National shortage of home-care workers threatening the option of aging at home (relative, teenagers)
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My sister bought one of those lifts off Facebook Marketplace to move her husband. He has PPMS, a late-life form of MS, and after ten years, he can't even move his feet anymore or put weight on his legs to help her. She went through getting a lawyer to wade through the Medicaid process to get some home care help. There's a shortage there, too, same as here.
My BF has no medical appointments to go to. He is on palliative care. The palliative care doc will come to the house if need be, but we've only had him there twice. A nurse comes once a week to check BP/pulse/any pressure sores, catheter, etc. A few times when a pressure sore was flaring up, she came every three days to dress it.
I guess this is the equivalent to "visiting nurses" in the USA.
We got Medicaid for my mom. The person that helped us was the hospital social worker. Wow if not for her, we would not have known what to do.
Well I did read the regs etc and got all the info they needed. We had to turn over her life insurance, pension checks etc to the nursing home. Get letters from my dad's civil service pension - they were very nice. It took me about a week to get it all organized.
The nursing home was nice. But even the lady that did their financials said we would have to sell her house. She could not own a home. In Texas you can own a home worth 500K and still qualify.
Oh that was last year before the neurological effects hit rock bottom. If they have. For example, in August he had a seizure. That was a new thing. They sent him home from the hospital last December as "bedridden", but we have him sit in a chair or a wheelchair and go outside for a few minutes sometimes. It's tiring and uncomfortable for him, though. Most of the time he is in a hospital bed. Which he has fallen out of, so now we shove a couch on one side and have boards wedged on the other side so he can't fall out of bed.
They do send a nurse once a week, and then we remove the board so she has access to him. It's a brightly painted thing that we found in the garage that had belonged by my bf's grandmother. Flowerpots with babies in them. The nurse is amused.
There are no words, MQ, other than I'm sorry that you are both going through this. I also think that you will never regret being there for him even though it has been a very tough situation.
I am glad that a nurse is coming to help. It's touching that the brightly painted board that belonged to your boyfriend's grandma is helping to keep him safe and adding a cheeriness to his room, too.
Assisted living is not end of life care. The average home is not set up to provide basic assisted living.
70 year old women should not be trying to heft around their 200 pound husbands. That isn't safe for either one of them.
No, it is not. But everyone expects her to do it.
Last edited by GotHereQuickAsICould; 10-02-2022 at 06:58 PM..
We got Medicaid for my mom. The person that helped us was the hospital social worker. Wow if not for her, we would not have known what to do.
Well I did read the regs etc and got all the info they needed. We had to turn over her life insurance, pension checks etc to the nursing home. Get letters from my dad's civil service pension - they were very nice. It took me about a week to get it all organized.
The nursing home was nice. But even the lady that did their financials said we would have to sell her house. She could not own a home. In Texas you can own a home worth 500K and still qualify.
I don't think they could demand the house, actually a condo in a 55+ community, because my sister would need a place to live. She just needs some assistance to come in and help with getting him transferred out of bed to his wheelchair and then the wheelchair to the recliner where he spends most of his day. Then back to bed at night. Also help with bathing, etc. He still has use of one hand so he can work the remote, feed himself, etc., at least until that goes. She herself is an LPN so she does a lot of "nurse" things herself. It's just that he's at least 225 pounds of dead weight, and she's 72 years old. She has been doing it alone for ten years, and she needs help.
I don't think they could demand the house, actually a condo in a 55+ community, because my sister would need a place to live. She just needs some assistance to come in and help with getting him transferred out of bed to his wheelchair and then the wheelchair to the recliner where he spends most of his day. Then back to bed at night. Also help with bathing, etc. He still has use of one hand so he can work the remote, feed himself, etc., at least until that goes. She herself is an LPN so she does a lot of "nurse" things herself. It's just that he's at least 225 pounds of dead weight, and she's 72 years old. She has been doing it alone for ten years, and she needs help.
And yes - that is another thing that will keep them from going after the residence. If someone will continue living there. My disabled veteran brother lived with my mom, so even if there wasn't the 500K thing - since he was there - they could not kick him out and take it.
When I was 18 years old, I couldn't imagine myself ever becoming old, I doubted that I would make it to 50. Saving for Assisted Living in my old age would not have even been on my radar. And if they had tried to teach me about saving for my own nursing home expenses in school I would have zoned out completely on that lesson.
A personal choice (albeit a hypothetical one) for which you, and you alone, bear its consequences.
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Originally Posted by springfieldva
For whatever reason, around the age of 25, I started contributing to my 401K and I also had a job that was earning me a pension. I couldn't "afford" to save for my retirement as I was earning peanuts at the time, but I did it anyway. But before the age of 25 I would not have been receptive to any kind of planning for my old age.
