My mother-in-law will be retiring at the end of the year. She divorced my wife’s father 23 years ago and has remained single since. She’s somewhat set in her ways and impatient about when things are just so. (aka: she can be a pain in the ass sometimes). She currently lives roughly 500 miles away.
I get credit for being the sperm donor & provider for her grandchildren but after that I’m pretty useless. My wife & her have a strained, albeit slowly improving, relationship after my wife was used for years as the ping-pong ball in the post-divorce “Let’s get even with my Ex” games. The scars from that run deeply.
Her health is rapidly deteriorating, she’s on multple daily drugs for joint, heart, & other circulatory issues. She’s becoming prone to falls & is almost unable to climb stairs anymore. My wife is convinced, given family history, that she won’t live more than five more years.
The whole “moving in” thing started with her idea that she wanted to move to Denver upon retirement - to be close to her only grandkids (my wife is an only child). Frankly, if it weren’t for the grandchildren, I’m not sure she’d move here. She’s also becoming unable to navigate her three-floor townhouse she currently owns.
An assisted living center nearby would be good but, frankly, we can’t afford it nor can she.
Her initial thought was to spend about $100K for a single-floor, walk-in-level condo in the area. Unfortunatly, $100K won’t buy that in Denver - at least not to the quality & location iwith which she’d be satisfied.
My worry is that her rapid detoriation will start to sap more and more of my wife’s time, with her at her mother’s place to do more and more tasks. The solution we came up with was to have her move in with us. That way we’d have her close to make the increasing care easier and less time consuming & my kids would have some normalcy rather than constantly being shuttled to and from Grandma’s all the time. (I grew up with an invalid grandmother - my father spent weekly time away from his family to spend time with his mother. His brother was live-in-care for the roughly twenty years she was bedridden until her death.)
Our house is too small for her to live-in permantly so the idea is to sell our place, taking the roughly $30K equity with her $100K and buy (perhaps build) a new house with another 1000 square feet or so. With luck, she’d have either an oversized bedroom & bath of her own or perhaps a bedroom, bath & nearby “sitting room” of her own. I would continue to work & pay the remainder of the mortgage (hopefully close to today’s payment) & bills like I do today. Finding and outright “mother-in-law apartment” would be ideal but because of city zoning restrictions, they’re really rare.
So the questions are, especially for those who live with your parents or in-laws:
What should the ground rules be?
If she kicks in for the down-payment, should she pay additional monthly for food and/or additional utilities? (She should receive a pretty healthy pension check.)
How can I keep from killing her?
What else?