ERE or Semi-ERE past Age 65

[ffj]

Anecdote:

Did a job yesterday with a buddy and he talked about his 96 yo mother-in-law who lives in an assisted-living home. They charge her $7,000/month but here's the kicker: any intervention, and they are generous with what constitutes an intervention, costs extra. Medication management, which is extra even for OTC drugs, helping a patient in or out of bed or toilet, bathing, etc. is charged.

The $7,000/month is a base rate. And he said they were lucky to find an opening for her. Yikes

[Scott 2]

@ffj - That's steep. Makes me think about this satire on Netflix:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Care_a_Lot

[ffj]

@Scott

That is a good movie and after watching Rosamund Pike in this movie and "Gone Girl" I can truly say she scares me because nobody is that good of an actor.

[J_]

Growing old as I am/do/plan/imagine.

First I studied health (lifestyle) and nutrition, gone deep, looked how it works for my body and mind. And practised. So I will stay away as long as possible from the “health industry.

Second, I have a plan, and realised it. As mentioned also by others: I have the possibility to live on one level with sleep-, cook- shower- accomodation ( groundfloor or (stair) lift). Modern wheelchairs can do a lot. I live on a location where I can reach groceries, a hospital and a library by foot or w-chair.

Third, I do my best to maintain or make a social net on location. I discuss with peers and younger friends how to find or combine (financial) efforts to organise care if need arise. (And avoid traps as mentioned by @jacob)

I have looked (in advance) for hospices for my last moments, in case I have some.

Such plans and ideas and circumstances change in time. Having thought about it gives me peace of mind.

For now I live the “freedom to “ life.

[7Wannabe5]

I said: in pursuit of Transcendent Eco-Sexuality...

Suo said: I mean, that's iDave, right there. It's staring you in the face!

No offense to iDave, but it is too difficult for me to intuit his adult masculine spirit animal from interaction on this forum, and I was imagining a mature male energy partner rather along these lines:





Goddess, grant me this one last wish...

...and I will not even whine if there is no pudding served in my final resting place.

[Henry]

Looks like an age enhanced Michaelangelo's David. You should juxtapose photos - iDave or miDave. I see meme potential.

[7Wannabe5]

@Henry:

It's an AI generated image based on a prompt somebody (not me) created using keywords/phrases such as "Zeus, gray hair, ruggedly handsome..." I happened upon it two side-paths away from a search trail I generated with keywords "old lumberjack" which is a wee bit closer to what I think I could actually obtain on the masculine energy market.

[suomalainen]

@candide - The insurers have modeled the boomers, I'm sure. Entire consulting practices specialize in analyzing scenarios like these, which then become standard products licensed by all the major insurers. If there is a mistake, it's likely impacting the full industry. This is when regulatory capture raises its ugly head. If everyone's risk pool is bad, there's simply not enough money. Promises will not be met.

It's funny how bad insurance companies are at insurance.

https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2024/02/22 ... s-by-2026/

Tom McInerney, the Richmond, Virginia-based company’s chief executive officer, today told securities analysts that Genworth has received state regulator approvals for $28 billion of the $33 billion in LTCI premium increases and LTCI policy benefits reductions needed to make the LTCI business stable.
...
The company was once a major writer of life insurance, annuities and private mortgage insurance, and it was one of the pillars of the long-term care insurance market.

Genworth suffered from severely inaccurate LTCI pricing assumptions and ended up suspending new sales of life, annuity and LTCI products.

Edit: see also the clusterfuck of variable annuitites issued in the late 1990s.

[Scott 2]

But a lot of people made a lot of money. And now tax payers and policy holders foot the bill. So - maybe the companies are pretty great at insurance?

Unfortunately, a company that purely follows the math isn't competitive. There's an art to developing the risk pool, which often becomes winner take all. The results can be precarious, but are also symptomatic of a broader market dysfunction.

Hence my reluctance towards an LTC policy.

[7Wannabe5]

It's also the case that the math on which the insurance industry is based isn't really math.

[DutchGirl]

Personally it's state pension + work pension + individual retirement account + regular investments/savings + government benefits for the disabled + government retirement home + hospice.
Potentially euthanasia as it is legal here under certain circumstances (like with a painful terminal disease).

[Sclass]

Money certainly makes some aspects of the end game easier.

Having watched both of my parents die with more money than they could spend my conclusion is dying still sucks but in different ways.

Both parents died with more money than they could use. And it took management to use the money as well. Money without some kind of care management is like electricity without robotics and CPUs. You need the juice but somebody must be there to deploy it effectively. It’s necessary but not sufficient.

