Planning for old age, do you see it as a luxury or something everyone can and should actively do?
My husband and I are in our mid 50s and are starting to have discussions about how we want to live in retirement and beyond. We are inspired to do so bc we’re closing in on retirement in 10 years and also watching our parents leave a lot of decisions to chance, which is currently impacting us and will continue to do so. I don’t want to get into the details but I’m baffled that more people of sound mind, body and finances don’t lay out plans and start executing on them before an emergency happens. Why leave things to chance or for your kids to handle? I’m witnessing friends in really awful situations. Ours is nothing comparatively speaking.
Both my DH and I are agreed…we will not burden our son with our care in our old age. It’s not why we had a child. We are not his responsibility and I would never want to impose myself on him. We hope he has his own family and will prioritize them and visit us when he wants to. PERIOD. Hopefully we will leave him some $$ and only if he wishes, property. Otherwise, we will unload assets and simplify ourselves on paper, early. Nothing is guaranteed so I say hopefully bc we are doing our best. Economies crumble, stock markets tumble. People get hit by buses. Anything can happen. So I hope there will be something to leave my kid, but it wont be debt or our care.
I am witnessing friends lose their health, their paying jobs and their happiness to take care of their parents bc the parents refuse to transition to more appropriate living arrangements. Oblivious to how they impact their kids.
It’s impossible to look from the outside and judge, but it’s easy to say “I don’t want to do that to my kid!”
Worth noting, I’m talking about elderly people who have plenty of financial security—not about people who can’t afford options. That is another huge, complicated societal issue that is impossible to tackle here. Also, I know people who want to take care of their parents (still hard even if you voluntarily became a caregiver) or do so when assisted living situations fail (sooooo hard on everyone!).
If you feel like sharing your advice or stories on how to plan so we don’t become a burden as we age, I for one would love to hear what you are doing or what we should not do. Or if you want to vent about how you’ve been impacted, go for it. I’d like to hear your experiences.
Thanks!
I have no intention of expecting family to care for me if I need it.
I have preplanned my funeral and am paying that off.
I have recently updated my Will.
My Husband never wanted to talk about things like this. I had planned on having him cremated but his sister told me he had said he wanted to be next to his mom.
I guess some people just do not want to face the fact that everyone dies.
It might be a generational thing, or a cultural thing. And since no one knows really what happens many just leave the subject alone.
Just like anything the more you talk about it the more "normal" it becomes and that takes some of the fear and the unknown out of the process.
Poverty changes everything.
One is robbed of choice when steeped lifelong in poverty.
Their lives are ones of struggle no matter their age.
Those who are NOT in poverty almost always DO take measures, I think, for their aging. Just my guess. I wonder what the statistics would show.
My own plan is to decline life-extending treatments that are most likely to extend the bad years -- in other words, death prolongation rather than life prolongation.
But I recognize that these calls get trickier when they are directly before us.
I do worry about the current direction of the U.S. Supreme Court. I'm in a state with MAID, but who knows. (And it's irritating to have to go to doctors with outstretched palm.) I also worry about how often DNR/DNI documents go missing in hospitals. In my experience, this happens pretty much every single time.
So I have a Plan B, discussion of which probably violates some forum rule or other. I'll just say that people make Plan B sound much more complicated than it actually is. When I finally found time to do the research, I was reassured by the options available, many of them fairly straightforward. And these methods are at least as reliable as some of the wild surgeries that are routinely performed (really, much more reliable in terms of avoiding fate-worse-than-death outcomes).
But I could have a massive stroke this afternoon and my whole control fantasy would go "poof." :-P
The reason why people leave things to chance or live in denial is because they've probably never done a day of caregiving in their lives so they have no idea what a poop show they can create. The poop show is so traumatizing that those of us on the receiving end make blood-pacts to never do that to people we care about.
There is a legal document called a Pre-need Guardianship that allows you to name your own guardian, should it come to that. All important documents need to go to someone they trust, or into an organized file in their home. At this point I'm not sure digital copies of anything are accepted by every institution, but that could change in the future.
I think the biggest problem is that most people do not plan on becoming demented first. They plan for physical and financial problems, but not cognitive/memory ones. I just had this conversation with a close friend of mine. She's single and in her 70's and a good planner. She was telling me about her Blue File (that is her competent self talking to her incompetent self, sort of like in the movie, Still Alice). But dementia and memory loss don't work like that since one can forget something within minutes, so leaving yourself a file is probably not gonna work. Another problem is the illogic, lack of reasoning skills and poor judgment, plus paranoia, that comes with dementias. I'm not sure there's a perfect solution. The most anyone can do is do the most they can, given their resources and circumstances.
I contacted the atty. Got a list of documents and things we needed to have to establish a trust and I did all the legwork and digging for stuff. Then we had a one hour chat with the Atty. He then put all this stuff in a big binder and organized it. We went back for another hour long meeting and went over everything with a fine tooth comb. Atty had a lot of things to add in, and some stuff we took out. We wouldn't have thought of a lot of these small issues.
