Lions have long dreamed of having mom still around after retirement.

  The internet abounds in horror stories of old people eventually making a mistake & surrendering all their money to someone posing as a federal agent.  The odds eventually stack up that you'll make a mistake & the only solution seems to be not revealing your wealth.

It takes a lot of effort to pull off a scam like this, so they needed prior knowledge of who has a lot of money. 

Lions believe the most likely scams are going to be parents requesting access to an account to manage it, parents requesting money in a real estate exchange, someone requesting an account number for a wire transfer.  By age 60, these requests have come so many times, you're no longer going to ponder if they're real.  

Most likely, the 1st time lions provided anyone access to an account would be the last time & the money would instantly all be gone.  The odds of falling for a scam increase if you routinely delegate finances to someone else or if you've received many legitimate requests to access the account.  Lions didn't even ponder if the last requests were legit but the plan is just not to delegate the account to anyone.  

When you're delegating finances to someone else, it's mathematically certain you'll eventually get a request for the password because they forgot it, you'll forget to practice diligence that 1 time, & then the money will be gone.

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Lions believe if the parents offered their half of the property for less than the cost of developing their own half, the best decision would be to buy their half.  The break even point is probably $200k nowadays.  Then, as non ideal as the house would be, lions could build a purpose built music room/shop separately.  The music room could be built more cheaply than a house.