What do childless old people do when they decline in health?

In My Humble Opinion
81

I see something similar happening with my siblings too - the sister who will end up being the caretaker is geographically closer, in that she and my mother live in the same house but she is neither lower-earning nor was she a SAHP. In my case, however, the discord will be entirely my mother’s fault - her only asset was a house which is currently worth over a million dollars. Which was worth over $700K when she sold it to my sister a few years ago - for $150K . The other three of us are probably not going to go out of our way to give caretaker sister a break.

* My sister did not manipulate or otherwise take advantage of my mother. In fact, she didn’t even know why my mother set that price until I told her - it was because my grandfather set the price at $150K when he sold it to her in 1993. Which is a kind of nuttiness but it’s unrelated to either age or competency.

82

Oh yeah, discord is guaranteed, the specifics are all over the map.

I did spend a couple of months with my parents after one of them had a health scare. I would sarcastically refer to my two siblings who hadn’t seen my parents in years as my “Management Team” and they didn’t get the sarcasm at all. To them I was and should have been glad for the advice and correction from my smarter and richer siblings. They were literally telling me from a thousand miles away how I could clean up shit better.

83

I would suggest that waiting until your home is no longer an option is waiting too long. We were still managing to take care of our home for the most part, but reached the realization that at some point stairs were going to become a problem (maintenance, too) and we had no relatives living in that city or anywhere near it. So at age 75, we sold the house at the top of the market, banked the money, and relocated to where we DO have family (not that we should need any major assistance from them). We now live in a very comfortable apartment in a retirement community, with all our “stuff”, come and go as we like, and let others clean the place and do all the maintenance/repairs. We can opt in for meals or not, as we please, get steady exercise through in-house programs, etc.

84

You, Sir, are doing it right. I salute your wisdom to move before your + your wife’s condition was a crisis, not after.


Aside, there are many good books on this topic. Most have a title akin to “solo aging”. Which are strictly meant for singles without kids, but are still very much applicable to couples without kids, or at least without kids they can rely on.

My wife mentioned upthread was a banking attorney. As such we dealt with lots of cases of adult children stealing the aged parents’ money, drugs and, on occasion, lives. She also did estate planning, so had these kinds of conversations with many, many aging singles & couples.

Her saying:

Having kids is no guarantee they’ll take care of you, much less good care. But not having kids (as we didn’t) absolutely positively guarantees they can’t / won’t be there for you.


After she died I married a woman with two wonderful 30-somethings I've known since they were kids. With any luck I'll have positioned myself to get the benefit of some help & advice in my / her eventual decrepitude. Not looking for a caregiver, just an occasional helping hand / sounding board. Hope I've managed my karma points adequately; we shall see.
85

True. My mother in law spent a few weeks in a rehab facility on several occasions (after 2 hip replacements, and when she was initially very debilitated due to multiple myeloma). The post I was responding to was (I gathered) more of the longer-term assisted living, where Medicaid chips in.

86

That’ll actually come back to bite the sister when she goes to sell the house. Her basis in the place will be just 150K - meaning she’ll get hit with a hefty capital gains tax bill. If mother had left it to her in her will, the basis would have been the value at the time of mother’s death. The taxes would still be less than the difference in purchase price would have been, but it’s something she’ll need to be aware of.

My youngest brother wound up being the “caregiver” for our mother, as he was the only one who stayed in our home town (and in fact lived just 3-4 miles away). Not that Mom needed any real “hands-on” care or anything, but he was the one to be around to help her to doctor’s appointments etc. during her last couple years. The only “break” he got was that the parents had loaned him the down payment for his house, and they asked him to consider that as his executor fee when settling Mom’s estate.

Brother #2 threw a tantrum about that, but that’s another can of worms. I made it clear I was not going to support him on any such bullshit, and he shut up realizing it would be 3 against 1 in any such legal dealings.

This is kind of where I am, with the in-laws. There’s no direct “guilting” going on - in fact the parents are fighting tooth and nail against accepting ANY assistance even though they desperately need it. And they have absolutely no assets to fund any kind of care whatsoever. None of the adult kids are in a position to provide any hands-on care, for a number of reasons, nor are any of us in a position to fund their nursing home care.

I’m a titch resentful about the whole situation. I love them, and wish them well, but we also have two adult special-needs offspring who require help (and will not be able to help us, when the time comes). I keep wondering when I get to stay home and have someone else pay my living expenses.

87

We’ve done some looking into this for the in-laws, as it could definitely impact us.

If they are in a Medicaid-funded program, then you’re off the hook.

Anything else, and in theory you could be. I don’t know how often it’s enforced, and whether it truly is limited to a situation in which the adult child signs something accepting responsibility.

88

Perhaps. You’re right the Mom did a dumb thing.

But the capital tax exclusion for residences is $250K if single or $500K if filing jointly. If @doreen’s sister lived in the house and then sold it, only gains in excess of those numbers would be taxable.

89

I thought that there was no tax on inheritance up to a certain amount.