Then the trust was drawn up and notarized. It's on the shelf in the office. My executor (OD) knows where everything is, there's even a check drawn up so when we go, she can access our funds immediately.
We moved into a 'smaller' home (I laugh because it's actually 1000 sf bigger than our first home!) I need to call the atty again and get together with him to update the trust.
I'm doing this for ME, DH and our kids. I don't want them to have to deal with ANYTHING weird or unusual--and certainly not having us die intestate and the nightmare that is.
I absolutely DO NOT want my kids to take care of me in my dotage. We've been to Hades and back with MIL and I am so burned out--and I don't DO ANYTHING!
She did draw up a trust, thank goodness, but if she ever dies, DH has the knowledge of what she wants. (Probably for him & his sibs to throw themselves into her grave with her...) (OK, that was not nice....but the whole last year they have practically breathed for her. Crazy town.)
I think what hold most people back from making these trusts/wills is that you have to face your own mortality. That's scary for many people. But it's also a great gift to those who get left behind.
If you don't make your EOL wishes made known, then whatever happens, happens. I've seen enough in-family squabbling to know that NOT leaving final wishes almost always ends in a fight. Even with my mom's very detailed will, my YB went crazy and cleaned out her entire apartment by himself and disposed of everything. A few tchotchkes were left, but all her clothes, books & DVD's and such were thrown away. This was NOT what she wanted, but he used the excuse that he was her POA---finally we opted to simply forgive and forget. It could have gotten very ugly, very fast.
That would be my Plan B.
I wish it were legal in my State.
Unfortunately some of the regulations make carrying out "Plan B" almost impossible.
The fact that we can humanly euthanize a beloved pet makes me crazy that I can not chose this potion for myself!
We have our wills done and POA and health proxies and living will but I alsonwant to put a trust in place. My husband doesn’t want to do it just yet. My parents did not do a thing and I am living the repercussions of this. Have to pressure him to start thinking about it.
i do not plan to get old because I am watching my parents lingering at the age of 95 in a NH. I don’t want a pacemaker, that’s for sure. No chemo if i have cancer. No lingering around. I don’t want to be a burden to my daughter, I’d rather be dead than this and will avail myself of assisted suicide if necessary. I’ve had a good run, nothing more to be said.
The problem with plan B is that it cannot be discussed really, being against the law as it is.
To my mind no one can/should post a plan B. That's for your membership in Final Exit, if you know what I mean.
That's the place to discuss it with those of like minds and common interests. Long standing member here.
They have a website. But no one here, I would think, will be posting any list.
But andsoitgoes is correct, that when one is very familiar with researching the subject for whatever reason--I mean they could be writing the next great Agatha Christie (mine takes place in a moldy-smelling kind of haunted inherited cabin at the Russian River)-- it isn't as complicated as people think.
There's a ton of plan Bs to choose from and our literature's full of them.
I would ask you to consider how often in life you-- if you live in the snowy areas-- awaken to a news story about an entire family who passes overnight in their own homes because they came up with a way to heat the house that was creative, if not wise.
Or because they have a faulty furnace and no Co2 alarms (now the law in our state). Or the power went out and the gas generator was brought into an enclosed house.
These folks just went to sleep and didn't get up in the morning, sadly. And you will find this a quite common occurance. No fuss, no muss, no pain, just another Midwest winter tragedy for some people who had no interest in a plan ABorC.
Boy, do I ever have STORIES. It's somewhat a pet subject for me, right down to the Dorothy Parker poem.
Do you remember the girl who went on trial because she kept encouraging her boyfriend to do a plan B? Oh, do ask! Or tune in to my favorite Crime Junkies Podcast.
All take care. And DEFINITELY buy a Co2 alarm. Very cheap on amazon, or your local hardware.
Happy summer to you, Margaret. And yikes. I hate heat. I would much rather do the cold I think. SF is kind of perfect for me, not a lot of either.
www.kcra.com/article/sheriff-to-announce-what-killed-california-family-hike/380…
Don't get me wrong, as a family we should be there for each other. But not to the detriment of the children expected to give up jobs, use their own money to support parents and do 24/7 care. We help them clean out that house. Help them find a new place to live. Give the rides if needed. My DH does not agree with me here but what you do for them, you do in your time. We do not enable our parents and we don't disable them. We are not at their back and call. And if possible we don't live with them or them with us.
It seems like people can not tell a parent NO. Its not disrespect or not honoring a parent to say NO. It surprises me when an OP says they give a parent with Dementia a choice. Sorry, they can no longer make decisions. Thats where the child now becomes the parent and just makes the decision. You don't ask if they want to go to an AL, u will get a No. You don't allow them to tell you they will not go to an AL when you can not care for them. You do not help them so much they think they are independent.