The cheapest home for sale right now in Santa Barbara is a 1bed/1bath 585 sqft trailer for $279k.
I have read this entire thread with great interest, because I am facing these questions for my wife and myself. We are 85 and 86 and all three kids are elsewhere. We are both fairly frail. A half mile walk is possible, but leaves us tired. We live in Montreal and our kids live in NYC, Boston, and Seattle. If we moved it would be to be near one of them, probably our daughter in NYC. We are both mentally competent, so far, although my wife’s short term memory is failing. But both her judgment and ability to cook wonderful meals are intact. She can still do the Thursday NYT crossword that I won’t even look at. Not to mention Fri, Sat, Sun.
Moving would be hell, but the kids would help. They visit us, but none is in a position to give us full-time case. If we stay here, I guess we would wind up in a some kind of long-term care facility provided by the province. If we move to near our daughter, she would certainly help, but not be a full-time caregiver. If I ever got to the point of not knowing them, I would not want to live. But I know of no way to implement that desire. On the other hand, if I were mentally sound, but incapacitated, I would want to continue. 'Tis a problem.
Whatever, we love our kids and have no doubt they love us (and, to our great joy, each other). We have zoomed with them nearly every week since the pandemic started and will be doing so in three hours.
It’s a two-way street. Our kids moved away as young adults. Very far away.
They got concerned about us living so far from them so a coordinated effort to move us to near one of them was made.(And if that one moves again, a promise to fund yet another move has been made.)
If the kids can move away, why can’t the parents???
The parents can move away. But like anything in life, there is a price to pay for doing so, and that is not having your kids there to support you when you need it. This works for kids who move away too.
I didn’t have kids. Although I have family in the area, they are consumed with their own lives. Not deliberately selfish, but doing what they need to do. Getting old without kids is a concern for me. At only 62, I have health issues that suggest that I won’t make it to the stage where, if I had someone to caretake me, I’d be okay. I am almost grateful for that now. I don’t want to be incompetent on my own and most nursing homes that I’d qualify for (state-run) scare the crap out of me.
Here’s to hoping I won’t meet my end in a horrible, lonely, neglected way.
My in-laws moved to a 55+ community, in an area where 55+ communities are as common as Starbucks in my neighborhood. The vast majority of residents in those places are in exactly the same situation (moving from somewhere far away). They developed a social circle, and had weekly get-togethers.
My father-in-law continued to “work” - finding causes to support, he actually testified as an expert witness in a court case, he taught part-time for a couple semesters. MIL actually did some freelance work involving a fair bit of travelling to pretty much every continent.
Then time caught up with them. The work dried up. Their health worsened. In hindsight, I can see now that FIL’s “next great idea” was no longer being talked about (he was always a dreamer, but it never went anywhere). People in their social circle were dying off and/or being “moved back home” by their adult children. And COVID shut everything down.
At the end, they had one pair of friends, whom they saw occasionally, and one or two others whom they spoke with on the phone. The one pair of friends is of a similar age; the wife is terminally ill and losing it, mentally; the husband said to us when we visited briefly last month “I now have more responsibilities than I have ever had, in my entire life”. In that greatly- diminished circle of 4 people: one has died, one has moved away, one is dying… last man standing indeed (and both his adult kids are estranged - WE are closer to that couple than their own kids). I’m depressing the hell out of myself just reading what I wrote.
No wonder that I find the idea of moving to such an area personally horrifying. I want people of all generations around me - whether my own family, or a community.
In terms of expecting the kids to drop everything and take care of you: I don’t get the sense that my in-laws “expected” anything - in fact, they fought like hell against pretty much any offered intervention.
But there’s also a sense of obligation, at least in any halfway functional family, to see that your parents are not suffering unduly. We had an example, about 9 years back, where an older couple’s adult daughter and son-in-law had purchased a condo for them to live in, with a mortgage. The parents were paying rent - which was being pocketed, versus paid toward the mortgage. It got foreclosed, and the parents had to move in a hurry.
