An estate plan quietly assumes the wealth-holder stays competent until the moment of death. Reality is a long, gradual decline, and financial judgment is often the first cognitive faculty to erode — years before any diagnosis. Through that window the wealth-creator becomes the single largest vulnerability in their own financial fortress: still legally in control, still able to sign, but progressively less able to detect a bad actor. Elder financial exploitation is not an edge case to acknowledge and move past. It drains tens of billions of dollars a year, and the larger your visible balance sheet, the closer to a near-certainty it is to be engineered against.