Special Report: Your Taxes

Whistle-blowers’ tips are pouring in to the I.R.S. But cash awards aren’t pouring out.

Unless and until Congress renews all sorts of deductions, tax specialists warn, it will be hard for small businesses to plan for expansion.

Shortcuts: A Special Purchase to Curb Behavior Could, Just as Easily, Terrify a Pet

We thought we had solved the problem by installing a new door that opens by radio frequency emitted from the tags on our cats’ collars. The only problem was that the cats hated the noise the door made and refused to use it.

We hoped they’d get used to it.

But six months later, Archie and Lily still view it with the same petrified stare as they did in the beginning.

That made me wonder about other pet problems and the products that owners buy to solve them.

There’s a caveat. What works for one pet may prove disastrous for another: different pets, different temperaments and different owners. Nonetheless, it can be useful to hear what some animal behavior experts and longtime pet owners suggest — or don’t — and why.

After all, Americans spent $53.3 billion on pet products last year, more than $12 billion of that for supplies and over-the-counter medicine, according to the American Pet Products Association.

First, what about sprays that are supposed to stop your cat from scratching your furniture? I’ve bought several bottles of different brands and spritzed them on the arms of the living room chairs. The cats walk up, sniff and then proceed to shred the chair as usual.

“I haven’t had much luck with sprays,” said Stephen L. Zawistowski, a science adviser to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He suggested putting double-sided tape, aluminum foil or Bubble Wrap on the places the cats like to scratch, while offering them a scratching post nearby.

That strategy has worked for me. I put catnip on a flat, corrugated cardboard box, and the cats claw away. It is the Trader Joe’s Double Wide Cat Scratcher and costs about $7.

Other sprays that promise to get rid of urine smells rarely do. Almost everyone I spoke to, including a friend who is down to five cats from eight, said none of them seemed to truly work.

The idea behind all these products, such as the most common, Nature’s Miracle, is not only to dispel the unpleasant odor for humans, but to discourage the pets from urinating in the same spot again.

“I no longer buy any of them,” my friend said. “I mix together half vinegar and half water with three to four drops of Dawn liquid dishwashing detergent and use it.” It seems to work, she said, even though it sometimes makes her house smell like salad dressing.

Automatic litter boxes don’t seem to have a lot of fans. They work this way: Sometime after the cat has done its business, a rake runs through the litter and deposits the excrement into a bag.

Besides being expensive — $100 and up — Mr. Zawistowski said that if the automatic cleaner started while the cats were in the box, it could frighten them so much they would avoid it altogether. If you own multiple cats, one can jump in after the first and “you have to make sure it doesn’t operate while the second cat is in the box,” he said.

A cat behavior that most of us find rather distasteful is the inclination to drink from toilets. One solution is to lower the toilet seat, but with two teenage boys in the house, it might be easier to train the cats to shut the lid.

Some suggest buying drinking fountains, but Megan Lynch, a cat owner, reported, “Our cat was terrified of the sound it made and didn’t want to go near it. We kept it for a month or so to see if he’d warm up to it, but he continued to regard it as an alien being that we had inexplicably brought into our home.”

Cats may drink from toilet bowls because the water can be fresher and cooler than water that’s been sitting in a bowl all day, Mr. Zawistowski said. That’s why he suggested refilling the bowl several times a day, wiping it out each time with a paper towel and then giving it a good scrubbing every few days.

Now on to dogs. One common product — retractable leashes — provoked the ire of several experts.

Maria Shriver Returning to NBC as a ‘Special Anchor’

The announcement, made on the “Today” show on Tuesday morning, is a significant moment in Ms. Shriver’s move away from political life. Ms. Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family, was the first lady of California while her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was governor from 2003 to 2011. She and Mr. Schwarzenegger separated in 2011 after he admitted that he had fathered a child with a member of their household staff a decade earlier.

Until Mr. Schwarzenegger ran for governor, Ms. Shriver was a familiar face on NBC as a correspondent on the network newsmagazine “Dateline.” Her formal homecoming was foreshadowed last month when she contributed to NBC’s coverage of the selection of the new pope.

