Protecting your elderly parents' assets: a mini-interview with an expert

If you read WalletPop regularly, you may have read about the sandwich generationfairly recently -- or maybe you've heard about it elsewhere. It's not exactly a phrase we coined. Either way, you know who they are -- the people who generally still have kids who depend on them, and parents who are getting along in years and depend heavily on their kids. They're in the middle, an independent generation between two sets of dependents.

As you know if you're in this group, the problems can be pretty overwhelming, and often it's harder to help your parents. You know that if your kid loses his summer job or has some trouble with their college application, you'll get through that. Your parents' problems are more complicated, of course; if things go wrong for them, they have more to lose. Because of that, when your parents are in their golden years, it often means that con artists are after their gold.