They basically spent ten years being aided in all the basics. I’m not sure what we gained here. Funny, both showed the desire to live up till the end. Only in the midnight hour did my dad say “I’ve had enough I don’t want to live anymore.” This was a week before he died. Up to then he fought. He was so difficult the care contractor piled on some “unkindness fees” for his belligerent behavior.

So the money allowed them to delay the inevitable. And the path grows more and more miserable and ridiculous. Human cranes. Medical grade lazy boy chairs which double as a bed. The smell of bodily waste and in dad’s case decaying flesh fills the air. Feet get swollen and cracked and the only thing left to do is slather them with analgesic lotion and cover them with special socks. It’s ridiculous.

The majority of their funds were untouched. They oversaved or maybe they just couldn’t buy life.

One of my friends took himself out when he was suffering with late stage cancer. His wife told me he sent her out for an errand and he took himself out in his garage. He wrote that he didn’t want to put her through caring for him. She was really upset he made the decision for her.

[Henry]

was so difficult the care contractor piled on some “unkindness fees” for his belligerent behavior.

I'm going to have to budget for this.

[7Wannabe5]

Money without some kind of care management is like electricity without robotics and CPUs. You need the juice but somebody must be there to deploy it effectively. It’s necessary but not sufficient.

They basically spent ten years being aided in all the basics. I’m not sure what we gained here. Funny, both showed the desire to live up till the end. Only in the midnight hour did my dad say “I’ve had enough I don’t want to live anymore.” This was a week before he died. Up to then he fought. He was so difficult the care contractor piled on some “unkindness fees” for his belligerent behavior.

This was also exactly my experience in the role of primary hospice care facilitator for my multi-multi-millionaire friend. And, I have good reason to believe that his "belligerance" might have been medically sedated while he was in the hospital for a couple weeks before returning home to hospice. And, if you believe that the world of the future is going to be increasingly full of unpredictable events such as the Covid lockdown, it was definitely my experience that money does not flow as readily towards the goods/services you might desire in such a situation. For small, sad example, my friend, who was usually a dietary health-nut, wanted me to cook him some of his favorite, unhealthy, foods from his childhood, since he was dying anyways, and I couldn't obtain some of them for love or money during the lock-down.

I would say the main thing that made his last days reasonably comfortable was that he did have two competent humans with reasonable levels of adult feminine care-taker energy on his "team", although we were both thrust into somewhat inappropriate roles. Basically, I (his best friend's girlfriend) teamed up with the woman who was second-in-charge at his place of business to play the role of his wife/sister/daughter for the last few months of his life, but in this almost surreal context that found the two of us doing stuff like counting out some of his stashes of gold coins on top of the dryer in his basement and desperately calling/bribing every private nurse agency possible. because there was no way in hell either of us was changing his diapers, although I was willing to be the one responsible/legally designated for giving him morphine, since nurse aides can't do that legally, and we couldn't round up any licensed nurses during the crisis. I would also note that the attempted "bribery" did not work, but the mention of affiliation with well-respected hospice agency did work. IOW, one hardcore problem with "buying care" is that the most caring humans generally can't be bought. OTOH, competence can be bought, but in crisis situation, the path to purchasing it may be strewn with debris.

[chenda]

This was also exactly my experience in the role of primary hospice care facilitator for my multi-multi-millionaire friend.

Do you know how is financial affairs were administrated in his final days? Had he given power of attorney or similar to anyone or did it become a mess?

[candide]

Something important to point out here. If you take things brought up by Sclass, Scott and 7, and combine it with the example from my family, you see that you don't just throw money at these first-order systems, you have to have people who will check up and provide a lot of service in the cracks.

There are examples in this now growing corpus (heh ... I'm letting that pun stay) in this thread of using money at that meta-level, but its gonna really cost you. Seems like a surefire win for team "social capital," yeah?

Well, what I'm afraid of is it seems like a lot of people on the social capital side are assuming an amount of input from other people which is closer to the amount that those us have walked this path see needs to be put in on the level of cracks and oversight alone..

Hmm... maybe I'm opening up a counter-argument of "you are going to be seeing them X hours anyway, as well as be on call constantly, you might as well take advantage of economies of scale with cooking an extra portion and putting the laundry together." This relies on the person being easy to care for. Even then, you are at best putting your life completely on hold, and at worst a slave.

