Yup. I live out in the country on a dead end road for multiple reasons – and one of them is that I really, really don’t like living in cities, and am not that wild even about living in towns. I want to see people some of the time; but I also need to be able to be outdoors somewhere I’m not likely to see people, but do have trees and non-manicured growth around. And here, I can let the cats out, and have as many as I feel I can take care of – there are currently four cats and a very lively puppy.
I sleep best when there’s no artificial light and I can’t hear anybody else talking, or for that matter rattling around doing stuff if it’s not an entirely familiar sort of rattle made by a known person; but unless it’s very cold out, with at least one window open.
I react badly to a lot of artificial scents, and to what appears to be common levels of outgassing of chemicals from assorted ordinary things which don’t bother most people – anything from some cleaning fluids to some shower curtains, and a lot of other things besides, won’t produce visible diagnosticable symptoms, but can make me feel like I’m going to start choking any minute and I desperately need to Get Out Of There.
I could go on, at considerable length. But moving to an apartment for me wouldn’t be just a matter of fitting into less space. It would be a matter of changing my life entirely. And I’m living this life because I found that it’s what I need.
Good point on people figuring out how to cope. My MIL is quite proud of how she uses her walker to hold the laundry basket, for example.
MIL has said, repeatedly, that she’s really happy they wound up where they are, even if they are not happy with HOW they wound up there (tl/dr: bad luck/bad decisions led to them facing foreclosure; we were able to buy a condo for them). It’s small enough that they never have to walk very far, and aside from some quibbles about the kitchen layout, meets all their needs.
True. But what a lot of folks forget is that they’re often moving out of a paid-for (or nearly paid-for) house or condo.
My late aged MIL sold her final house for ~$275K. She owned it free and clear. The independent living place she moved into cost $2700/mo. The cash proceeds from the sale of the house paid for 100+ months = 8+ years of independent living. The savings from having no more property taxes, no more house insurance, no more gas / electricity / water / sewer utility bills, and the savings from no more grocery shopping or eating out paid for a lot more months.
She always believed that rent was just throwing away money. She thought owning outright meant you never had any housing expense; you “lived for free” in her words. Despite paying all those other bills for decades, somehow that large monthly collective outflow wasn’t “housing expense”. Until suddenly she didn’t have those expenses any more. Then, and only then, she got it. Kinda.
She survived 4+ years in the independent living place and witnessed about 80% turnover during that tenure. She did not even come close to spending all the proceeds of the house sale on rent. Much less touch the nest egg in the bank that she’d scrimped for decades to build up. Nor the earnings all that money was making along the way.
Wow, that is a great way to see the thorny reality of elder stay-at-homes. While doing good for the world and learning that reality for yourself. I salute you.
I got my intro to all this stuff by managing my condo association and dealing with various owners aging out to helpless incompetence in place, while others sold, moved to more supportive places, and thrived for several additional years.
My MIL’s decline was a bit late versus what I’d already picked up from my fellow residents. So she benefitted from my learning. I expect I will have the wisdom to do the right thing for me before my own time comes. But one never knows for sure until it happens.
Speaking as a widow - it took me years to deal with my late spouses’ stuff, and more years to downsize my own heap (still working on that). Thank Og I’m still healthy, active, and able to do it.
My parents sold their house when mom began needing help every day and my dad saw the writing on the wall, although it probably helped they had spent a significant portion of their adult lives renting as well as owning so maybe it wasn’t quite the barrier it is to some people. They sold before they were unable to keep up with the house so got maximum value. It also resulted in jettisoning a lot of excess stuff (which is how I got my dad’s old desk, which he didn’t need/want any more but I now use every day). Then they went to rental properties where they no longer had to worry about upkeep and repairs. After mom died dad downsized even more and moved in with my sister in Buffalo (she had more room and a mother-in-law apartment. As a result, when he finally died there wasn’t a lot left to distribute and no big pile of junk for the heirs to go through. Much kinder to everyone.
As a number for on “no one thinks you’ll live that long, so this is a safe move. Make sure you don’tlive longer”, eight years is actually pretty short.
I can relate. I can’t tolerate neighbor noise at all, and in every assisted living place you have neighbors on each side, if not above or below you as well. Independent living facilities sometimes offer free-standing cottages, but I’m looking beyond that. And I’m sure none of them are “eco-friendly,” meaning no toxic chemicals in the building materials or furnishings. Thankfully, I don’t have chemical sensitivity, but I am aware of what is and isn’t healthy to live with.
After spending their adult lives saving money for the future, it can be hard for some folks to adjust to the concept of spending down their savings. Spending “principal” can be psychologically traumatic.
From someone’s date of retirement I agree completely; 8 years is far far too short.
OTOH, from someone’s date of “Despite my best efforts I’m no longer able to live alone & reluctantly realize I need to move to supportive care”, it’s rather long. Not impossible-to-outlive long, but decently long.
And the larger point is that I am not asserting that someone should have no savings beyond a paid-off house. That plus SS from a middle-class working career amounts to penury followed by bankruptcy.