“Through her reports, her books, her events, her activism and the powerful social community that she has built, Maria Shriver has become a leading voice for empowering women and inspiring all of us to be architects of change in our lives,” said Pat Fili-Krushel, the NBCUniversal News Group chairwoman, in a statement on Tuesday. “We are delighted that Maria will play such a key role in our efforts to examine this important topic, and all of us at the NBC family are excited to welcome her home.”

In Ms. Shriver’s new role, she will not appear regularly on any one NBC program, but will be on a variety of them and will produce and anchor prime-time special reports. Her appearances will not be limited to NBC’s network news programs; they could also come on the cable channels MSNBC and CNBC and on the company’s sports shows. Her other title will be editor at large for women’s issues for the Web sites owned by NBC News, indicating that she will contribute to those as well.

Responding to questions via e-mail on Tuesday, Ms. Shriver said she worked with Ms. Fili-Krushel “and the NBC News team to create a new role that supported the work I’ve been doing and allowed me to take it all forward.”

NBC briefly partnered with Ms. Shriver in 2009 when she published a study titled “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything,” about the increase of women in the workplace and its effects. When the next such report is released next year, NBC will have “exclusive broadcast access” to it, the network said in a news release.

Ms. Shriver will remain in Los Angeles, and she said that she would not give up any of her outside work.

While the NBC positions are not full time, Ms. Shriver said, “knowing me and my love of reporting, I imagine it will fully occupy my mind.”

She added: “I see it as a partnership that will evolve over time and give me an ongoing outlet for many of the stories I want to tell. Like so many women, I’m trying to craft a life that allows me to do meaningful work and keep a focus on my family, which will always be my No. 1 job.”

Energy Special Section

BETTER GUIDANCE Engineers with the Lighting Science Group Corporation, Mark Oostdyk, right, and Ran Zhou, testing road lights.

Beyond the energy and cost savings, new types of lighting are now envisioned as ways to heal, soothe, invigorate or protect people.

Your Money: The Psychic Toll Paid in a Special Needs House

They put together a team of health, legal and financial experts who understand their family member’s condition. Then comes the estate plan and making sure they understand the eligibility rules for any state or federal benefits.

Checking these items off, however, as I did in a column last week, often proves to be the easier part of special needs planning. The harder part springs from two challenges that are ultimately rooted in emotion and behavior. It’s the psychological side, after all, that often plays a big role in just about every major financial decision.

The first is the question of where a special needs child or sibling should live. The second is not letting the stress of managing the affairs of a special needs family member contribute to the end of a marriage or other long-term romantic partnership.

When Alice Walther’s son was small and experiencing developmental delays, she and her husband took him to a major children’s hospital in the St. Louis area. A top doctor there told them that he was severely retarded. “He said to put him in a home, that it will ruin your family,” she recalled.

Her son Sean is now 43 and he never left his family’s home. He works part time at a library and pursues his passion for golf in his spare time, watching tournaments on television and maintaining a collection of scorecards from all over the world that is so large it takes up three bookshelves.

“He’s gotten so used to his own room and his own bathroom that he wouldn’t fit into a group home, quite honestly,” Ms. Walther said.

Mary Anne Ehlert, a financial planner in Lincolnshire, Ill., who specializes in advising people with family members who have special needs, has heard versions of this before. Her own late sister, who had cerebral palsy, lived with her parents as an adult before her parents finally decided to have her move out.

“You want to keep them totally in a bubble,” she said. “But it’s not in their best interest, and it’s not what they want. The problem is, if the parents die, then what?”

Ms. Walther’s other son Michael, a financial planner himself, has thought through every angle of his younger brother’s situation. He sees things as Ms. Ehlert does and thinks his brother should move out of his parents’ home sooner rather than later.

“Change is not something he does well with,” he said. “If we were to introduce it at the same time as the loss of a parent, that’s going to be an awful lot to swallow. ”Their parents have a plan for this. “The minute one of us goes, the two who are left will move into assisted living,” Ms. Walther said. Meanwhile, they’re building a financial war chest for that moment, in part by living in the same house they have been in for 45 years.

