Learning from experience - caring for aging parents

Int eh New York Times, Jane Gross gives us an enlightening look at, What I Wish I Had Done Differently when caring for her aging mother.

She learned some things, but the common theme of them all is, like we talk about here is plan ahead so you don’t have to make decisions in haste.

One of the most interesting things to me about her article is that a person can’t get home care benefits when they don’t have a home:

What never occurred to me is that once my mother no longer had a home, we lost the option of setting her up with home care. Eventually too incapacitated to live out her days in assisted living and unwilling to move in with either of her children, a nursing home was her only choice — a happy one, as it turned out, but not in the early going, for any of us.

My fourth mistake was not understanding the limits of a long-term care insurance policy that had cost us about $7,000 a year because of my mother’s advanced age when we purchased it. It would have paid for retrofitting her own home, or even mine. It would have paid for 24/7 home health attendants. But it was virtually useless in an assisted-living apartment, and once my mother was in a nursing home, the policy benefit wasn’t ours to spend.

That’s some food for thought, there.

Again, understand your benefits and options and make the plans you can before you need them.