Tag: senior citizens
How To Care For Two Parents At Once Without Going Broke

How To Care For Two Parents At Once Without Going Broke

By Chris Taylor

NEW YORK (Reuters) – For years, Madeleine Smithberg has been at the forefront of American comedy as co-creator of The Daily Show and a talent coordinator for Late Show with David Letterman.

That sense of humor was especially handy during the last few years. That is because Smithberg had to cope with not one, but two elderly parents in rapid decline.

“It’s heartbreaking,” says Smithberg, 56, who heads a production company in Los Angeles. “And yet it’s invisible, because nobody talks about it.”

Dealing with one aging parent is challenging enough, whether you are helping navigate the complex healthcare system, paying for an assisted living facility or struggling with cognitive decline as the parent slips away. But the emotional and financial stress can be more than double if you are caring for both parents at the same time.

“It’s like having toddlers,” says Smithberg, whose father passed away in 2014 after she moved her parents to Los Angeles. “They’re hot, they’re cold, they’re hungry, they ask repetitive questions, and their needs become the most important thing in the world at that second… The biggest challenge of all is holding onto your patience.”

According to a new study by Northwestern Mutual, the childrearing comparison is apt: 59 percent of Americans feel that taking care of two parents between ages 85 and 90 would be even harder than handling two kids between ages 3 and 5.

Caregivers may also have kids of their own. In that case, it’s not just the “Sandwich Generation” – it’s a Triple-Decker.

The Northwestern Mutual report found that 38 percent of those surveyed have not planned at all for handling the financial burdens of caring for elderly parents.

The costs can be gigantic: National median costs for an assisted-living facility are now $43,200 annually, according to insurer Genworth Financial in its annual Cost of Care study. A private room in a nursing home? $91,250.

That is more than enough to blow up any financial plan. The following is advice on how to care for your parents without going bankrupt yourself.

LONG-TERM CARE

“Long-term care, long-term care, long-term care.” That’s the simple advice from Smithberg. Her father had taken out coverage for himself and his wife, which she calls “the best thing he ever did.”

Long-term care insurance covers expenses for nursing home or home care if you become incapacitated – most of which is not covered by Medicare. The coverage, like the care, can be extremely expensive, and to be sure, it did not cover all of Smithberg’s parents’ assisted-living costs. But, combined with their own life savings, the policy has meant that she has not yet had to dip into her own savings to pay for their care.

HAVE THE TALK

With the holidays right around the corner, it is one of the few times of year when far-flung families tend to gather in one place. Don’t let the opportunity slip by to discuss your parents’ expectations, should illness arrive. Find out if they have advance directives – documents that spell out what treatment they would and would not want during a life-threatening health crisis. Make sure you establish who has power of attorney, should they need someone to make important decisions.

“It’s the perfect time to have this kind of conversation,” says Kamilah Williams-Kemp, Northwestern Mutual’s vice president of long-term care. Her spouse’s grandmother lived to 102, and her mother-in-law has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

CONSIDER A REVERSE MORTGAGE

Reverse mortgages allow homeowners aged 62 and above to borrow against their home equity and to receive either a lump sum, a series of monthly checks or a line of credit that can be tapped as needed. The upside of a reverse mortgage? With the bank paying you every month, instead of the other way around, that check can help cover costs for in-home caregivers.

Tom Davison, a financial planner in Columbus, Ohio, is working with a 90-year-old woman whose daughter moved in with her as a caregiver. “A reverse mortgage could help (the daughter) pay her the wages she has given up,” Davison said.

The downside, of course: The family home will eventually become property of the bank.

GET HELP

Your first instinct as a child may be to drop everything and handle all your parents’ needs yourself. But if it comes at the cost of your own career, think about the ripple effects – on your retirement savings, on the needs of your own kids, even on your own sanity.

With Americans extending their lifespan – 76.4 years for men, 81.2 years for women, according to the National Center for Health Statistics – this is a family challenge that won’t be going away anytime soon.

Denver financial planner Kristi Sullivan recommends hiring a case manager to do the heavy lifting.

“For an hourly fee, these people can handle tasks quickly that it might take you hours to do – scheduling doctor’s appointments, handling medical payments and dealing with insurance, helping find a good nursing home or in-home care,” Sullivan says. “Spending this money may seem expensive, but it’s less than putting someone’s career on hold to become a full-time caregiver.”

