Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
It is, indeed, beautiful there. I'm curious where you are: Fayetteville, Springfield, Bella Vista, Rogers, Eureka Springs? How is the proximity to quality healthcare? My husband and I wanted to retire to Fayetteville, but over the 10-15 years that we've been through en route to hiking trips, we've seen the cost of housing and the volume of traffic skyrocket. Can't afford it. Like you, we were avid hikers, and mountain bikers, but that's off the table now. Would be nice to be near Buffalo River and others for kayaking and canoeing, though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Themanwithnoname
What I like about my area (southern Missouri, northern Arkansas) that there's plentiful "culture" for the tourists, more reasturant than you'd expect, and ABSOLUTE BEAUTY everywhere.
I used to be into backpacking. I can't anymore, but there's lots of places I can drive to and hike a short distance and still enjoy nature. In all aeasons
There's MANY activities I haven't mentioned like the world class motorcycle roads I'm no longer able to take advantage of, free or almost free classes in glassblowing, pottery, chainsaw carving, etc.
.
Unfortunately, I think smaller, rural areas like the one the OP describes will continue to decline in services for the elderly in the coming years. I really wish this weren't the case. I'd would like to be wrong on that guess with the near future (2-3 decades out or so).
The job centers basically are concentrated in medium to large-sized metro areas. Rural areas have been suffering from chronic job loss a few decades already, and I really see no immediate turn around for that trend.
If I were the OP, I would actively seek a job since he sees the current job he is in possibly coming to an end. And to maintain a decent wage, it looks like he may be moving again. And seeking out jobs in larger metros just within reasonable hours (4-5) of driving from where his aging family lives is a good strategy.
I know the OP said his parents do not make much money, but since they are in their late 50s, they could probably look into elder care insurance. I don't know how affordable it is (or isn't), but it wouldn't hurt to at least look into it while his parents are still relatively younger. I know plenty of cases where assisted living insurance has paid for itself pretty quickly.
While preparing for the future with aging family members is a good idea, ultimately we all do not know what the future holds for each of us.
OP, I was also puzzled about why your parents were broke since the number you cited sounded like plenty for their lifestyle and area.
I think about all you can do at this point is look for a job elsewhere, help them out as much as you can while still there, point out to them that you're probably not going to be around to help indefinitely, and hope for the best. It's a shame that they won't take responsibility, but you can't force people to do this.
Unfortunately, with people who are ostriches the "external change mechanism" is probably going to be a death or a medical or other kind of crisis.
When my parents were in their early 80s and their house got to be too much for them (by our assessment, since they would never acknowledge it) my brothers and I took them on tours of retirement living places. Not nursing homes, since they weren't at that stage yet, but the kind where you own your own apartment. They resisted us every step of way. They would only consider moving if they could take *everything* with them, and there was a whole lot of everything since they'd lived in the same house for 40+ years. This was merely an excuse, though: they were determined to stay in their multi-level home indefinitely, even though the stairs were too much for them, even though it was inconveniently far from healthcare, and even as their driving ability deteriorated.
When my dad had to be put in an Alzheimer's unit (a whole other saga), my mother remained marooned in their house while we arranged for home health aides and other social services. She was no longer safe behind the wheel, so we had to take her everywhere--and we all worked full-time. I should add that neither she nor my dad were easy to get along with. Nothing we nor the social services people did was ever enough or quite right. It was a thankless endeavor for us kids and incredibly stressful.
My mother finally fell down the basement steps and fractured her hip. She had to have surgery and then recover in a a rehab center. While she was there, we found an assisted living place, signed her up, and moved what furniture would fit. Hated to be duplicitous, but she wouldn't have budged, otherwise.
So, I think that you can expect some kind of unpleasantness and stress down the road when the inevitable crisis occurs, but all you can do in the meantime is live your life. They're adults and need to be thinking things through themselves.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Serious Conversation
They love eating out but no real big money wasting hobbies or vices. Mom used to have a bad shopping issue. No real clue where it goes.
There's just a general lack of agency on doing anything. Ultimately they are not going to change at their age unless there is some sort of external change mechanism.
I live in a small rural town and I really don't feel stuck here. If I wanted to leave, I would just take off. The things that keep me here are my animals. Family - eh. The ones that are here would never leave. And they hate having to go to the city for medical and other needs.
