Yes. For financial stuff it’s actually pretty easy. But fewer and fewer businesses will accept trusteeships after a number of high profile lawsuits by beneficiaries who felt mistreated.
I & my wife were the trustees for my late MIL. So far so easy. But if not us, who would she hire? Many attorneys won’t take the job at any price. Neither will banks unless you’ve got megabucks. They’re happy to host ordinary folks’ trust accounts. But they’re not interested in acting as your trustee. Small Mom-n-Pop CPAs? Maybe.
The much harder job is all the other stuff. Need someone with a brain to accompany you to the doctor, take notes, and explain it all to you 3 more times later that day before you get it? Need a ride to a clothing store, but you can’t use Uber, etc., because you can’t read the screen on a phone well enough to operate their app? Or because although you’re a whiz with a smartphone, you need to also transport your 300lb power-chair that you need for mobility? When the chairs in your ancient dining room set get wobbly because the screws have all loosened, who will tighten them for you? When your PC gets old, who will help you select a new one, transfer your old data, and teach you how to operate this new-fangled Windows 11 when your old machine was Windows XP? etc.
And all the above assumes the basics of food, shelter, and basic housekeeping are handled because you’re already established in a decent reliable independent living facility while you’re still a fully capable, if slightly slow-moving, adult.
This, so much This. My three sibs all live out of state, so I was the guy to look after both Mom and Dad, especially Mom after Dad passed. It’s a damn good thing I was retired, because there’s no way I could have done all that @LSLGuy describes had I been working.
I’m not sure if this is a hijack, but I wonder what we all think each elderly person is entitled to in their final years. Upthread someone spoke of a 3-year stay in memory care, the first of which was funded through savings. As a society, what resources do we wish directed to individuals in such a situation? What level of care? Comfort? I honestly don’t know what I feel the best answer is.
I wonder what individuals who grow old alone could do differently to lessen the chances of that happening. You can be childless by choice, but that lessens the chances that you will have someone younger to advocate for you when you need it.
There are professional trustees out there. When my husband and I did our trust and wills a couple of years ago, our attorney steered us to someone who does this professionally. We had an interview and some meetings (on the clock) and now I feel much better prepared to face the future – especially if I go first, because my husband is helpless and hopeless dealing with financial things. This person is a fiduciary and has a fair amount of experience, and after the meetings understands our rather simple needs pretty well.
You can also wind up childless because your child(ren) died; or because you never found a suitable partner to raise children with and didn’t have the resources to do so alone. And even if you have a dozen living children there’s no guarantee that any of them will be willing and able to do the work needed for you, and to do it well.
And having children if you otherwise didn’t want them, for the sole reason that you hope they’ll take care of you when you’re old, is a recipe for disaster: for both you and the children.
What resources do we want directed? When you think about that question: think about it applying to you. Think about that even if you think you’ve got it covered. There’s no guarantee that will last.
Will they come change the lightbulbs? Will they come check that the lightbulbs need to be changed, when you’ve just been puzzling over why it’s so dark in that room now, or can’t remember who to call? Will they keep track of your meds for you? If they’ve hired somebody to deal with the meds and the lightbulbs, will they notice and step in on the inevitable days when that person doesn’t show up?
It may be possible, in some areas, to hire somebody to do all that; but for one I suspect it’s going to be really expensive, and for two, I think it’s going to be really hard to be sure you’re hiring somebody genuinely dependable, rather than somebody hoping to get control of the resources of a person who’s no longer capable of effectively objecting. (Occasionally, of course, that’s also a problem when it’s a child or grandchild doing the job.)
Please believe I’m not “blaming” the childless or suggesting having kids is the route to a happy long life.
I only suggest it is ONE way to try to increase the chances that there will be SOMEONE who gives a damn about you when you near death. If you don’t have kids, develop relations with younger relatives. Or develop younger friends. Try to save and plan for your dotage. Look into end of life societies and other sources of assistance.
Sure, some folk end up old and alone by no choice of their own. But others get there following numerous choices large and small.
I would prefer a bullet in the brain over 2 years in the nicest memory care facility. But I doubt most people would agree to scale up my personal preferences.
Thank you for articulating things so well! It all comes down to having at least one person whom the elderly person can trust. Since I don’t have any family and my friends are all my age or older, I’ll be at the mercy of strangers I hire.
I am childless by choice and am fortunate to have the means to have hired help in my later years. I have four nieces and a nephew and many younger friends but I have zero expectations that they will take charge for me. Not their job.
If something sudden happens, so be it. If I am going down the path of slow decline physically or mentally, my plan is a tank of nitrous oxide and a tight mask assuming that I have the courage.