(Editing by Lauren Young and Dan Grebler)

A young carer holds the hands of an elderly woman in a residential home for the elderly in Planegg near Munich in this June 19, 2007 file photo. REUTERS/Michaela Rehle/Files

Seniors Gear Up For The Sharing Economy

Seniors Gear Up For The Sharing Economy

By Mark Miller

CHICAGO (Reuters) — Five dollars may not sound like much pay for doing a job, but do not tell that to Brooke Folk.

At age 67, Folk spends up to 30 hours a week on projects generated through Fiverr.com, a shared-economy website that requires all its vendors to offer something to customers for just $5 and takes a 20 percent commission on earnings.

Folk, a former radio announcer and small business owner who lives near Pittsburgh, earns approximately $10,000 per year in supplemental income to his Social Security benefits on the site writing short stories and narrating scripts. He also sells — no surprise here — an e-book explaining how to succeed on Fiverr.

“When I first heard about it, I wondered if I should do something for $5, but what happens is you often upsell customers something additional. The most that I’ve billed an account is $1,300, and that’s a far cry from $5.”

More Americans than ever intend to keep working past traditional retirement age — whether it’s just to keep busy or because they need to financially — and entrepreneurship is becoming a more common alternative to full time jobs.

Entrepreneurs age 55-65 accounted for 26 percent of all startups last year, up from 15 percent in 1996, according to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.

Fiverr may be a millennial-dominated platform with just 2 percent of sellers over the age of 55, but growth in vendors age 55-64 shot up 375 percent at the end of the second quarter this year compared with a year ago, according to the company.

Starting a business may sound like a risky investment of capital, but it does not have to be. A “micro-enterprise” — or side-gigging — can help retirees generate supplemental income without putting capital at risk and perhaps even enough to stall filing for Social Security or ease the pressure for drawdowns from retirement portfolios.

Folk is participating in an emerging online ecosystem that helps micro-entrepreneurs leverage their accumulated knowledge and experience. Other platforms include retail site Etsy.com (handmade and vintage items), and freelance marketplaces Guru.com and Freelancer.com.

But the action is not limited to the knowledge economy. For example, Airbnb.com recently noted that 10 percent of its hosts are over age 60.

Older Drivers

And AARP’s Life Reimagined — a program focused on guiding people through life transitions — recently announced a partnership with Uber aimed at recruiting older drivers. Life Reimagined has 1.4 million members; for Uber, the alliance is part of a strategy to hire hundreds of thousands of drivers as it works to meet surging demand for its service.

If driving strangers around in your own car for hours on end does not sound like an ideal retirement to you, AARP begs to differ. While it is not putting an age limit on applicants, AARP sees the Uber program as ideally suited to the younger end of its constituency — workers over 50 who have been sidelined by economic turbulence.

“The shared economy is offering people an opportunity to follow their hearts, have flexibility in their work, be empowered to make money, and be their own bosses,” says Adam Sohn, vice president of strategic initiatives at Life Reimagined.

“And, for millions of people who are doing what they don’t love, or have been pushed out of precarious jobs and are having trouble fighting their way back into the workforce, this kind of work also can provide a transition to whatever is next.”

Microentrepreneurship certainly offers a path around the age discrimination that older workers face.

In an AARP study released earlier this year, more than half of older workers who lost jobs during the Great Recession said age discrimination had a significant impact on their ability to find new work. But in the gig economy, if you can get the job done, no one cares about your age.

Nearly 25 percent of Uber’s drivers are over age 50, according to a study commissioned by the company recently – and among new drivers with no previous professional driving experience, 39 percent are over 50. Three percent were retired before driving for Uber, and 8 percent were unemployed; one in five drivers was employed in a temporary job.

Uber does not disclose data about the earnings of its drivers, but the report states that drivers are making $19 per hour on average.

(The writer is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

(Editing by Beth Pinsker and Alan Crosby)

Photo: Alper Çuğun via Flickr

Preschoolers, Seniors Work Together At Day Care Inside Retirement Home

Preschoolers, Seniors Work Together At Day Care Inside Retirement Home

By Sami Edge, The Seattle Times (TNS)

SEATTLE — The little boy in a bright-green shirt tightly clenches a sandwich bag and asks, “Can you open this for me?” He thrusts the bag at the elderly man seated to his right.