I’m merely asserting that I’ve seen lots of middle-class+ seniors who essentially forget that selling their paid-for house/condo can let them leave their nest egg savings untouched for a number of years longer than they may have expected. And assuming decent age-appropriate conservative investments, the years they’re not burning through savings will themselves generate further years of living expenses.
I think even my 90 year old grandmother would not have liked to hear “surely you don’t have more than 8 years left”.
I agree with your larger point that the house can be a powerful asset, and certainly that is the “buy in” a lot of retirement communities require. But even then, its very scary to think ofbhaving a date past which you cannot afford to continue to pay for your housing.
Agree completely. Which is why the house should not be your last source of money. Easy to say for folks who have more.
My point is only and entirely that somebody who has, e.g. $400K in the bank and a $200K paid for house really has $600K spendable. Not just $400K. Folks who plan their entire budget around teh $400K are leaving 1/3rd of their wealth untouched.
If that’s a conscious deliberate decision, hooray for them. If it’s an oversight, a form of category blindness, IMO that’s dumb. I did not expect to find oldsters who’d been successful in life making that category error, but I have found exactly that. So I’m sharing this finding with the crowd here. Not as a gigantic piece of received wisdom, but as a curiosity about human (mis-)perception. And perhaps as a cautionary tale for themselves or someone they care about. Unexamined assumptions are the most dangerous ones because one doesn’t even know they’ve been made.
Bumping an old thread: My father died quickly in October at age 90, and within a month, my mother told me that she had bagged up most of his clothing for a thrift store. I said, “That’s awfully hasty!” and she replied, “He doesn’t need them any more, but there are men here in town who do.”
Several years ago, Dad became one of the 20% of senior adults who go to a LTC. He was there for less than 24 hours, for rehab after major surgery, and then had to be readmitted to the hospital. He went home after that admission.
Discussing suicide here is always flirting with violating the rules.
But there’s a big difference between someone of sound mind in a badly damaged body and someone with a badly damaged mind in a sound (for now) body.
I can see lots of ways for the former to succeed in their efforts and for the latter to fail, despite most sincerely wanting to succeed in their more mentally capable moments.
Your mother sounds very practical. I hope my wife would do the same for my clothes if it comes to that. (We are both thrift shop fans, so it is likely.) But why have them as a reminder. and why go through the hassle of getting rid of them if she moves.
I had a friend who died a couple weeks ago. Her husband contacted me and asked me to come over and look at some of her “Gone With The Wind” memorabilia, because he knew I had some connections with antique dealers and might even know myself if the items were valuable. (I found two that might be, in the $100 range; I’m going to make a trip to an auctioneer in the weeks to come, for my own things and the library’s too, and may take those with me and make sure he gets that money.) She had told him before she died that she didn’t want her clothes taken to a resale place but instead given to the needy, and I know of a few places in town which do that and he will contact me (he has some mobility issues) when they’re ready to pick up.
When my first wife died after a long illness I got rid of her meds and sick-bed stuff the first day. So it was as if she was still around, but not a raggedy health disaster, just her old healthy self. That felt very uplifting.
I got rid of her clothes during the first week. Their sheer uselessness without her here to use them was a real drag and their absence was also freeing. Due to the long illness, probably 80% of them had not been worn in the last 2 years anyhow. Clothes are inherently something you buy, use up, and dispose of. What’s the significance of a bunch of undies or some sweatshirt you bought at Target? Not much.
It was the rest of her durable stuff that was shared or memory-filled or meaningful that took a lot longer to dispose of. And far more mental and emotional effort / discomfort.
I have a Facebook friend (a woman I worked with many years ago) whose ex-husband, the father of her children, died a while back. (I’m pretty sure, sadly, that it was a suicide.) Their sons took the clothes they wanted, and the ones they didn’t want, or didn’t fit, have been made over by a relative into shirt quilts.
When I was staying with my mother before Dad died, she showed me a gadget she had just purchased that would enable him to more easily put on and take off his TED hose, which he had been wearing for some time. She was thinking about taking it back, and I suggested that she not do it because she might one day need it herself. It’s not that expensive, and they may not have taken it back anyway. I know that mastectomy bras, which she has worn for almost 40 years, are considered durable medical equipment and cannot be resold, but they can certainly be donated (and TBH, they just look like a regular bra with extra support).
When we moved to this house, after about 5 years the old guy across the street sold his house to move into a condo. He had been alone as long as we knew him. There was a house sale, and we checked it out. The closets were FILLED with his old wife’s clothes, as well as make-up and stuff.
Maybe he got some comfort from it, but it struck us as so sad, that he had lived just surrounded by all the STUFF of a dead person.
I didn’t want to start a new thread for this, so I’ll just post it here.
I called my mom earlier this evening, and asked her if she’d gone to lunch again at the senior center, something she and my dad had enjoyed doing very much, and she hadn’t mentioned doing so since the first time (one time?) she went after he died.
Here’s why she’s stayed away. Word got around, and several men hit on her! She saw one at the grocery store a few days later, and he told her that he’d found out where she lived, and sat out in his car in the street for a little while, hoping she’d invite him in for dinner.