More and more of us are being faced with aging parents which will need to be in some sort of supervised living facility. The nicer ones can be pretty expensive and it wouldn’t be unusual to spend over $100k per year on care. That’s doable when the parent has financial resources, but that money doesn’t always last very long. When their own money runs out, it usually turns to the kids to start paying or move the parent to a cheaper, and usually worse, facility.
With the high cost of care, I would assume this could cause a lot of disagreement between the child and their spouse if the child wanted to keep the parent in the expensive facility. The cost is not trivial, so the spouse may balk at draining their own savings and retirement for their parent-in-law. This can be further compounded if the spouse and parent-in-law did not have a good relationship to begin with. There’s also the case where the parent did make any effort to save money in the first place, so their child’s spouse may resent that as well.
Have you had to deal with this situation or know someone who has? How did the child and their spouse resolve whether to spend the money or not for keeping the parent in a nice facility?
We haven’t; 3 of 4 parents passed before this became an issue. But all three were very clear that if we touched our money to end-life-care for them, they would claw their way out of the grave and start the zombie apocalypse or haunt our asses for eternity. If they were lucid the answer was still going to be no but at least we could try to talk them into letting us pay something towards them.
The remaining one is my mother. And since she hated me from birth I think I could pass on breaking my bank on her account.
That thread was part of the reason I was asking. In my circle of family members, there are some people that I would be much more willing to help out for long-term care than others. Some I would let live with me, some I would contribute money, and some I wouldn’t want to support at all. But I suspect my list is different from my wife’s. Fortunately, we haven’t had to deal with this issue yet, but I was just wondering how other people have resolved it.
I think the problem is easier to confront when the parent is a good, responsible person. It’s easier for the non-blood relative to help someone they like. But if the parent isn’t a nice person and has been irresponsible with money, the non-blood relative may not feel as generous to contribute towards their care. That may be true for the child as well, but often the child will feel a greater obligation to help just because of the parent-child relationship.
This isn’t necessarily the same thing, but my (overattached and boundary-ignoring and vaguely narcissistic) mother thinks that she’s going to live with me when she gets old and broke and needs elder-care, and my husband has continually insisted that it’s not ever going to happen.
In another decade or so, that’s going to be a reeeeeaaally awkward set of conversations.
We started working on that same issue with my wife’s Mom shortly after we returned from our honeymoon. The one she tried to invite herself along on. :eek:
Over the course of three decades she now accepts that she’s not ever going to live with us barring some planetary Armageddon.
Far better to sand that problem down over decades than try to derail it in just one crisis-laden afternoon.
In fairness, people of that era grew up with 3 or 4 generations of the whole extended family all living in the same small town. We all tend to expect when we’re old that things will work as they did when we were young. Sadly society changes a lot over the span of a single lifetime. And more and faster with each successive generation.
One of her older sisters did spend her final years that way. Being shuttled every couple months between 6 grown kids all living in the same zip code. When wife’s Mom started making those sorts of plaintive hints about how well her sister’s out years were going, we replied that Mom forgot to have her last 4 kids. And she forgot to live in one small town and only raise homebody daughters who also stayed in the same small town. Oops.
You’ve got to lay the groundwork to get the right outcome. That applied then to my wife’s Mom’s child-bearing and -rearing and it applies now to you managing your Mom’s expectations.
Lest you think we’re heartless beasts, we’ve moved her across the country to live near us and we get together often. We take care of many of her physical needs and provide advice and counsel. Plus LTC insurance covering her paid visiting day-helpers. Which will also cover assisted living or a nursing home if/when it comes to that.
We have, are, and will continue to invest money, and more importantly, time and love in the old gal. But not all day of every day inside our home.
I know a disabled elderly woman whose two grown children, who both live in widely separate parts of the country, both said she couldn’t live with them, although both of them said, in effect, “There’s a great senior apartment complex down the road. You can live there, and I’ll visit you every day and even pay your rent if you need help” but no, that wasn’t good enough. It was live with them or nothing, until she collapsed and wasn’t found for about a week :eek: and wound up in a nursing home.
I like this woman, but I’m wagering that between her militant atheism and her hatred of her now-deceased ex-husband (their father), she would not be the most fun person to live with, on top of her extensive medical needs. I don’t think she has any grandchildren.
Why would a child be obligated to pay for a parent’s medical bills, anyway?
As a poster on another board pointed out, there’s also a big difference between “Mom, what do you want for breakfast?” and having a Mom who doesn’t know what food is for any more.
Twenty-nine states still have filial responsibility laws on the books. They are mostly dormant, but there was a lot of coverage in 2012 when a court in Pennsylvania ruled that a son had to pay for his mom’s care in a nursing facility.
This is a really good point, thank you. I say this because I opened this thread thinking it didn’t apply to me, as my parents are comfortably off with assets that should be sufficient to see them out with a good standard of care (if and when they need it) regardless, and my wife gets on well with them anyway. But then I remembered my father-in-law and his new wife are not quite so well-off, with not (as) much in the way of retirement savings. Since I work in this field, I have had a couple of conversations with them about retirement planning, but I think they are of the view that it’s too late to do anything about that now (they’re just either side of age 60 currently). However, they take at least one expensive foreign holiday every year, have a nice car, and until recently owned a speedboat and a caravan. OK, none of these things were top of the range and in themselves won’t break the bank, but it seems to me they are prioritising having fun now over securing their future a bit more. I’m not about to tell them how to spend their money (they have earned it - I don’t think they’re doing it on credit) but it would play on my mind a bit should we need to support them financially in the future. Having said all that, I don’t see it causing bad feeling, unless they demanded to live with us (which I think is unlikely).