When my father had dementia and my mom went into the hospital for surgery,
I was living 400 miles away. I called the social worker at the local senior center and asked her to send a well-recommended caregiver to my parents’ house to look after my dad. I sent the caregiver a check for $80 for one night’s stay. The next morning, I learned that my father hadn’t allowed her in his house. She never returned my check.
In the meantime, the hospital reported the situation to Adult Protective Services because my father couldn’t be left alone. I basically had to go there and manage things until my parents’ deaths two years later. But without me in the picture, their lives would have fallen apart.
One possibility to look at is participating in local church groups. If you are there now helping others out they may reciprocate later when you need it. And note that the churches most closely aligned with your own religious views may not be the ones who are more into helping other parishioners.
I would have loved to have children. But I’m gay. I looked into adoption, but we weren’t stable enough to qualify, fiscally or in terms of employment, and we couldn’t afford the up-front costs. We probably could as of last year, but we’ve come to accept being childless, and are in any case now in our 50s, a little too old to manage the eldercare we’re now doing, full-time jobs, and children (as well as not necessarily being fair on the children: it’s a bit much to hope that teens-to-twenties will manage elder care just as they’re launching their own lives).
I think the only solution with any hope of quality of life is family members of a younger generation, and that’s just not on the cards for some people. A few generations ago, with larger and often geographially closer families, there was more slack in the extended family for childless people. Now there isn’t, but nothing has stepped up to take its place.
It’s worth checking with your city’s or county’s Senior Affairs Department (or equivalent) to find out what services are available. This goes for botpeople who don’t have kids or those whose kids live too far away to provide hands-on help. Also, if you’re being discharged from a hospital and don’t have family or close friends to help, the discharge coordinator and hospital social worker can help put aftercare plans into place.
A buddy of mine’s mom died after being dropped from a Hoyer. And yeah, there are lousy old folks’ homes. But I’d wager the vast majority of old folk progress towards their deaths relatively uneventfully in relatively safe environments.
The issue of how much care and attention such a person should receive - and who should pay for it - remains. In my job, I encounter a great many CNAs. Suffice it to say the position is not well paid. These persons might be compassionate - I don’t know. But they do not trend towards the more highly educated end of the work force. So what do you expect of someone who is getting paid minimum wage for providing basic care for aged, infirm, and at times unpleasant people? I would have to imagine that for many employees, the job would become VERY draining over time.
I had long thought that senior care was a high profit business, but I recently had a discussion w/ a doctor who firmly believed otherwise.
The expensive facilities - what makes them expensive? And if it reflects the actual cost of providing services, do we want our society to fund that level of end-of-life care for everyone? For how long? I don’t, personally. Tho I guess I’d prefer it over the obscene amounts spent of the military.
Whether or not this is the thread for it, I do think it’s a valid and interesting question.
I’ll just offer this factoid … and then walk away in case it’s really a threadjack:
Raising a child is expensive. From the day your baby is born until the day they turn 18, your family will spend about $310,605 — or about $17,000 a year , according to a new Brookings Institution analysis of data from the U.S. Agriculture Department.
(October 2022)
And, obviously, that’s before we start talking about college.
Meaning: an argument could be made that long-term care insurance and a rather conservative investment approach – over that 18 year period – might be a better strategy, if “strategy,” in this regard, is the priority.
I like it! Instead of having you ungrateful brats, I coulda put that $ in a CD! Now shaddup and puree me some food and change my diaper!
My kids are in their 30s. Over the past 5-10 years we have noticed that they greatly appreciate that we have managed to maintain a decent level of physical and financial health. They have realized many of their cohort are facing the possibility of having to support and care for their parents. We like to be generous towards our kids, but we have told that that one reason we are not more so is our concern that we not be a burden on them.
For anyone who has had an aged parent slowly decline, I can’t imagine them wanting their kids to go through the same with them.
If you don’t want kids in the first place, then yes, saving for your decrepitudinous years is a better plan than having kids. But even if you do have kids, you should still be saving for those years. If you guilt your kids into caring for you in ways that really ought to be left to full-time professional elder care specialists because you chose not to plan ahead, they’re not going to have charitable feelings toward you.
And sowing discord among siblings. I’ve seen more than one case of the care of elderly parents defaulting to:
geographically closer
female
stay-at-home-parents
lower earning
Children and then the others wanting to supervise (aka second-guess) the care-giver’s efforts and spending.
And the caregiver feels resentful that the financially better off siblings taking three weeks off to stay in a pensione in Italy, but not wanting to spend that time giving the caregiver a break, who pretty much can’t take a vacation from the daily grind.
I see this in our future with my siblings as well.
