Click buttons for the Answers 6.  You can have a conservator or guardian appointed over you for the rest of your life and you may not even know this is happening? How can that be? In the first chapter of THE RETIREMENT NIGHTMARE, I give an example of this egregious fact drawn from the pages of The Los Angeles Times (November 1997).  Glen Hawkins, 89, had bicycled two miles from his Orange County home in Leisure World, California, to confer with his investment counselor.  Once there, he was told that the $380,000 in his account was no longer his to control.  A professional conservator had been assigned to manage his financial and personal affairs.  As Mr. Hawkins soon learned, he already owed almost $1,200 in conservator and attorney fees.  How could this be?  A social worker at Glen Hawkins' retirement community had filed a petition for an emergency conservatorship over Mr. Hawkins, claiming that he was too ill to attend the required hearing and too addled to understand the legal proceeding. Glen Hawkins had harmed no one, and he clearly was not a danger to himself.  He had planned to live out the rest of his golden years in his Leisure World condominium.  Unfortunately, his wish to be left alone had led him into dangerous new territory--territory that is made unsafe by the legal reality that each state in America feels free to intrude into the lives of its elderly in ways that would be unthinkable if the objects of its intrusion were young.