I do think about moving later after my pets expire. You get old and you tend to get ill, so if I feel the need to be close to medical, I'll move. But then maybe I won't feel that way. I'll just let nature take its course.
I used to know the town you lived in but over the years I've forgotten. Anyway, I think your town is even smaller than mine. The actual population of my town is about 12,000, give or take a few, but we have a lot of small communities that butt up against us and make it seem like more. Probably around 45,000 if you consider the entire valley, about 20 mi. in circumference. Maybe that's why I don't feel "stuck here" or maybe it's just because I really love where I live. I've thought about leaving again, and know exactly where I'd go if I did, but I think I've just gotten too old, tired and lazy to really consider it. My family is certainly not keeping me here. I might as well not have any for all the communication we have but I have everything I could possibly need here so it's all good.
Unfortunately, I think smaller, rural areas like the one the OP describes will continue to decline in services for the elderly in the coming years. I really wish this weren't the case. I'd would like to be wrong on that guess with the near future (2-3 decades out or so).
The job centers basically are concentrated in medium to large-sized metro areas. Rural areas have been suffering from chronic job loss a few decades already, and I really see no immediate turn around for that trend.
If I were the OP, I would actively seek a job since he sees the current job he is in possibly coming to an end. And to maintain a decent wage, it looks like he may be moving again. And seeking out jobs in larger metros just within reasonable hours (4-5) of driving from where his aging family lives is a good strategy.
I know the OP said his parents do not make much money, but since they are in their late 50s, they could probably look into elder care insurance. I don't know how affordable it is (or isn't), but it wouldn't hurt to at least look into it while his parents are still relatively younger. I know plenty of cases where assisted living insurance has paid for itself pretty quickly.
While preparing for the future with aging family members is a good idea, ultimately we all do not know what the future holds for each of us.
I had a 1:1 with my manager yesterday that went well. She doesn't think our team will be on the chopping block, and there is no guarantee of a merger. I'm also the only person in my role, and run specific software vital to the company. At this point, it's more of an "be aware" than an active job search. With that said, I keep an eye on nearby job boards at least once a week.
What's so frustrating is that both aunt and parents are all extremely stubborn. Aunt is likely to be laid off within a few months. Yet, instead of keeping her job with the offer to move to St. Louis, she is whining how she will be retired due to age, can't afford to retire, etc. Her husband's first wife died suddenly, and his parents died - anyway, he was the beneficiary of a lot of life insurance policies. When he died, I think most of that went to her. She probably has enough to retire or to at least cut back dramatically, but it's whining and crying. Keep in mind the grandfather on that side had heart problems for many years, but for the last five years of his life, would consistently complain about everything and would always say "Lord, please take me on home" when he got really upset.
My wife is 87 and I am 85. We are both in excellent health and mobility of most 20 year younger people. We have been married for 65 years. We live in a town of about 2,000 and the surrounding area is about the same population. We are the big town in the county. Our children and grandchildren live hundreds of miles away from us.
We have a modern large independent grocery store, a small hardware store, a small building supply store, a feed store to serve the farmers and ranchers, and several restaurants/casinos.
We have a 500 foot lane to the county road, that separates us from the best part of town. 3% unemployment rate, and homes went up 12.5% last year, so it is a growing town. Very high rated schools. 2 year old trama center 10 bed hospital with the other end of the complex the doctors offices. 2 doctors that have been here for 25 years or so since med school, and are top quality, and two nurse practitioners. Part of the medical system for the area, with very large top quality facilities, and is one of the 7 medical systems affiliated with the Mayo Clinic. For most of our specialists it is an hour by interstate to the big hospital system.
Medical system, is the major one for Montana, Northern Wyoming, Western Dakotas, and a big piece of Canada. They have ambulances to move patients as needed, plus the system is unique that it owns 2 medical evac helicopters, plus 3 twin engine turbo prop medical planes with full crews always available as needed.
We live in a 4 level 3,700 sq. ft. contemporary home (no basement), on 5 acres with 1 acre landscaped and rest in pasture with a nice metal barn. We do not do the housework, but have a housekeeper come in 3 days a week, and more if needed. We have someone come in and use our tractor mounted mower, and equipment on the yard one day a week in summer, and remove the mower and mount a snow blade in the winter. No shoveling, just blade it out of the way.
We have 3 half flights of stairs which my wife and I no longer feel safe to climb, and have installed chair lifts on every flight. We have installed grab bars in bathroom as needed. As long as we use the stair lifts, the home is as safe as a single level home for us.
