Post #34 “Where Do I Begin” – Staying at Home options (#4 of a series)
Baby Boomers have more Stay-at-Home Choices than they realized
Part 4 of a five-part series
Welcome to Part 4 of our five-part series on getting started in your senior living journey. In parts 1 and 2 we talked about mentally preparing for the journey (posts 28 and 31). In post #33, I gave you the overview of 14 choices you could have, seven Stay-at-Home options and seven senior living communities choices.
In this Part 4, I will take a deeper dive into your Stay-at Home options. That’s a lot of choices! As I’ve mentioned before, some are rather obvious, but some are new choices that you may want to consider. And as always, maybe you have more of your own unique choices!
I believe it may be these seven options – and new ones to come – that may become the defining element of this new generation of Senior Living for Baby Boomers.
Where for our grandparents, the nursing home was the new, bright shiny object, (what I call Senior Living 1.0) and for our parents, assisted living was the new kid on the block (Senior Living 2.0), from my decades of experience in the senior living “space,” I believe, along with the existing options, the single-family home and its different variations will be a new, signature element of senior living as we move forward.
Think of it as the “uberization” or “VRBO-ization” of senior living. Where every car is now a taxicab, and where every home can now be hotel, every single-family home can now be its own, small, senior living community. We don’t have to build new, fancy, expensive single-use senior communities for all of us Boomers. We already have millions of them! This will help keep costs down (they are already paid for) and bring the quality-of-life up.
It could change everything. But most importantly, for you and for now, it can change the way you look at senior living and how you may want to live out these last decades of your life. You will have so many new choices.
It’s a whole new ballgame.
Staying at Home
As we move through the seven choices, I will give a brief synopsis of each , and then comment on eight characteristics so you can have a good perspective on pricing, food, activities, socialization and overall quality of life.
1. Staying in your own home (alone). Many people want to stay in their home as long as they can. I understand why. It is where you have built a life. If you have been living in your home for decades, you have a lifetime of memories. It is comfortable. I get it. You like your main chair, the view out of one particular window, your dog or cat hanging around. Your friendly or even unfriendly neighbor. They are yours.
However, full-time care at home could cost up to $225,000 per year, unaffordable for most of us non-Musk people. However, it can be affordable if you need 4-8 hours of care per day, about $3,000-4,000 per month. The downside - your food choices may be limited. Your socialization may be extremely limited. Your activities may be scarce. However, you are in your home and it’s your life. It’s something to think about it.
· care quality - usually pretty good, but depends on the caregivers
· affordability – 24 hour care not affordable; good for 3-4 hours per day
· food choices - limited, but yours
· activity choices – limited, but yours
· socialization - poor
· ability to do what you want when you want – great
· real life vs recreated one – it’s as real as it gets
· overall quality of life – can go either way depending on all of the above
2 and 3. Staying home with your adult children living with you (and/or)
Living with your adult children in their home.
This is how things used to be before approximately 1960 and the beginning of nursing homes and then assisted living. If you lived long enough, you lived with your kids, or they stayed in the house with you. In many cultures around the globe this is still how it’s done. We now think that NOT living with your family as you age is normal, but it is actuality, it is an anomaly in human history to have millions of people living out their final decades and years not being with their family.
There are a lot of positives to living with your family. It is a good option when you are lacking in funds, and lower-income America experiences this more than middle to upper-middle class America. However, statistics show that many Boomers, due to outliving their savings, the economy, or not-so-great saving habits, will NOT have the private funds for medium to upscale senior communities, and won’t want to go into poor to mediocre level government subsidized housing. The upside is that you get to see your kids every day, your grandkids often, and, on a daily basis, you are part of the family. There may be animals around, people coming in and out – it is real life. And if it is your own home – even better. It is your comfort zone.
The downside is – you may have to see your kids every day! You thought you had finally gotten rid of them when they moved out in their late teens or early twenties! If you don’t have a particularly close relationship with them, it may not be pleasant. Also, depending on your condition and their abilities, you may not get the higher quality personal and/or medical care, socialization, food and activities you may get in a senior living setting. It also could get awkward if your adult kids are helping with your personal care such as bathing, dressing and especially toileting. And, in a worst-case scenario, they may get burned out caring for you, the relationship could deteriorate, and some old, dysfunctional behaviors could come out of the family closet. On the other hand, in a functional (versus dysfunctional) and loving setting, it could be a godsend, where you spend the last years of your life with the people you most love, mentoring and nurturing grandchildren, actively participating in a family and the real life around you. This is why it is so important to know who you are and what you want, before you start your search.
· care quality - could vary, depending upon your caregiver. From great to neglect
· affordability – great. It may not cost you anything
· food choices - limited, but yours. Could be good if someone is a good cook!
· activity choices – could go either way – could be limited, could be wonderful family things going on, but may not be geared to what you want to do
· socialization – great with family, poor with your peers
· ability to do what you want when you want – great
· real life vs recreated one – it’s as real as it gets
· overall quality of life – great if it works, not so great if it doesn’t
4. Having a caregiver live with you.
This is not a new option but doesn’t happen as often as it used to. When my in-laws were in the last years of their lives decades ago in Miami Beach, they had two Jamaican sisters split twelve-hour shifts caring for them. Many of their friends also had full-time caregivers, usually immigrants, living with them. It was less expensive then, as they didn’t go through an agency with its high costs, and they basically “traded” room and board, along with a small salary, for their personal care. This was before there were many assisted living communities. It was the only alternative besides living with your adult children or having them come over all the time to care for you. (Remember those days – when a big family would “split” the time and take shifts to take care of Mom or Dad?)