Once Sean’s other parent dies or is close to death, Mike plans to move his brother to the Chicago area where he lives. He’s made peace, more or less, with his parents’ decision about where Sean will do best in the meantime. “They’re going to win this argument while they’re alive,” he said. “And I’m going to win it when they’re dead.”

The elder Walthers will celebrate their 49th wedding anniversary next month, but not every couple is so lucky. Just how many couples never make it that long while caring for a family member with special needs is a bit uncertain, though. Families I’ve spoken to in the last two weeks have repeated a statistic that about 75 percent of parents with a special needs child end up getting divorced or splitting up.

There does not seem to be any data backing this up, but it’s clear why people may fear the financial consequences of a divorce in a family that is caring for a child or live-in relative with special needs.

Christopher Currin, a financial planner in Dallas who has an 18-year-old son with Down syndrome, knows of a family that ended up paying for three residences after a divorce. One is for the mother, one for the father and one is the house they used to share. They didn’t think their child with special needs could easily move back and forth from one residence to another, so the parents trade off moving back in.

Mr. Currin’s marriage is intact, but as someone who has counseled many families with special needs relatives, he understands why many partnerships do not. “One person in a couple with a child whose disability was unexpected may have difficulty accepting it,” he said. “A deeper wellspring of love may open up in one of them, while the other goes to that well and finds it empty.”

Some people also turn to a higher power when faced with a different sort of parenting challenge. “It can reinforce or cause someone to rediscover religious feelings,” he said. “But others might be cast into doubt that can lead to losing faith.”

The one advantage to frightening, if exaggerated, divorce data is that it might nudge people into some preventive marriage counseling. Or if not that, the persistent, low-grade fear of a failed partnership may at least encourage people to invest in some quality time as a couple.

Mr. Currin said he was particularly grateful for the respite programs that Methodist churches in his area have offered over the years. There, special needs children and their siblings can spend an evening with others like them while their parents get a few hours alone.

“We don’t ever use the D word,” said Matt Syverson, a financial planner in Overland Park, Kan. He and his wife have twins and a younger daughter, Lily, who has Down syndrome. “We don’t ever need to go there. We make the best with what we’ve been dealt, and with God’s help we keep getting through it.”

In fact, now that Lily is in kindergarten, the Syversons have decided to add another child to their family. In the spring, they hope to adopt a boy they’ve named Levi and bring him home from China. He has a severe heart ailment, and once he’s moved in, they will cross their fingers when the time comes for the surgery that will give him the best chance at a long life.

Your Money: Assuring the Care of a Family Member With Special Needs

But debates about the deserving and the undeserving and the proper level of budgets and taxes tend to gloss over the issue of disabled people — many of whom must hope that the programs they rely on are not cut, because they have no way to make up the difference.

There were 5.5 million nonelderly adults with disabilities whose health care was covered by Medicaid in 2009, according to a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation estimate using the most recent numbers available. And an estimated 6.9 million nonelderly disabled people receive Social Security payments under the Supplemental Security Income program, according to federal government figures.

For every one of those people, many of whom draw from multiple sources of government aid, there are often several family members helping to sort out the financial details of that relative’s care. They navigate a confounding thicket of tasks and rules. On one side, there is the bureaucracy that government program administrators may erect at any moment. On the other, there are specialized trust accounts and estate planning issues to consider. Even sophisticated investors and ace budgeters find themselves lost when encountering all of this for the first time.

There are few well-marked road maps for these people, as there are for those trying to invest their 401(k) money or refinance a mortgage. But there are a growing number of financial advisers and other professionals who themselves have special needs children or siblings. Because they’ve been there, they know the practical steps that most families need to take.

What follows is a primer from those practitioners on the basics that families should consider when helping someone with special needs.

YOU FIRST When Michael C. Walther II talks to families for the first time in his work as a financial planner in Deerfield, Ill., he often parrots the standard flight attendant announcement at the beginning of a trip: Put your oxygen mask on first before worrying about the family member next to you.

Mr. Walther, who has a brother with Asperger’s syndrome who lives with their parents, said he sometimes saw parents who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on therapies for their child and arrived in his office with no retirement savings at the age of 50. “That’s a loving thing,” he said. “But now you have another problem. There is nothing for you. That special needs kid is dependent on you guys, and now you can’t support yourself.”