We buy our non perishable groceries and household supplies on line, and save a lot of money doing so. Sit at a computer for 20 minutes and buy up to $250 at a time. 2 days later, it is brought to our door where it is placed in a wagon, we wheel into the kitchen to unload it. It has been 2 1/2 years (a little over), since we drove to the large stores to shop. Why waste 2 hours going to the stores, a couple of hours shopping, and having to unload the Explorer and carry it in. We just have it brought to the house, put in the wagon, and wheel it in. Also saves a lot of money, as the gas plus wear and tear on the Explorer saves about $40 a trip for the car. We find we can buy about anything that is not perishable on line, and save money doing it. Next spring we are buying a hot house (8X12) and bringing it from China. Exact same one (buying from the wholesaler in China) at a big box home supply store, is $4,500 to $4,800 and we can land it here at our house for $1,200 delivered from China.
If we get to where we can't drive, our housekeeper uses our Explorer to take us anywhere we need to go.
As our home is free and clear of debt, we only have upkeep and care, taxes which are low, insurance, to worry about. Our total living here are about the same or less than it would cost to rent an apartment. We sit with room around us so neighbors do not bother us, a real nice home to live in, a fantastic view of the Rocky Mountains. Watching deer and geese in our yard. My wife even watched one Cougar pass through the property one day. When company comes to visit, we have plenty of room for them, and the way the house is laid out, we can all have our privacy.
We see absolutely no reason to move to big population areas, especially as we have been driven out of 3 as smog developed, staring with the Silicon Valley where we raised our family, and we have all left that area. When a medical specialist took me to his office, and told me I had two choices. Go down and make arrangements for funerals that would happen in 6 months or less for one of our children and for my wife, or second choice I chose, move them to a clean air area of he country. They are both healthy and alive decades later.
OP, I was also puzzled about why your parents were broke since the number you cited sounded like plenty for their lifestyle and area.
I think about all you can do at this point is look for a job elsewhere, help them out as much as you can while still there, point out to them that you're probably not going to be around to help indefinitely, and hope for the best. It's a shame that they won't take responsibility, but you can't force people to do this.
Unfortunately, with people who are ostriches the "external change mechanism" is probably going to be a death or a medical or other kind of crisis.
When my parents were in their early 80s and their house got to be too much for them (by our assessment, since they would never acknowledge it) my brothers and I took them on tours of retirement living places. Not nursing homes, since they weren't at that stage yet, but the kind where you own your own apartment. They resisted us every step of way. They would only consider moving if they could take *everything* with them, and there was a whole lot of everything since they'd lived in the same house for 40+ years. This was merely an excuse, though: they were determined to stay in their multi-level home indefinitely, even though the stairs were too much for them, even though it was inconveniently far from healthcare, and even as their driving ability deteriorated.
When my dad had to be put in an Alzheimer's unit (a whole other saga), my mother remained marooned in their house while we arranged for home health aides and other social services. She was no longer safe behind the wheel, so we had to take her everywhere--and we all worked full-time. I should add that neither she nor my dad were easy to get along with. Nothing we nor the social services people did was ever enough or quite right. It was a thankless endeavor for us kids and incredibly stressful.
My mother finally fell down the basement steps and fractured her hip. She had to have surgery and then recover in a a rehab center. While she was there, we found an assisted living place, signed her up, and moved what furniture would fit. Hated to be duplicitous, but she wouldn't have budged, otherwise.
So, I think that you can expect some kind of unpleasantness and stress down the road when the inevitable crisis occurs, but all you can do in the meantime is live your life. They're adults and need to be thinking things through themselves.
I definitely think this is going to come to a head in some sort of crisis, and we have no experience in crisis management.
So far, they've been lucky in the sense no one has been laid off/fired, there have been no disruptions to income, no showstopper medical crises, no "unexpected event" like a major car crash, weather disaster, etc.
Dad needs $1,700 in dental work he says he can't afford. I'm guessing it would take about a grand or two to fix the laundry room up. The toilet in the laundry room slowly leaks into the floor and there is a sewage smell coming up. We need to get some sort of cheap stick on flooring (it's bare concrete), a toilet, a pedestal sink, change the outlets, get rid of the mold, and paint. We also have five cats with a litter box in the same room. You can imagine the smell with the litter box and sewer gas - the washing machine has also leaked in the floor, which got the sheet rock wet and has contributed to the mold. I'm trying to get them to let me finish buying the stuff for the basement, but they're too proud to let me do it.
