🚩 "Does this exist?" — forced-allowance / spendthrift protection for an at-risk relative
Pain point
Grandma burned through a multimillion-dollar estate; OP explicitly asks whether a *service* exists to dole out a monthly allowance. An advisor in-thread describes a client who inherited ~$2M and "immediately started spending — vacations, new kitchen, new car," and was powerless to stop it. Current answers are workarounds: annuities, or a law firm's legal secretary manually paying bills.
Signal
Low volume (10 upvotes) but **highest-value signal type** — a literal "does X exist?" post, confirmed by a professional saying he can't solve it and by a "my friend's firm does this manually" answer. Manual-labor workarounds at law firms = unpriced, unproductized demand. Also adjacent to the self-control theme in [#2](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/1x4ip6n/i_have_90k_not_sure_what_to_do_with_it/).
Opportunity
A "**self-imposed trustee**" product — custodial account + debit card that releases a fixed monthly allowance, with withdrawal requests requiring a designated co-signer and a 72-hour cooldown. Two markets: (a) aging parents with early cognitive decline, (b) voluntary self-binding for lottery/inheritance/settlement recipients. Think True Link Financial (elder-fraud cards) extended to *spending discipline* and bundled with a cheap digital spendthrift trust. **Hard** — custody, licensing, fiduciary liability, family-conflict edge cases — but defensible and high-LTV; the elder-care angle has wealthy, motivated buyers (adult children).
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