Is 65 the new 50? I'd like to think so.

I haven't reached that milestone age, but it's not decades off either. Although we may have elderly parents, most of us in that younger demographic can't envision not using our own car for transportation, not taking the stairs to the office in the loft of our home or not personally depositing and withdrawing our hard-earned money at the neighborhood bank.

But reality is, by the time we reach 65, one out of eight of us will have Alzheimer's disease, according to 2010 data from the Alzheimer's Association. That translates to 5.1 million Americans living today with Alzheimer's disease. Rates increase with age. Still more sobering is the fact that 200,000 Americans who have not yet celebrated their 65th birthday already have the diagnosis.

It should be a wake-up call that many of us will not be doing our own banking in our seventh and eighth decade of life. We may not even be able to live alone or take care of our basic needs. Have you thought about who will make decisions on your behalf if you are unable to do so? Do you want your son who has declared bankruptcy twice to be the one? Or what will you do if you have no children or you outlive them?

Magistrate Phillip Houk thinks about those decisions every day. He oversees guardianship cases in Allen Superior Court. About 400 times a year, he makes rulings to approve or disapprove the appointment of specific people to serve as guardians for incapacitated adults.

“I also handle cases for administrations of estates and issues related to trusts and administration of trusts, but 50 percent of my time is devoted to guardianship cases,” Houk said at a recent community forum on guardianship sponsored by the Volunteer Lawyer Program of Northeast Indiana and by Easter Seals Arc.

The large number of older adults bearing down upon society forces us to become educated on the subject of guardianship. When Houk asked attendees what words come to mind when they think of guardianship, answers included: headache, difficult, costly, red tape, complex and responsibility.

“I prefer to call the red tape ‘due process.' When you ask to be appointed guardian, that's pretty significant,” Houk said. “Society was built on freedom, but you're coming to court and saying, ‘Take that person's freedom away,' so there's good reason for the red tape.”

A petition for guardianship over someone is done in cases in which there is proof and documentation of the person's incapacitation. In some cases, as with Alzheimer's, the person is older, but guardianship is also a need for many people with lifetime disabilities, such as a child born with severe intellectual disabilities and those with traumatic brain injuries.

A significant concern is that, in many cases, middle-age children with developmental disabilities have parents in their 70s and 80s who haven't planned who will be the decision-maker for their child after the parents' death or incapacitation.

New privacy laws also have an impact.

Although special-education students can remain in school through age 21, at age 18 they are considered emancipated unless the parent petitions for legal guardianship, said forum speaker Nathan Williams with Shambaugh, Kast, Beck and Williams law firm.

In pre-HIPAA privacy rules days, parents of adult children who needed medical care could often make those decisions without legal documentation they were a guardian. Today, just because you have for 17 years made health care decisions for your child, you cannot continue doing so when the child reaches 18, regardless if he or she has disabilities, unless there is legal documentation allowing you to do so.

One alternative to court-appointed guardianship, which in most cases grants broad and general authority, is power of attorney, Williams said. Specific powers of attorney such as health care or financial can be chosen by the individual in need of oversight.

Deciding what way to go — court-appointed guardianship or power of attorney — depends on the level of incapacity of the individual, Williams said. With a power of attorney, the individual may put into documents the specifics of the powers granted. Outside those parameters, the power of attorney has no authority.

“With power of attorney, the (adult) child is appointing people to do these various things. There is less red tape with power of attorney. You are not going to court,” Williams said. On the other hand, “When you are appointing a health care representative or someone as power of attorney, you are giving them a lot of authority. Sometimes someone acting as power of attorney is misusing that authority.”

With guardianship, the court appoints an attorney who serves as the temporary guardian ad litem (GAL). The GAL, independently of all other interested parties, checks out the potential guardian to ensure that person has the client's best interests at heart, explained attorney Catherine Christoff.

Individuals and families would like to think caregivers, particularly in institutional settings, are always acting on behalf of them. But the recent case of Earnest Beal, the administrator of group home provider Your Friends and Neighbors who was found guilty of theft of money from a client's trust fund, reveals that is not always the case.

A regional task force has been formed to look at the need for volunteer guardians for people who have no family or who are estranged from family, said Sue Christman, a member of the Allen County-Northeast Indiana Guardianship Council, which includes nearly 40 agencies, including her employer, Easter Seals Arc.

Although hosting community guardianship forums is helping educate and recruit appropriate volunteer guardians, “We have not seen relatives come out of the woodwork,” said Christman, of Easter Seals Arc.

“A lot of our people from the developmental disability world were ‘dumped' (from institutional settings), for lack of a better word,” she said. “No one wants to come out of the woodwork,” and take guardianship responsibilities.

Julie Cameron, a longtime professional guardian, admits that in most cases, more challenges exist when serving as a guardian for someone in a group home or nursing home than for the individual living in the family home.

But “there's no feeling like it,” she said, “to assist someone who has incapacity and who otherwise might make a bad decision and who might not be with us if someone didn't step up to take the strikes. This is very serious business, but it is very rewarding.”