Expense Tracker for People Supporting Aging Parents: A Guide

Caring for an aging parent doesn't show up as a single line item — it shows up as a Costco run for adult diapers, a $48 pharmacy auto-refill, and a $1,400 month at the assisted-living facility. The number that frames all of that, AARP's 2021 out-of-pocket study, is $7,242 a year on average — about 26% of the typical caregiver's income.^[] An expense tracker is the right tool for this situation specifically because elder-care spending is high-frequency, low-amount, and quietly recurring, which is exactly the pattern that defeats memory and spreadsheets.

The population doing this work is large and growing. AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving counted 63 million Americans providing unpaid care in 2025, a 45% increase in a decade, with 29% of caregivers — and 47% of those under 50 — also raising or supporting children at the same time.^[] One in four caregivers in the same study reported taking on debt for caregiving, which is to say the receipts are real and the year-end picture matters.

What actually needs to be tracked, by category

Most app round-ups treat elder-care as a single bucket. It isn't. The IRS, your siblings, and your own household budget all want to see different slices, so the tracker needs at least these tags:

• Medical out-of-pocket — co-pays, Rx, dental, eyeglasses, durable equipment, mileage to appointments. This is the bucket that feeds Schedule A.
• In-home aide and facility costs — the largest single line for many families. Genworth and CareScout's 2024 survey put the median U.S. cost of a home health aide at $77,792 a year for 44 hours a week.^[]
• Housing share — rent, mortgage assistance, ramps and grab-bars, accessibility modifications. AARP found housing was 52% of total caregiver out-of-pocket — most of it not deductible.^[]
• Recurring auto-pays under the parent's name — pharmacy refills, streaming services, two cell-phone lines, Costco, AARP membership. These are the ones that silently double-bill.
• Sibling reimbursements (in and out) — when one of you fronts the cost and the others pay back. Without a tag, this looks like income, which it is not.
• Transportation — rideshare, fuel, parking, a fraction of a vehicle if it was bought partly for this.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 38.2 million Americans provide unpaid eldercare and that on a day they're providing care, the average caregiver spends 3.9 hours doing it.^[] Most of those hours don't generate a receipt. Hours that do generate a receipt are what an expense tracker should catch — and the cost of a missed one is a deduction.

Why anomaly flags matter more than category averages

The interesting bug in elder-care finances isn't categories — it's recurring charges that nobody chose to keep. When you take over Mom's checking account during a hospitalization, you inherit her subscription stack: a magazine she stopped reading, a streaming bundle she pays for through her cable plan, the YMCA membership she hasn't used since the fall. A category dashboard won't surface those. An anomaly-and-recurring-subscription audit will.

The same matters at tax time. The IRS allows a deduction for the portion of medical expenses that exceeds 7.5% of your adjusted gross income under Publication 502, and a parent counts toward your medical-deduction tally only if the parent's gross income (excluding nontaxable Social Security) is under $5,200 in 2025 and you provide more than half of their support.^[] An anomaly flag that catches a $312 home-modification charge mid-year is the difference between bundling it into a deductible total and never seeing it again.

How MFFT's expense tracker fits this situation

MFFT's expense tracker is set up for category-level monthly spend with anomaly flags and a recurring-subscription audit, which is the exact stack a sandwich-generation caregiver needs. You can rename the default categories to caregiving-specific buckets, tag every transaction with a sibling code, and export the medical-only subset at year-end for the Schedule A pile. The point is that you can answer two specific questions on January 2nd: what was the medical total, and what does each sibling owe whom?

For the dual-goal budgeting side of the same situation — splitting envelopes between caregiver spending and your own household — there's a companion budgeting-app guide for sandwich caregivers that pairs naturally with the tracker on this page. The two answer different questions: the budgeting app protects your retirement contributions from drifting; the tracker produces the year-end totals the IRS and your siblings will want to see.

The calculation rendered below shows a real consequence of the 7.5%-of-AGI floor: a $90,000-AGI caregiver with the average $1,231 of elder-medical receipts needs at least $5,519 of additional household medical out-of-pocket before any of it becomes deductible. Without a tracker that sums both households, that breakeven is invisible — which is why many caregivers miss the deduction.

What I would track this month if my parent moved in tomorrow

If a parent moved into my house tomorrow, I would set up a separate checking account in my name for caregiver expenses, link it to the tracker, and tag every transaction with two fields: a category and a sibling code. I would set anomaly thresholds low for the first three months — anything over $50 that hadn't appeared in the prior month's pattern would surface, because the first quarter is when subscription bloat becomes visible. I would not commingle caregiver expenses with my household checking, even if I'm the only sibling involved, because the year-end Multiple Support Agreement math under Publication 502 is much cleaner when the receipts are all in one place.^[]

The most important habit isn't categorization — it's not double-counting. When a sibling reimburses $200, that's a transfer, not income, and it shouldn't reduce the caregiving total used for the qualifying-relative support test. A tracker that treats sibling transfers as a labeled category, separate from inflows and outflows, makes that line item invisible to the deduction math while still showing it on the household balance sheet. If the only thing you change is moving caregiver expenses to a tagged channel, the receipts you keep this year will be worth more at tax time than the ones from last year.