing here is updated by a machine; a person reads the source, and the date is the day they did.