Having watched or had to go through it now 4 times with close family members, this is not something you want to cheap out on.
Hire an attorney and get it done the correct way--especially if:
1. You may have to move her our of state
2. You have to conduct business for her in another state
3 Deal with SS or Medicare
4. Open, close, change or update bank accounts or utility accounts.
In addition:
if there are investment assets then immediately, now, go open an umbrella account at Fidelity, Schwab, or Vanguard. Give them POA to demand all assets elsewhere be moved into this umbrella account. This is common among financial institutions. You may be sent a document to sign in a few instances but Fidelity etc will coordinate everything.
A disaster story: Dad had bought a few shares of ATT 20 years earlier, just as ATT was broken up. He eventually held small fractional shares in all the prior components of ATT - Western Electric Labs, SW Bell, PacBell, etc and also had subscribed to their various dividend re-investment plans ... all of this in the form of paper stock certificates that had been mailed to him quarterly as dividends were declared. He didn't have a brokerage account. The fractional divident-reinvestment stock certificates were an incomprehensible jumble by the time he asked me to help him sort things out.
I got a Fidelity account opened and took in all the stock certificates I could find. Fidelity tracked down what was missing and got everything on one monthly consolidated statement, data that had occupied some large file cabinets in Dad's study. One asset he was sure he owned but couldn't find documentation for was the cell phone division that had been spun off from PacBell. As a tech-bubble stock it had then grown in value far faster than all the other phone stuff. I finally found enough documentation to establish ownership and thought the problem was solved.
Then - Dad died in Y2K just as the market was crashing. Per his instructions I sold everything the following day, so avoided going down with the sinking ship. Except - That PacBell cell phone system spinoff had been acquired by Vodaphone of the UK and they didn't accept my Trustee papers as authority to carry out the sell orders I sent them. I watched this new Vodaphone investment crash a few tens of thousands of $ from its stratospheric high price while I was helpless to sell it, they ignored or discarded all the correspondence I sent them. Finally Vodaphone's sales agent told me they needed to hear my father in his own voice order the sale, by phone. i said he's dead, the helpful agent said that doesn't matter just call back tomorrow. Uh ok. ... That worked. Moral of the story - You need a brokerage to front for you in safeguarding and eventually distributing investment assets. Don't try to manage that aspect alone.
