I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Wealth, I write about money management, retirement, estate, and long-term care planning.
My parents, in their eighties, each live in a senior living place, my dad with his partner Hilde and my mother on her own, since her second husband passed away a couple years ago.
Their choices give me a peek into what my choices might look like later, should I choose to leave my house.
My dad and his partner live in an upscale multi-building retirement community that requires a buy-in — a large sum that is 90% refundable when they leave. It has multiple restaurants, an on-site rehab facility, and services like physical therapy right on site. It is a “continuing care retirement community” with assisted living, skilled nursing, and memory care units available. My mother lives in a one-building mid-rise (eight floors) with one dining room. It has assisted living but no memory care or skilled nursing. My mother pays just a monthly fee. No buy-in was required. My dad and Hilde pay a large monthly fee in addition to the buy-in that serves as both rent and payment for services like dining.
My mother told me that many of her friends, especially those from back in our country club days, are on a waiting list for a community similar to the one my dad lives in that is the place to be as you age, for that set.
It struck me that even as you age, you don’t give up on the search for prestige and comfort. +
I’m familiar now with both options — the posh multi-building community requiring a buy-in and the more modest (though still very nice) single building setting that only requires a monthly fee.
Personally, I’d probably look to the one-building community. My mother scored one of the best apartments in her building: a unit on the eighth floor with a bay window featuring a mountain view. My dad’s unit is spacious and lovely, it’s true, and the food at the various restaurants is fantastic, relatively speaking, but personally I wouldn’t want to do the buy-in or pay the high monthly fees (much higher than my mom’s monthly fee despite the buy-in).
An alternative, of course, would be aging in place. My house features a first-floor main suite, which makes that a more feasible option. But maintaining a house is a lot of work. I’m not even sure I want to keep that up right now!
However, I still have another era left in me: the era of being a grandmother. I hope very much that happens for me (or should I say, for at least one of my children, because it’s really not about me, is it?)
When my sisters children were young, and mine were adolescents, my mother and her husband had a large house with lots of bedrooms. My sisters would come in town over Christmas with their children and stay there.
I can imagine providing that kind of hospitality for my own grandchildren in the future. So I may have twenty years of homeownership in my future. By then I’ll be 78, a good age to think about moving into a senior living place.
It could be that by then I’m completely addled and need memory care. However, I plan to get my cognitive function tested regularly, and if I get diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I’ll be making plans to fly to Switzerland before it gets too advanced. I do understand why most people who become demented just accept a long multi-year decline as part of what life might offer, and it might end up what I face too. But I think it’s a huge shame we don’t have a better way of dealing with it than the dark landscape of memory care.