THE TEAM Once you know what challenges family members face — and it can sometimes take years to understand what limitations they have and what kind of financial support they will need — it’s probably wise to resist the urge to hunker down and sort it all out yourself.

“Life is totally rearranged,” said Mary Anne Ehlert, a financial planner in Lincolnshire, Ill. Her late sister had cerebral palsy, and Ms. Ehlert also runs a service called Protected Tomorrows that advises families on the life planning tasks beyond the financial issues.

She hopes to one day have a large team of affiliated financial planners around the country who are experts on serving special needs families. In the meantime, there are networks of lawyers, including the Academy of Special Needs Planners and the Special Needs Alliance, with directories of members who can help with some of the tasks.

Your best source of advice and referrals to local experts may well be your fellow travelers, so be sure to seek out other families with relatives in similar situations to yours to see who has helped them with their planning.

THE TRUST One of the first tasks that many proactive families tackle is to set up a special needs trust, which holds assets that can help pay for a disabled person’s care and expenses without disqualifying them from certain government benefits that are means-tested.

Some families feel an urgency to do this for estate planning purposes, since they can direct proceeds of a life insurance policy to the trust. They may leave the trust empty until that point.

Others start filling it from Day 1, as they would a college savings plan, because they worry about the future of government benefits given the amount of government debt. “We’re in a hole, and I don’t know how long it will take to climb back out of the hole,” said Matt Syverson, a financial planner in Overland Park, Kan., whose 5-year old daughter has Down syndrome. “I don’t know if the benefits will be there or not. It would be nice if they were. I just can’t count on it.”

THE ESTATE PLAN Any trust account may involve other people who can act as administrators, so you’ll need to have frank conversations with them about what it would mean to be responsible for your family member’s care or money, or both.

Others will want to help in any number of ways, but their help may be counterproductive. Jerry Ruttenberg, who helps clients with life insurance and other financial planning at Firstrust Financial Resources in Philadelphia, faced this situation when his late father left $10,000 to his grandson Seth, who is brain-injured and receives government benefits that help pay for his expenses in the group home where he lives.

Mr. Ruttenberg spent many months going back and forth with various government agencies before someone was able to help him keep the inheritance from disqualifying his son from continued government assistance. “A dead person can’t unwind a mistake,” he said. “Part of doing planning is letting family members know what is going on.”

If you have family members with special needs, your estate plan needs a care plan, too. “We call it ‘Sean’s Care Guide,’ ” Mr. Walther said of the plan for his brother. “It can include foods. Caloric intake. That he likes to watch golf. Is the light on or off at bedtime? Here are their best friends and how to reach them. These are the kids that pick on him. Here are the medications, and here are the doctors who have not been successful in interacting with someone or don’t want to. This kind of stuff won’t be anywhere else, and you have to update it every now and then.”

THE BENEFITS A fair bit of the financial planning for adults with special needs tends to revolve around qualifying for and then preserving government benefits. But some families with reasonably high-functioning family members may not want to tap those benefits, or even make sure they are eligible.

Mr. Walther counts his parents in this camp, since they came of age at a time when Medicaid was for poor people. “They felt that we shouldn’t take that money out of other people’s pockets,” he said. One drawback, however, is that many government programs, like art classes or outreach services, may be available only to people who are eligible for Medicaid.

Mr. Ruttenberg has no such qualms about the fact that Medicaid covers his son, Seth. He likened the theoretical possibility of having to pay out of pocket for the expenses that the government covers to paying college tuition each year for the rest of his life. “Eventually, it would bankrupt me,” he said.

James M. Hayes, a lawyer in Binghamton, N.Y., who specializes in estate and other planning for people with special needs and has a developmentally disabled adult son, put it more bluntly.

“I’ve never felt like I was taking advantage of anything,” he said. “It’s my adult son. I’ve never really felt that people who have adult children like my son should have a burden that other people don’t have.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 5, 2012

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the city where James M. Hayes works. It is Binghamton, N.Y., not Binghampton.