So a little background:
My 70 year-old mother had a stroke in 2.5 years ago that has left her with a very limited short term memory. Even though she is relatively healthy physically, due to the memory issues, she struggles with day to day tasks, and gets very stressed out at almost anything. She also still hasn't come to grips with her mental state and gets frustrated due to not being able to do these normal tasks. Financially she should be set for the rest of her life. Between her pension, her portion of my father's pension, and social security, she is pulling in over $5,000/month. She also has around $1.2 million in various tax advantaged accounts. And she also has a paid off house and long term care insurance. I have already automated all of her monthly bill payments, including her credit card, so she has no reason to worry about missing or late payments. Her expenses are much lower than $5k per month. She's not a big spender, so besides the RMD's, I don't see her even touching the rest of her investment money.
My father passed away in November, so now my My sister and I have to start on the enormous task of consolidating all of her financial accounts. She turned 70 last April so we just finished withdrawing her first year of RMDs which turned into a colossal task. My mother has 7 retirement accounts at four different places. To add to this, my father had 4 retirement accounts at 3 different places. Due to the fact that my sister and I both have full time jobs, and my mother wants to head to Arizona to vacation with her brother for a couple of months, her lawyer is drawing up POAs for both my sister and I.
I plan on spending the next "who knows how long" moving these 11 accounts and consolidating them at Vanguard. I've come here for help on how to go about doing this. Do I start by opening her a traditional and roth account at Vanguard, and then call them to help move these accounts over? How does a POA work? Do I just fax it in to Vanguard and I then have the power to do all of this? Are there steps that I'm missing with the financial stuff or anything else (for those who have been in a similar situation)? My goal is to get everything at Vanguard and have her investments on cruise control with the RMDs automatically coming out of her account every year (or should it by monthly?). I don't want her to worry about bills, or stressing out about how much money she needs to withdraw every year. I just want her to relax and take it easy for the rest of her life. And I want to make sure I'm doing what's best for her. \
Any advice is appreciated. Thank you.