90

Actually not as dumb as it seems , at least not for the tax reasons. My sister does live in the house (two apartments and she never left) , my mother outlived her money ( due to other dumb decisions) and needed to get money somehow and it’s unlikely that my sister will ever sell the house. When her son inherits it , the basis will be the value at the time of my sister’s death.

The dumbness really is limited to the discord resulting from my mother giving one child a gift of over half a million dollars while giving/leaving nothing to the other three. Which so far has been limited to not helping caretaker sister and not listening to complaints about her, but I’ll probably be the only one speaking to that sister after my mother’s death.

91

It’s not an inheritance tax, it’s a capital gains tax. If someone inherits a house today and sells it next week, no profit so no tax. But my sister didn’t inherit it , she bought it and would have to pay tax on the profit if she sells.

92

I don’t see the transfer of the house as necessarily a bad thing. I know someone who was in a similar situation. She provided 24/7, in-house care for her mom in her last years. The amount of care mom needed meant she couldn’t work since she couldn’t be away for any significant amount of time. The siblings told her not to worry about her financial future, that the house would go to her, etc. But after mom died, one of the siblings tried to get control of the house. With nothing in writing, it was a multi-year, expensive legal hassle to get everything straightened out. If your sister really will be providing 24/7 care that allows mom to stay in the house until the end, then getting the house is not necessarily out of line. That end of life care is very time consuming and stressful. The caregiver may be not be able to do much else during that time. Getting compensated with the house can help make up for that sacrifice. But transferring the house now probably wasn’t the best idea since it’s now the sister’s house and she can do whatever she wants with it. If she decides to sell it tomorrow, then there’s not much anyone can do. It would have been better to put the house in a trust or something which could have stipulations about what could be done with it.

Along those lines, anyone who is in a similar situation should at least get things in writing. If the siblings agree that one sibling will get a greater share of the inheritance for providing primary care for the parent, write it down. Have an actual agreement written up. If the matters are discussed over email and text, save those in a permanent location. Don’t count on oral agreements standing up. When large sums of money are involved, integrity goes out the window. Even if the siblings can be trusted, there’s always in-laws or other circumstances which can foul up the plans.

93

You are correct that in that situation it might not be out of line. But there are different levels of caretaking - my sister isn’t changing my mother’s diapers or bathing her and she can go on vacation whenever she wants to. Which means it rankles when someone else is asked to take my mother to the bank or to go coat shopping or give her a ride to an event or when my mother complains about my sister- there’s very much an attitude of “I didn’t get the $500K gift , why can’t you take her to the bank on Saturday”?

94

You’re probably right, but I suspect most people wait until their condition absolutely requires a move - simply because that’s the nature of people. When you’ve owned a single-family home all your life with plenty of space and a yard, moving into something like an apartment feels like a step down - even if your objective quality of life in that single-family home has been seriously degraded by your own diminished capability to manage day-to-day life in that space. Accepting such a transition may also feel to some folks like putting one foot in the grave, so to speak. There’s also the cost, which can be intimidating.

I think my own parents waited too long. In the mid 2010s my mom’s condition was deteriorating slowly, but she still managed to take care of herself and my dad, whose Parkinson’s disease left him with little energy for chores and diminished brainpower for managing his own medications. But it wasn’t until her condition took a large, quantum step downward (over a six-week period her motor control went from “moving kind of slow these days” to literally needing sixty seconds to sign her name on a document) that they became convinced to start the process of getting into independent living. It took several months after that to get their house sold and get moved into their new place, and it required a lot of help from my sister during that time to get them through that process and also assure that they were doing OK in their daily lives, which had become a real struggle for them. Independent living took a lot of the burden off of my mom: basic housekeeping was taken care of, and most of their meals were in the on-site restaurant so she didn’t have to cook or do dishes or do much grocery shopping. It think their lives would have been much better if they had moved into IL 9-12 months earlier than they did.

95

They probably have no conception of the work she’s putting in, both on the level of loss of time and on the emotional level. It’s a damn hard job to do on one’s own and it ought to be compensated. And people who have never done it rarely understand how much it takes out of the person who is doing it.

96

I had those thoughts as well and I understand that it’s a major life change. At the risk of sounding brusque or unfeeling, I would tell people who feel that way to get over themselves and embrace the reality of growing old. Yeah, the rental cost can be high, depending on where you are and the type of facility. A lot of them are located in the suburbs, where rents are lower. After a recent $25K sewer repair on our house, we cried “uncle”. At least where we are now we don’t pay property tax, maintenance costs, yard care costs, etc. It doesn’t offset the annual rental by any means, but our house was beginning to show signs of eventual expensive repairs (roof, heat pump, major deck work, etc.).

We also didn’t want any family to have to deal with all of our life’s debris, house sale, etc. at long distance, or to have to take vacation to fly out and deal with it all when we croak. Another consideration was a what-if: if one of us died, the other would be strapped with trying to deal with it all, so we decided to simplify our lives and theirs. When we were delivering Meals on Wheels, we saw way too many single elderly people who were still trying to stay in their homes, struggling to maintain them, and who were clearly in poor health. I can’t remember how many times we had to call 911 for folks in distress.

