A significant number of older individuals in Tennessee add one or more of their children to their bank accounts to help them manage their finances. They often do this as joint owners with right of survivorship in order to have them help to pay the bills and to take care of other matters late in life. This can be an option that sounds very appealing. However, doing this is a major problem and can cause devastating financial consequences that are completely unintended.

When someone adds another person as a joint owner on the account, any judgments that the other person obtains against them, could lead to collection efforts against your bank account. Once the other person is an owner, they are an owner of your account for all purposes. For instance, if one of your children gets into a serious car accident and severely injures or kills someone else, but they have insufficient insurance coverage to pay for the damages, then the injured party could obtain a judgment against them. They could then execute against your account to pay the judgment.

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