Posts Tagged With ‘ Aging parents ’

A common worry many adult children express about aging parents is that the parents are alone and it’s time they got some help. The kids are worried because of changes in the parent’s health, mobility or memory problems. The aging parent may not agree that there is anything to worry about, and this, of course, leads to resistance. Assisted living is something adult children frequently mention as a solution to their worries. But is it? There are pros and cons to consider and the family needs to understand what assisted living is and what it isn’t.  On a personal note, I had a 96 year old mother-in-law... Continue Reading

Do you have a stubborn aging parent? Are you worried that he or she is doing unsafe or just plain dumb things? You’re not alone. Here at AgingParents.com, we see this scenario often, and it’s frequently about control over the family finances. Here’s an example, based on a real case with some elements altered for privacy’s sake. The matriarch, age 85, decides to move to a high end assisted living facility, due to her physical difficulties. She has lived in her elegant home for 60 years and it is, of course, much more valuable than when she and her husband, now deceased, bought it. Her financial... Continue Reading

Questions about parents’ finances often come up when a parent starts to need some help. Basics like shopping, cooking or bathing can become too difficult for an elder with chronic illness, frailty and problems with memory. It may have started at retirement when income became fixed but unpredictable expenses weren’t figured into the cost of living. You, the adult children grow concerned that Mom or Dad need to spend more now for new things in their lives, such as paying a caregiver. You ask questions. “How are your finances?” and “Can you afford this helper?” Often there is push-back... Continue Reading

These ethnic crime rings, as I call them, work like this—many of their elders are foreign born and the oldest may struggle with English no matter how long they’ve lived in the U.S.. These elders are always more comfortable with “their own”. The elders trust those who speak their first language. They trust those who share cultural, religious and other habits in common. This sets them up nicely for being targeted by unscrupulous members of their own ethnic group. It can be any ethnicity. Aging is aging and predators find way to steal any way they can. I have heard about pastors of their... Continue Reading

Imagine your aging parent or other loved one living on his or her own and losing power from a natural disaster or an intentional blackout. What would they do? Massive weather events across the U.S. leave millions without power, sometimes for long periods.  There are lessons for all of us in what we are seeing. Power outages bring their own crises, particularly to vulnerable elders. Many elders live alone, some with major mobility problems and some depending on electricity to run medical devices. At AgingParents.com, elders are our focus. No client of ours has yet raised the issue of an aging parent... Continue Reading

Agatha, 60, had married a man 25 years her senior. He had one son who lived outside the US and was not close to his father. Agatha and her husband had a lot of good times until he began to show signs of dementia. Before long, Agatha was a full-time caregiver. She lost her husband within two years of the emergence of his symptoms. Now, Agatha finds herself in charge of everything her husband had handled before: investing, management of retirement funds, household repairs, maintenance, and decisions she had never made in her life. She was not financially literate when she got married and she feels... Continue Reading

Everywhere we look, there is media focused on how to have a great retirement. No wonder. 10,000 people a day are turning 65. The emphasis is largely on urging you to get financial advice so you can feel “secure” and “reach your goals” all suggesting that these are the components of a happy retirement. But is that all there is to it? Of course, saving and controlling spending are essential to protect against running out of money but there is far more to a satisfying retirement than your finances. Generally, financial advisors and managers do not address the subject of a healthy retirement... Continue Reading

Hearing, memory, and mobility all going at once: the aging triple whammy. We see it with Walter, 91, a very accomplished CEO in his day. He has always been a take-charge guy. But now, he has a severe hearing loss which limits his life considerably. He hates hearing aids and won’t wear them. He rejects using a cell phone because of it, and he can barely hear on a regular landline phone. His memory is going, and fast. He does not like to admit this. He never wanted help. Accepting that he forgets a lot means that he would actually have to ask for help. Further, he is now having trouble walking.... Continue Reading

When an aging parent is diagnosed with dementia of any kind, it can be devastating and confusing to the family. For some, there is denial: ”It’s not that bad, I don’t see anything wrong with her, and let’s just let things stay the same for now.” For others, there is overreacting and trying to push the aging parent into a care facility before that may be needed, just because of assumptions about dementia. Family fights over these things, such as we address at AgingParents.com, are not unusual. As the disease affects each person in an individual way, it is impossible to generalize much... Continue Reading

Your aging parent may have demanded something from you long ago: “Promise you’ll never put me in a home!” And you may have promised that. Perhaps you never thought through the implications. For elders who saw what healthcare was like before Medicare in 1965, their fears are founded in what things looked like then: unregulated warehouses for old people. Assisted living did not yet exist. Choices were few and none of them looked like anything other than what descriptions they were given. These included “God’s waiting room”, “a place you wait to die”, “hell hole” “it’s a bunch... Continue Reading