There is an outside shed for the mowers on the adjacent lot they own, and the wood on the shed is rotting away to the point there is some exposure to the elements and needs replaced, but there's no money for that. He also won't sell the lot the shed ****s on. Lot would probably be worth $15k-$20k, but he won't sell because he "doesn't want anyone that close." Mice have gotten into the shed and chewed away wires on the mower, so all those are now in the garage and there is little even in the shed. It's another hour of mowing every week and something to pay property taxes on every year. There is also a rotting deck that was in bad shape when they bought the house twenty years ago. No one ever used it or maintained it. I can still walk on it, but something needs to be done about it. This property is not going to sell at a decent price with these problems, yet they claim there is no money to do anything about it. Amusingly, there was a house down the street in worse shape than ours that sold for $230k last month - no idea who was stupid enough to buy it.
I should know something on the merger by early summer. Unless it looks like I'm going to be sacked, I'm buying a place shortly afterward. I will help here and there on major stuff, but I'm not going to run myself ragged to help him with the yard and do laundry that they do not do during the week once I'm gone. With me helping a third on the house and utilities, their cash flow has improved, so I'm not sure why there is "no money." I'm doing way more on a day to day basis with general household chores because I'm basically taking care of three people and five cats than when I lived in Indiana alone. My last childhood cat is still alive and she has gotten back into the same routines she did when I was a kid.
I don't want to give the impression they bad parents - I think they did well with what they had to work with growing up. But continuing to live like they did twenty years ago is ignoring reality.
"According to a new 92016) study of over 100,000 adults in Denmark, researchers from the Copenhagen University Hospital have found that those with an “overweight” body mass index (BMI) were more likely to live longer than those in all of the other BMI categories — “normal,” “underweight,” and “obese.”"
My grandmother was obese and died at 85. But she had grown up on a farm and used manure for all her crops all life long (no GMO before we even learned about that word) and kept a very large garden even in her Golden Years. She ate a lot, but the food she ate was not full of all the crap that is in the food we eat nowadays. I think it is fair to say that everything she ate was organic back then. She did can a lot of her fruit, and froze a lot of pies. I remember pleading with her to leave me some berries that I could eat fresh and not to put everything away in the cellar or freezers, and she did the best she could, but having lived through the Great Depression, and living way out of town, her canned and frozen food made her feel very secure.
"Obese" is not "overweight." I remember that study. It was referring to chunky people. People with a LITTLE extra weight on them, which enables them to maintain a healthy bodyweight through illnesses.
Obesity is something else entirely. And morbid obesity is the top level. Obesity is 30% over ideal weight. Very unhealthy. Morbid obesity is even more....and those people do not live the normal life expectancy.
Organic or not....obesity is obesity. Morbid obesity is morbid obesity. We're talking about the heart and vital organs. Eating processed foods and such add to the risk of cancer and such...not heart problems.
When you see someone with midsection fat, that shows that their internal organs are loaded with fat...before it gets to the point of showing outwardly. The heart becomes encapsulated by fat and struggles with every pulse.
Besides heart problems, many obese people develop metabolic syndrome. This is a syndrome that has a group of risk factors related to obesity and greatly increases the risk of not only heart trouble, but stroke. This involves thickening waist, high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol.
Insurance companies keep track of statistics of those likely to cause high claims. Obese people is one of the high risk groups. They are classified high risk for a reason. Being chunky (or just "overweight") is not in a high risk group.
My morbidly obese mother died at 68 from heart trouble. My morbidly obese older sister died at 63 from respiratory failure after suffering a massive stroke at 55. (I lucked out and take after dad's side of the family, which doesn't have obesity.)
There are exceptions to the rules. But they are called rules and statistics because that's the way it usually is.
I would say mom is around 300 lbs at 5'2. My ex got on a scale at Sam's the other day, and she is smaller than mom, and weighted 260ish. I really don't think mom will be around in ten years.
General observation -- people stay in one place long after they should have moved. "Wither where you're planted" is what happens. In today's world, family ties can be maintained at a distance...and sometimes that improves the relationship. Moving to a new place is a challenge that stimulates and opens opportunities for work and social connections. For retirees it stimulates the mind with a new learning curve and new problem solving tasks.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