That's the thing about being infirm. Idle hands gives you lots of time to think of things other people can be doing. And control might become the last jolly you have left. It can get pretty twisted. (ETA: in other words, when you pay for assisted living for a relative, you paying for the space to not have to listen to every whim of a former adult -- potentially get into an argument with an elder with dementia about how unreasonable they are being. It's nice to be able to go home from that).

I know arguments have been made upthread about how this state of affairs is new. Yeah, but so is this many people living this long, as well as families this small and this widespread geographically. Also, both men and women working full-time. So if we were to Make Elderly Care Great Again, we would need to have the implied person (used to be daughter in law) who will serve as beast of burden, and then which member (used to be oldest unmarried daughter) who would be picking up the home economic slack.

Recreating that or that stack of functions... challenging.

[7Wannabe5]

@chenda;

Well, he pretty much forced himself to have some lucid moments right up to the end, because he didn't want to fully give up administration over his financial affairs. He would wake up from a morphine haze, and literally the first thing he would do was look at the last GTD sort of list he had made for himself the last time he was free from the haze, and then check his financial affairs on his smartphone and/or make call to his private line access to brokerage account manager. He had already transferred as much of his fortune as possible to trust administered by a team of lawyers held for his early-20s adopted daughter (she was born in prison to drug-addicted prostitute who was his long-term much younger "girlfriend" and was not up to helping out with his hospice for a number of reasons with which I could empathize.) The main problem was that he did virtually nothing to cover management of his business, which he was still running at age 80. I actually had to deal with scenes right out of Dickens, in which somewhat unscrupulous individuals, pretending like they were making a sick-bed visit, tried to get him to sign-off on paperwork related to the business to their advantage. OTOH, in a very last minute burst of off-the-books philanthropy, he opened up and funded small brokerage accounts for a couple of the nursing aides we hired. And I could barely sleep or leave the house without having to consider the prospect of somebody else sneakily searching the house for more of the hidden gold coins.

He wanted to stay lucid, but the cancer had gotten into his bones, which is supposed to be one of the most painful things possible. So, finally one night, he had the nursing aide wake me up around 2 AM, and he gruff-apologetically said something like "Shoot me up, sweetheart, I'm screwed." I don't think he lasted much more than a week after that.

Recreating that or that stack of functions... challenging.

This is almost exactly what I was attempting to do in more generalized and modular model with my Lentil Baby "scheme." One of the problems with moving form ERE1 to ERE2 from my perspective is that there is too much adult masculine fence-post-pounding energy and not enough adult feminine warm-lubricating-massage energy in the mix.

[chenda]

@7w5 - Thanks for sharing. There's a lot to think about there though I'm going to guess his approach to his financial affairs was what made him so successful in earlier life.

[candide]

I wanted to make it explicit that my concerns are really about the last, last bit of life. This terrible zone could be as short as a few months, seems to have a median of two years, but can be 10 years... I see that it being 6% of grandma's life was a some seriously bad luck.

So I'll admit I have derailed us a bit from Scott's question

What does ERE or Semi-ERE look like during one's last 2-3 decades? When the gradual decline of aging sets in?

... and spent most of my time instead answering what past 80 can look like. Also, I addressed a steep rather than the gradual decline.

By all means, plan to kick ass in your 70s. My grandparents did. But at some point plan for resignation, being easy to take care of, and being ready to pass batons.

[ertyu]

I wanted to make it explicit that my concerns are really about the last, last bit of life. This terrible zone could be as short as a few months, seems to have a median of two years, but can be 10 years... I see that it being 6% of grandma's life was a some seriously bad luck.

hemlock is a secure species, and as far as I understand, death from drinking an infusion of the seeds puts you to sleep quite peacefully and nice. I have multiple instances of cancer as well as dementia in my family tree, and am unmarried/child-free. I have considered, after I'm done coasting/semi-ERE-ing via low-paid uni lecturer job, engaging in a number of hikes in areas where hemlock is native and locating a plant. Given that hemlock is hemlock, I don't imagine that would be too easy and straightforward. However, having a bunch of hemlock seeds in a napkin somewhere in a drawer would make me feel quite nice.

Even if I did have friends or relatives willing to care for me in old age, one read through redddit reports easily persuades one that one wouldn't want to inflict old age elder care on anyone one actually likes. I wouldn't want to put anyone under the pressure to have to euthanize me just because I am a coward either. On the other hand, I don't know how much I trust myself not to want to cling to life. A cancer, where one is in constant pain, would make it easier I imagine. With dementia, however, I see myself going "... maybe not just quite yet" during my more lucid times. I don't know what exactly to do about that.