A personal choice (albeit a hypothetical one) for which you, and you alone, bear its consequences.
Good points. We didn't know anything about investing when we were young. That was something other people did. My parents didn't gamble in the stock market, either. I think they were both sketchy about the stock market because they were Depression-era kids. They bought a few different lots when the Poconos lake communities began to become a thing back in the '60s and '70s, and that was their investment.
Sounds like my parents, absent the lots. They, too, remember the Depression first-hand.
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Originally Posted by Mightyqueen801
I didn't even know what "the SATs" meant when the other kids were talking about taking them, lol, let alone worrying about retirement.
Me either. My uncle convinced me to sign up to take them. I remember I wasn't so much hung over when I showed up for the exam as I was still a bit intoxicated from the previous night's partying.
At any rate, out of my graduating class of 660, about 12 went to college our community college.
A personal choice (albeit a hypothetical one) for which you, and you alone, bear its consequences.
A personal choice (albeit a hypothetical one) for which you, and you alone, bear its consequences.
18 year old kids, as a general rule, do not tend to worry about things that are 65, 70+ years away.
Heck, I'm 56 and I don't worry about being 100 years old. The likelihood of me living that long is very low and planning obsessively for it seems sort of....stupid. On the upside, you don't see too many 100 year old homeless people, so if I do make it that long somehow I doubt I'll be living under an overpass.
18 year old kids, as a general rule, do not tend to worry about things that are 65, 70+ years away.
That's why I like the Australian Suerannuation System. Every worker has to pay in 9% of their pay, and every employer has to match that 9%. No planning is required, so young people can't underfund their retirement. And if the amount saved turns out to be insufficient for those who live into extreme old age, welfare can pick up the tab.
It's protection against our natural tendency to be short-sighted.
Wait. You were promiscuous? I wish I had known you back then.
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Originally Posted by ocnjgirl
It really messed me up losing my dad and the lack of supervision from a working mom who was still young and also trying to date, and an angry brother who often took that out on me. It took me until my late 20s to get myself together. Even then I made some poor decisions because I had poor self esteem and had never really been prepared to function as an adult. It was a lot of trial and error. Many of your posts seem to presume a certain cookie-cutter life that a lot of people don’t have growing up.
I paid off student loans until I was 45, so got a very late start saving anything for retirement. I lost tens of thousands of what I did save due to medical expenses and being unable to work for 10 months before and after my back surgery in 2016. I had to liquidate my Roth just to survive.
Having worked in a school district for five years, I think the reason they don’t teach things like that is because of both the emphasis today on passing standardized national tests and the difficulty passing school budgets. Schools are eliminating classes such as art, music etc. to concentrate purely on academics. I would be willing to bet that there would be parents that would complain about those kind of life lessons in any case, because there’s an increasing emphasis now among the public that school should only be concentrating on academics and leave everything else to parents. Which of course presumes that every kid has involved parents, which many do not. I think teaching finances is a good idea.
I don’t think most 18-year-olds can even fathom that they’re going to be old infirm one day.
As a teenager, I was very conscious of OASI ("Social Security"), as my father had died young and OASI helped mom put food on our table. Mom said several times that if it were not for "Social Secuirty", we would have been totally screwed, financially speaking. Perhaps because of that, I spent some time looking at the Social Security trust funds when I was a teenager. While I didn't even know what an actuary was at that time, I had uncommon aptitude for mathematics. It didn't take long to realize that absent modifications to the system, the Social Security trust fund would collapse. Metaphorically, it was a bathtub with water coming in from the spigot and water flowing out through the drain. Absent action, the bathtub would go dry.
The original insurance premium was 1% of payroll on the employer and 1% on the employee. Congress has expanded both eligibility and payments (outflows) and has expanded payments (inflows) over the decades, and now it is 7.65% on each of the employer and employee. The last couple of big expansions of inflows were the result of legislation in 1977 and 1983.
You're right that most 18-year-olds have more pressing concerns, but many also are able to contemplate the future - for example, many 18 year olds are very conscious of climate change and actively wish for the nation to "do something" to combat it.
If they are able to contemplate the consequences of Global Warming, they also should be able to contemplate the effects of compounding of savings. A simple, great game is to give them a chess board. Give them ten dollars in pennies. Have them place one penny on the first square, and two pennies on the second square, four on the third square -- then ask them how long the 10 dollars of pennies will last? Ask them how many pennies do they think they would need in order to keep adding pennies onto the chess board until all the squares are filled.
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