For years, economists have described the coming decades as the largest transfer of wealth in American history. Baby boomers hold more than half of all U.S. household wealth, and somewhere between $68 trillion and $84 trillion is expected to pass to their children over the next twenty years.

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A recent Washington Post analysis suggests those projections may be missing something important. When the Post examined the finances of thousands of seniors during the last decade of their lives, it found that the cost of care consumes much of what families hoped to leave behind. For a growing number of households, it consumes all of it. In some cases adult children are spending down their own savings to cover a parent's care.

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Most families do not see this coming, and the reason is simple. Almost everyone assumes Medicare will cover it.

Home management is a young industry, and that is mostly good news for homeowners. It means services like ours exist because families genuinely need them. But it also means there is no established playbook for choosing one. When you hire an electrician, you know what to check. When you hire a company to be your trusted point of contact for your entire home, the stakes are higher and the questions are less obvious.

So here they are. These are the ten questions we believe every family should ask before signing with any home management or concierge service, including ours. We have included our own answers, because if a company is not willing to answer these directly, that tells you something too.

Most adult children don't notice the shift until they're already deep in it.

It doesn't happen all at once. It's gradual. A phone call here, a repair that keeps getting pushed, a visit where something feels a little off. Before long you're managing your parent's home from a distance, fielding calls you didn't expect, and wondering how much you're actually missing between your visits.

The five signs below don't require a crisis to appear. They show up quietly, in the everyday details, and they're worth paying attention to before something bigger forces your hand.

Here is a situation that plays out more often than most families expect.

An adult child watches their parent struggle to keep up with the house. The lawn is overgrown. There is a repair that has been waiting three months. Groceries are hit or miss. So they do what feels like the responsible thing: they call a home care agency.

The agency sends someone wonderful. Kind, attentive, good with their parent. But six months later, the same adult child is still fielding calls about the broken gutter, still scheduling contractors, still making sure the utilities are paid. The house is still a source of constant low-grade stress, just with a caregiver added to the picture.

This is not a failure of home care. It is a mismatch of expectations. Home care and home management are two different things, and understanding the difference can save families significant time, money, and frustration.

And for busy professionals and families who have nothing to do with home care agencies at all, the case for home management is just as strong.

You already know how to manage your home. That is not the problem.

The problem is that managing your home takes time you do not have, attention you would rather spend elsewhere, and a level of follow-through that assumes your calendar has room for one more thing. It does not. Nobody's does.

If you have ever spent a Tuesday morning on hold with a plumber, rescheduled a contractor three times before the work actually got done, or realized mid-meeting that you forgot to call about the leak in the mudroom, you already understand the cost. It just does not show up on a bill anywhere.

That is what a WholeHome membership actually addresses.