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Musings Report 2024-36 9-7-24 The Impossible Dream: 70 Million Boomers Retire in Style
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The Impossible Dream: 70 Million Boomers Retire in Style
I've reached the point in life where I see a sharp line dividing the adult populace: there are those of us who are old enough to retire who are taking care of very elderly parents / family members at home, and then there's everyone else.
Instead of life getting easier as we age, it gets harder--much harder, as we no longer have the same energy we had in our 40s and 50s.
This article captures what life is like for those of us fulfilling parents' wishes to live out their final years at home: The Crushing Financial Burden of Aging at Home: Families face soaring costs and mounting pressures in taking care of their loved ones. 'I never feel truly free.' (WSJ.com)
In my case, we spent the last 8 years taking care of my mother-in-law, the last 6 years of her life here at our home. (She passed away at 92 last year.) So from ages 62 to 70, we had two jobs: caregiving and our self-employment paid work. In those years, we managed one vacation--not exactly the ideal retirement scenario.
Many others have it much worse: they're caring for an elderly, ill parent or spouse by themselves, with limited financial resources. Those who opt to pay for 24/7 home care for parents or spouses with dementia or Alzheimer's are paying $240,000 a year--a sum that will consume the entire wealth of most families in a few years:
Here are excerpts from the article:
"Americans want to grow old in their own homes. But pursuing that dream has gotten harder, and is putting huge financial and emotional strains on families.
In Nebraska, Christine Salhany spends about $240,000 a year for 24-hour in-home care for her husband who has Alzheimer’s. In Illinois, Carolyn Brugioni’s dad exhausted his savings and took out a home-equity line-of-credit to pay for home healthcare.
Traci Lamb closed her business to take care of her mom in Florida. And in California, Cheryl Orr delayed retirement to help pay for care and home modifications for her wife, who has dementia.
Soaring costs of in-home care, medical advances that extend lives but require ongoing help, and the growing ranks of older baby boomers are creating new pressures. Spouses, adult children and siblings are putting their lives on hold to care for relatives, wrestling with sleep deprivation and constant worry. Families are draining savings to hire help, pay for medical care, and modify homes.
More than 11,000 people in the U.S. are turning 65 every day and the vast majority—77% of Americans age 50 and older according to an AARP survey—want to live as long as possible in their current home.
Those needing round-the-clock in-home care can expect a median cost of about $290,000, which is more than double the annual median cost of a private room in a nursing home facility and four times the annual median cost of a private room in assisted living, according to Genworth."
The drain on caregivers isn't just financial--it's [physical and emotional:
“I have to be very vigilant. I never feel truly free,” says Christine. That is a feeling expressed by many. Four in 10 family caregivers rarely or never feel relaxed, according to a 2023 AARP survey. Dementia care is among the most taxing, physically, financially and emotionally."
For those families opting to place a parent or spouse in an institutional care facility, the cost is around $13,000 a month and up. Assisted living and private care homes generally cost between $6,000 and $9,000 a month.
How many families have the means to pay these rates for years?
My Mom is 95 and has lived in an assisted living/care facility that she bought into 18 years ago with the proceeds from selling her house. The monthly fees have consumed her own inheritance from her parents, who passed away in the late 1980s.
My siblings and I are relieved that there are still funds to pay for our Mom's care. That there is no inheritance doesn't matter; what matters is that we're not burdened with enormous monthly fees for her care in our own retirement.
We are not alone. Our neighbors are 80 years old and they recently moved her 102-year old mother from their home to a care home, as she and her husband could no longer lift her Mom out of bed.
In many cases, the caregivers don't get to actually retire until they're well into old age. Family conflicts arise as some adult children refuse to do their share, burdening one sibling with the workload and financial costs. (Forgive and forget? Well, try spending six years taking care of a very elderly parent at home and see how you feel about a wealthy sibling ditching out on all the responsibility for their parent, contributing nothing to the costs and making excuses while taking lavish exotic vacations. The rank unfairness is a bitter pill to swallow.)
People living longer put an enormous strain on families and the government. The wealth that was intended to be an inheritance passed onto children and grandchildren is consumed by elderly care: at $150,000 a year, even $1 million is consumed in a few years.
The strategy pursued by many families is to transfer ownership of the parents' home to the adult children long before retirement, so the parent's remaining assets will be modest enough to qualify for Medicaid, where the federal government pays for the parents' care home expenses.
Federal programs for retirees, the disabled and the elderly already consume 44% of the budget, and this percentage will rise sharply in the decades ahead.
As we all know, the federal government is already borrowing trillions of dollars to cover its ballooning expenditures, and 80% of the expected growth of federal spending is Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the debt.
As the 70+ million baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1965) retire, how will families and the nation pay for the retirement of a generation of this scale? As this chart illustrates, in retirement, the Boomer generation will be more than twice the size of the preceding Silent Generation.