24-hour live-in care can be a good option – when it works, and when you can find the right people. With our current topsy-turvy immigration issues going on these days, this may prove to be difficult, although I imagine for people living in the gulf states and those close to a border, it still may be doable.
If you are physically or cognitively limited and/or almost bed-bound, and if funds are limited, and you can find the right people, this could be a wonderful alternative. However, in reality, and if you can scrape up the money, this may be one of those situations where a small group home or an assisted living community is a better option for you.
· care quality - could vary, depending upon your caregiver. From great to neglect.
· affordability –good to great. You are using your home as a revenue generator which reduces your cost of care.
· food choices - limited, but yours. Could be good if someone is a good cook!
· activity choices – generally, very limited. Most live-ins are not that astute in planning, initiating or implementing activities. But at this stage, you may not want to do that much!
· socialization – poor with your peers, but you do have someone there. Sometimes one person is enough.
· ability to do that you want when you want – great
· real life vs recreated one – it’s as real as it gets
· overall quality of life – can go either way depending on all of the above
Alternative #4 option. Having a whole new family live with you. A variation of the old-school/having one or two people splitting twelve hour shifts caring for you is to have a whole family move in! If you have a colonial, two-story home, why not think about having the caregiver’s whole family move in! They could live upstairs, and you could be downstairs. The upside is that you’d have all these people around, kids flying about, laughter, crying, food and music. Maybe they’d even be a different culture and you could have a wonderful experience living a new life in that culture. To make this work, of course, any family should be fully vetted, with professional background checks. But for those daring enough, it could be a wonderful adventure.
5 and 6. (New Choice) Having another person who needs care live you in your home (and/or you living with someone else in their home.
These are new options which many people have not thought about and not many people do in this country, but that I am advocating for.
We will be writing much more about this in the future, but for now, I believe that having two people receiving home care in one of the person’s homes will be a new, important paradigm in the upcoming generation.
Here is the upside -
· it reduces the cost of caregiving, as you will be splitting the caregiving costs with someone else.
· You also can earn some extra income ($500-1000 per month as the landlord) to further help pay for the remaining costs. This may then allow you to stay in your own home longer if you choose.
· It also solves the problem of social isolation, which is a big issue. You’ll have a companion there.
· It helps solve the problem of society not having enough caregivers. We are doubling up.
· It will allow for caregivers to make more money. If you both paid 60% of the going wage, it would be a more livable wage for caregivers.
For some people, this could be a wonderful solution if you just can’t see yourself moving to a senior community.
downside – you lose some privacy. You will be having someone else living in your home. You may not like them, their family or friends. It also may be hard to find someone as this method is not yet mainstream. However, I (CSS, my company) may be able to help with this.
· care quality - it should be good, as you are only sharing a caregiver with one person
· affordability – will make staying at home more affordable; good for 3-4 or 4-8 hours per day
· food choices - limited, but yours
· activities – limited, but better with two than being alone.
· socialization – better than being alone; not as much as in a senior community
· ability to do what you want when you want – great
· real life vs re-created one – it’s real
· overall quality of life – if it works, much better than living alone
7. New – Living with a group of friends
I’m not exactly sure why this hasn’t caught on yet, maybe it will take Boomers a few more years to get it – but another option you may have is moving in with two or three of your good friends. Maybe lifelong friends don’t want to live with each other, - maybe that’s why they’re lifelong friends - but for some people wouldn’t living with your best friends be preferable than living with a bunch of strangers in a senior community? (I said for some of us).
Imagine if four people sold their homes, say for $500,000, and put that money together, they could build a beautiful four-apartment suite for two million dollars. Or, more likely, if one of them already had a big house, you could all just live together there. It may take some refurbishing – you’d probably all want your own bathroom, but it could be done. You could have all the amenities you want. Need a big library – you got it. Want a pickleball court – easy. A big garden – done. I do believe that people we be creative and two, three and four friends or more may opt out of a larger assisted living community and decide to live together. They could “share the care” and have one nursing assistant care for all of them, making it quite affordable. I believe that soon we’ll be hearing stories about friends having the time of their lives creating their own little senior community.
The downside – the finances could get tricky, especially when one person dies or wants to leave. In the business, we call that an “exit strategy.” You would have to have an agreement of some kind where you would agree to buy out the person who is leaving. Or, with everyone living longer, you could keep your bedroom/apartment in your family estate for the next generation. The best scenario is that group would always have a new, approved, person waiting in the wings and you would use their money to pay out the person leaving, not unlike a LifePlan community now. Again, if you would like to explore this, please contact us. We can help make it happen!
Also, it is possible that you could hurt a long-term relationship by living together; people are different day-to-day than when you just see them occasionally. But, as the old saying goes, better to have lived and loved than to never have loved at all. Maybe it’s just something I would want to do, but if you have the opportunity and the right group of people, why not go for it?
· care quality - it should be good, with a 3-1 or 4-1 resident/caregiver ratio.
· affordability – sharing the care is more affordable.
· food choices - you will be picking the food. Should be good!
· activity choices – it should be fine. While not with all the choices of a senior community, the whole point of this is to do the things that you want to do!
· socialization – couldn’t be better
· ability to do what you want when you want – couldn’t be better
· real life vs recreated one – couldn’t be better
· overall quality of life – couldn’t be better
I hope you enjoyed reading about these options, and maybe it got you thinking. Hmm, maybe there is another way for me, rather than just staying home alone or having to move to senior living residence….
Next up – your traditional senior living options.
Dean Solden is the founder and owner of Creative Senior Solutions (CSS), a management, development and consulting company specializing in senior living. (www.creativeseniorsolutions.com).
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You can reach Dean at (734) 260-3600 or dean@creativeseniorsolutions.com.
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