97

ETA: ninja’d by @doreen, and much more succinctly.

You’re mixing inheritance tax and capital gains tax.

An example in generalities, not about @doreen’s family’s specific situation:

If a kid inherits Mom’s house, they take it with no inheritance tax unless the estate is 10+ million dollars. But they also take it with a basis of whatever an appraiser thinks it would have sold for on Mom’s date of death. So when kid sells the house e.g. 5 years later, they will only pay capital gains tax on however much the house appreciated in price over those 5 years.

Contrast this with Mom sold the kid the house for a way below market price while Mom was alive. Then a few years later Mom died. There is no inheritance tax on the house this time either, but that’s because the house wasn’t inherited at all. Instead it already belonged to kid who was letting Mom stay there.

So now 5 years later the kid sells the house. Their capital gains are not the difference between the selling price and the value when Mom died. It’s the difference between what it sells for and what they paid Mom for it waay back when. Which might be a much larger number.

The capital gains issue is further muddied by the $250K/$500K exclusion that’s applicable as long as the house was the kid’s primary residence around the time it was sold.

Clear as mud yet? :wink:

98

I think a lot of that may have less to do with leaving a single family home for an apartment and more to do with other associated changes. For example, I own a single family house in a city. When the time comes that I don’t want to deal with stairs or shoveling snow or mowing the lawn or household repairs, I can sell my house and rent an apartment in my neighborhood. I won’t have to change anything else in my life - I will still be able to shop in the same stores, use the same doctors, participate in the same social activities. And in fact, although I own a single family house it’s not actually all that much more spacious than an apartment , so I won’t be leaving a house with five bedrooms , three full bathrooms, a living room , a family room and a garage for a five room apartment with one bathroom. I’ll be leaving a six room house with one full bath which isn’t that different from a five room apartment with one bathroom. Almost all the people I know who have had issues with moving to an apartment have moved from large, suburban single family houses to apartment-style living in a retirement community - those who moved from a small house to an apartment in same neighborhood (or even a different but similar neighborhood) had a much easier time adjusting. Which is why I’m planning to move sooner rather than later.

99

Correct. Though, in the case of the sister buying the house at less than market value, that’s not a factor - she didn’t inherit the house. If she had, it would likely have been tax free since it would likely still be worth less than the exclusion.

And, correct, that the sister would not be paying taxes on the full capital gains because of that 250K/500K exclusion on the primary residence (and if her son inherits, then it’s unlikely that any taxes will happen).

Obviously there are loads of other issues with a transfer of this sort - for example if the mother needed to go into Medicaid-funded nursing home care, it might fall within the lookback period since it was for far less than market value. Not entirely sure what happens in that case, but it wouldn’t be pretty. But there may well have been an understanding that in exchange for the cheap sale, the daughter provides care for the mother, in the home, for as long as physically possible. And of course the family dynamic (basically the residential daughter is getting the only inheritance) is unfortunate.

Your understanding meshes with mine!

To use numbers as an example: let’s say the house transferred for 150K a few years back, it was worth 750K at the time of the transfer, and it is now worth 950K. The purchaser basically saved 600K at the time of purchase. Had s/he paid market value, the profit would be 200K; instead it’s 800K.

Let’s assume the owner’s tax rate is 25%.

Sell today: your gain is 800K. Subtract out the 500K exclusion because you’ve lived in it for the required time. Your gain is 300K. You pay 75K in capital gains. You have spent 225,000 dollars, and gotten 950K back. Net profit: 725K (950K minus 150K purchase minus 75K capital gains).

If you paid full market value (750K) at the time of the transfer, your gain is 200K, with no capital gains (since it’s less than the 250/500K exclusion). Thus, your profit is also 200K.

So the purchaser still comes out ahead with the below-market purchase, just needs to be prepared to write Uncle Same a large check that year.

If the grandson inherits when the house is worth 950K, then sells the house a couple months later for 1M, the gain is 50K. I’m not sure how the “full time residence” rule applies in this case, even if he lived in the place with the mother / grandmother for the requisite number of years, since he was not the owner of the property. He’d either pay zero in gains (since 50K is less than the 250K exclusion), or the applicable tax rate on the 50K gain.

All that’s a digression from the OP’s topic. I’m avoiding work, as you can see :slight_smile: .

100

One thing is that you can live in your own place independently much longer than you can live anywhere else because as your condition has gradually worsened, you’ve worked out a lot of ad hoc workarounds that help you take care of yourself. Every elderly person I know who lives alone has a lot of these, things like "I can’t reach to change the HVAC filter any more but this discarded curtain rod from when we remodeled the kitchen in 1987 fits exactly, so what i do os leverage it here . . . " . Dozens of tricks like that, slowly worked put over the years.

Move to a new place, even a simpler place, and you have to start over. Its impossibly daunting.