Not long after that, my MIL/FIL were facing homelessness (bad decisions / bad luck), and that’s what led to our first major financial intervention: the condo purchase. As I put it at the time: “You don’t put your parents out on the street. You just FUCKING DON’T DO THAT!”.
I absolutely DO see the attraction in moving to a more congenial (for whatever your definition of “congenial” is) place in retirement. But there are many tradeoffs - and I would definitely err on the side of being “near” family. Not next door, not upstairs in a mother-in-law apartment, but within an hour or two.
As a counternote: I have a very close friend who grew up in the northeast, and eventually settled down in the mid-Atlantic for virtually all her career. She is in the process of retiring and moving to the Midwest - precisely because her brother and his adult kids live there. It’s not cheaper, the weather is arguably worse, but she is moving TOWARD a support network, not away.
In your specific case, moving to be near the kids would be especially difficult, if you needed a care facility: unless you have the means to pay for it yourself (and those are 60-120 thousand bucks a year). Dunno if you’d even be eligible for something Medicaid-funded if you did not have the means. At least if you were in a place in Montreal, that’s only a few hours drive from NY or Boston.
From what a friend told me, even moving to a different province (not an issue in your case) would be a challenge if you were in a facility; her father was in Ontario, and she was in Nova Scotia (I think), and there would have been some kind of 90-day wait before he could have gotten care in NS if she’d moved him. I think he passed away before she could sort all that out. We might have faced similar concerns if we’d gotten the in-laws into a place in Florida then wanted to move them to NJ.
That’s like a six hour drive. NY State may be a few hours away, but I have no idea what is that far up there.
I would normally say you can’t put a price on love…and yet here we are. Most people can’t afford a second condo. At least not without potentially negatively impacting their own or their children’s financial situation. Should my wife and I dip into our retirement fund or our children’s college money because my in-laws led a life of bad financial decisions?
That’s a very valid point.
In my family’s case, one person stayed near home, one was just 140 miles away (me), and the other two were 700+ miles away. Both parents remained in the family home until their deaths.
In my husband’s case, one sibling stayed near home, another moved 800 miles away, and the third (my husband) was 200ish miles away. And the parents moved a thousand miles away from the nearest of the adult kids.
Let’s say there’s one “kid”, who moves a thousand miles away. Logistically, that’s the exact same thing as the kid staying put while the parents move the thousand miles.
The former (kid moves, parents stay put) seems like the kid should expect to have more need to “go home” at least occasionally to help out, while the latter (parents move, kid stays put) is more the parents causing the situation to be more complicated.
That isn’t entirely rational, I fully admit.
Logistically, the parents moving is harder because they are leaving behind lifelong social support networks.
This!!
We were able to manage the condo purchase because prices were low at the time, and we had resources we were able to tap (home equity, AND we did take a 401k loan). And it’s been a struggle. When asked to help out with other expenses, like their need for a vehicle, I pretty much refused: we needed a new car ourselves, and couldn’t afford it. The parents absolutely DID make assumptions that “we” (all kids collectively) would help out when, for example, FIL needed a lot of dental work, or a new hearing aid, and a new mattress when they moved. We just basically ignored most of those requests, and they managed to find the money themselves.
My sister-in-law makes noise about worrying about her own retirement after MIL is settled - but that’s foolish, as she’s not that much younger than we are, and has a LOT less in retirement savings. BIL’s kids are both launched and self-supporting, but his wife has enough health issues that she had to retire early - and they had some financial reversals a while back from which they’re finally basically dug out from.
So arguably we’re the best off to help out, except we’re the closest to retirement, AND we have two adult special-needs kids who are a long way away from being self-supporting. And as I have said to my husband, “When do WE get to stay home and have someone else pay for our housing expenses?”. But I’m not bitter.
In Tampa Bay don 't worry about it.