As a rough estimate, let's say there will be 30 million more elderly than there were in the previous generation--the equivalent of adding an entire nation of elderly retirees. Yes, many elderly people continue working into their 70s and 80s, and many are still living alone and do not need any assistance. One of our neighbors is a World War II vet who is 102, and he still drives and lives on his own. But he is an outlier. Few reach old age without needing assistance of some kind.
The decline of the population's health as poor diet and inactive lifestyles take their toll will heavily impact the Boomers' need for care. And the decline in the health of younger generations will also impact the ability of the nation to fund the costs of caring for 60 to 70 million elderly and supply the workforce to provide all the care.
Anecdotally, there is little evidence that new care facilities are being built at a rate anywhere close to meeting the future need for such facilities. Even if elderly Boomers wish to move out of their own homes into a care home, there may not be enough facilities to meet demand. There may be few options to spending one's last years at home, but with what level of care if that care costs $13,000 a month--$156,000 a year?
The younger generations expecting to inherit the immense wealth piled up by Boomers in home equity and stocks may be in for a shock as they learn that 24/7 home care for a grandparent with dementia costs $250,000 a year unless they provide the care themselves, and that even modest care facilities can cost $100,000 a year.
Combine the popping of the Everything Bubble with the rising costs of care, and it becomes apparent that dreams of inheriting fortunes are as unrealistic as the dreams of 60 to 70 million elderly Boomers of living comfortably at home with caregivers doing all the work.
The retirement hopes of those with elderly parents to care for will also go up in smoke, as I can attest from our own experience: the Golden Years of one's 60s and 70s can be consumed by caregiving, at the cost of one's own retirement funds and health.
It's estimated that around 30% of the debilities of aging are the result of genetics; the other 70% are the result of our lifestyle and life choices. Piling up money in the hopes it will be enough may not be enough. The higher-return investment may well be in radically changing our lifestyle to become as healthy as possible as we age so we won't need the kind of care that will bankrupt families and the nation.
Highlights of the Blog
Playing It Safe 9/6/24
Is the "Everything Bubble" About to Pop? 9/4/24
What If All the Conventional Models Fail to Predict What Happens Next? 9/2/24
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Managed to fix a Windows 11 laptop battery that was no longer charging. A search for solutions turned up the dreaded "hold down the ESC key during bootup and select F2:" you know you're in trouble when you have to start with F-Keys, which open menus hidden from normal users: BIOS, etc. It's similar to opening Command Prompt and typing cryptic instructions that end in /f.
The battery checked out as functioning, so it was on to these very typical instructions:
1) Open "Device Manager".
2) Expand "Batteries".
3) Right-click the "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery".
4) Click "Uninstall".
5) At the prompt put a check in the box to remove the current driver.
6) Shutdown the computer.
7) Remove the battery for minute and then put it back in.
NOTE: this is a non-trivial project, requiring removing a bunch of tiny screws and prying off the back of the laptop, removing four more screws and gently extracting the battery.
8) When the computer comes back up it should automatically find the driver.
9) Go to Device Manager.
10) Expand Batteries.
11) Right-click "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery".
12) Click "Search automatically for updated driver software". Do the same thing with Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Embedded Controller.
No big deal, right? Just another hike into the Windows thicket. I was Mac-only from 1984 (Mac model 0001) to 1998, when I took a job that demanded learning Windows and Linux PCs.
It's a good feeling when you can actually fix something rather than be forced to buy a replacement.
What's on the Book Shelf
The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore
Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern War -- Winner of the 2023 Gold Medal Award, Best Military History Memoir, Military Writers Society of America
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
Arsenic and old sugarcane: cleaning up Hawaii in the fallout from wildfires
How to Tell If What You're Reading Was Written By AI
Heartbreaking reality of fit patients in their 20s being hit with colon cancer is laid bare by oncologist who reveals his 'critical' discovery about the cause-- obesity, diet of highly processed foods....
2 foods could be fueling cancer epidemic in young people: UPFs make up an estimated 73% of the US food supply, and the average American adult gets more than 60% of their daily calories from them.
The World Economy is About to be Wiped Out by a Black Swan — Here's How You Can Prepare... glad this wasn't a click-bait headline, just the facts...
Plant pandemics: They are the next big contagion and pose threats to global food security (via Cheryl A.)
A boomer couple who have pensions after working their whole lives said they're just scraping by after retiring: 'I can't imagine getting by on Social Security alone'
The Eruption of Mt. Vesuvius Wasn’t Pompeii’s Only Killer: While the volcano’s eruption was deadly, research shows that many people in the ancient Roman city died in building collapses from the earthquake associated with the outburst.
Off the Grid, Extremely Online: In corners of the internet — and in wooded, undeveloped parts of the country — young men are documenting their efforts to live off the land.
Into The Great Depression, Part 1: The Roaring '20s & The Creation Of The Fed-- insightful discussion of the gold standard as a double-edged sword...
China’s one-child policy hangover: Scarred women dismiss Beijing’s pro-birth agenda
China Unleashes Rapid Drop in New-Home Prices With Relaxed Curbs-- it isn't working...
"If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment." Henry David Thoreau
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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