If you join a senior community with golf, tennis, huge number of clubs and activities you will find others just like you for friends who will help you out, or at least listen to you. Publics will bring your groceries to your door and there are all kinds of organization to help with doctors appointments etc. The hospitals have social workers and their job is to make sure a person is set up when they leave or loose ends are tired up if they don’t leave.
Some people need loads of family and some people will not endure the long winter for another winter.
Don’t worry, be happy! 
Also, the reality is…we come into this world alone and we go out alone. Family doesn’t come with us when we die.
Welcome, @onwaldonpond!
Yeah, where the in-laws lived, there were many such services and features. Sadly, they did not take advantage of them in recent years, aside from the senior transit service when the family quit paying for them to have a car (MIL chose not to drive; FIL was… frightening).
And as a side note: as of today, we officially no longer own that condo. Woohoo!
To each his own.
Some people want to stay in a town where their family lived for generations, have 8 month winters. Some people had enough of it and want a new beginning. There is an awful lot of fun to be had with a new beginning. And there is an awful lot of fun to be had with 2 homes !
I don’t think the people in the forum have prepared well for retirement. The posts are sad, focusing on gloom and doom and end of the line issues. No optimism no spirit. I don’t think the people in this forum do anything…no money. Shame. It 's almost like I can see who they are on the train in the morning.
I think I will be moving on from this forum.
A lot of people on this forum are old. Casting for aging parent or looking for care for aging self can sap some of that spirit.
I think it’s completely rational - if my siblings and I had all moved a thousand miles away from our parents when we were young, we would have done so knowing that as they got older , we would be flying that thousand miles for various reasons and would have decided that moving was worth having to fly back , sometimes on short notice. It’s not as though we had never seen anyone get old when we were in our 20s - one of my grandparents lived until I was 37 and another 'till I was 25. .
But if we all stayed local , we would have likewise decided to stay local knowing that it would be easier to do whatever was needed from 15 or 45 minutes away , whether that’s hiring aides or paying bills and changing the high light bulbs. If my mother decided at 75 to move across the country , I’d be annoyed. Partly because she was complicating things but mostly because had I known she would someday move across the country , I might have made different decisions for myself.
We’ll likely be moving to another state not too many years after I retire. We’re fine with waiting a little to get some idea where our kids settle down first, but we own a house free and clear in a very expensive area. It’s important to be somewhere our trans kid feels comfortable visiting, but any place that doesn’t qualify there probably wouldn’t have worked for us anyway. If they choose opposite coasts, though, it’s not like we’re going to live in the middle of the country.
My wife and I already have plans to relocate (at least for 50.1% of our time) to a state with no state income taxes when I am ready for retirement. We will probably have a second home whereever the kid(s) with the most grandchildren will be located. I do not plan on relying on my children to care for me as I age. If I become infirmed, I will adjust my living habits/arrangements for such an event. Yes, I’m lucky like that.
I hear this a lot from soon-to-be retirees among friends, but I am not sure they understand the complete tax picture of where they think they want to retire - while some states are, indeed, friendly to retirees’ finances, they may get you on some other things, like property tax or sales tax. Here is one take on each state’s tax structure for retirees:
My home state of CA is, surprisingly, considered tax-friendly for retirees, and our brief exploration of moving to another state for retirement just does not seem to pencil-out compared to staying-put. Anyway, food for thought.
The old classic dodge for retirees is Vancouver, Washington on the Oregon border across from Portland. Washington levies no income tax, but has high sales tax. Oregon has high income tax, but no sales tax. So retirees settle in Vancouver and cross to Portland to shop.
Yeah, my daughter has a friend that lives there - I think she said they somehow can tell your zip code and apply the proper sales tax. Maybe when you use a credit card, like when you purchase something online - I dunno. I guess if you pay cash you can work it.
Weed legal in both too. Seems like an ideal retirement locale as long as you love never-ending strip malls (I feel this way about many cities…Phoenix appears to be one gigantic strip mall).