“Sure I can, buddy,” says 92-year-old David Carriere as his weathered hands reach for the bag and slowly tear at the opening.
Satisfied, the little boy starts stuffing sandwiches into the bag.

“I haven’t worked with him in a while,” Carriere says. “He’s smart.”

On a recent Friday at Providence Mount St. Vincent retirement home in West Seattle, a group of senior citizens and youngsters are packing sack lunches that will be delivered to the homeless. It’s one of many projects that bring the elderly and the young together through the Intergenerational Learning Center, a day care inside the retirement home.

Five days a week, children ages 6 weeks to 5 years interact with Mount St. Vincent’s residents, whose average age is 92. Activities range from musical hour to story time to art classes.

Charlene Boyd, the administrator of Providence Mount St. Vincent, or “the Mount,” says the Intergenerational Learning Center (ILC) was developed 23 years ago as a way to further the center’s mission of developing community and making the last years of life “meaningful, life-affirming and engaging.”

“We wanted this to be a place where people come to live, not come to die,” Boyd said.

“It’s not rocket science,” she added. “It’s about normalcy.”

In 1991, Boyd was part of the team that decided to open a day care at the Mount, an idea that she and others thought would add to the “community” that the Mount strives to cultivate.

“To make from the beginning of life to the end of life the best years of life,” Boyd says. “Linking that full circle.”

Not only does interacting with children revitalize many of the residents and allow them access to a more “normal” and varied sphere, it also helps acquaint young families and children with the realities — positive and negative — of aging.

“It’s normal for someone to use a wheelchair or a walker, and that’s just part of life,” Boyd said. “It’s not out of sight, out of mind. It’s right here. These kids see that every day, and they’re not afraid.”

Donna Butts, executive director of Generations United, a national group that advocates for intergenerational involvement, says the idea of intergenerational learning facilities has been around for about 25 years and shows many benefits.

Older adults involved in the programs tend to be more optimistic, have larger social networks and better memories, and take better care of themselves, Butts says. For young people, extra attention from an older adult helps improve social skills and reduces fear of aging.

She says there are somewhere between 100 and 500 intergenerational learning facilities in the U.S., and the trend is on the rise as baby boomers look for stimulating and engaging care facilities for their aging parents.

“People are starting to wake up and smell the demographics,” Butts said. “We have this older demographic, and we can look at it as a problem or as an asset … people of all ages have something to give.”

Indeed, the ILC has proved to be a popular program. Currently, the day care is capped at 125 students and has a waiting list of two and a half years.

ILC Director Marie Hoover, a former hospice provider, sees the intergenerational visits as an extension of the variety of experience that the school has to offer. Anecdotally, she says she hears often from parents who are amazed at their children’s ability to interact with the elderly and disabled outside of the classroom.

“These children are pretty young, so there’s not necessarily a lot of cognitive awareness,” Hoover said. “But clearly, it’s there.”

Eileen Hirami, a 13-year instructor at the day care center, describes that impact in terms of the children’s “emotional awareness.”

“From the time you’re a baby to the time you die, you’re an individual who wants to be recognized and respected,” Hirami said.
She says the children start to understand this through their daily interactions with multiple age groups — from the residents in the facility, adult volunteers in the Mount’s gift shop and thrift store, teachers, and teenagers who volunteer to run the convenience store.

“We have the whole spectrum of life here, and it’s the joy and the challenge to always be together,” she says. “Sometimes it’s joyful, sometimes it’s stressful — how do we grow together?”

Boyd’s son, Ryan Smith, was one of the first children enrolled in the day care. Now 23, he credits the program with instilling his “need to help people.”

Smith recently graduated from Washington State University and is studying to become a firefighter.

“Looking back now, I think it’s had a big impact on my life,” Smith said. “It made me more aware of my surroundings and of elderly people.”

Eileen McCloskey, an activities director for some of the residents, says it’s unlike any other long-term-care environment she’s ever worked in.

“You heard all this life,” McCloskey remembers of her first ILC event. “There was a joyous, raucous noise coming down the hallway that you just don’t associate with long-term care.”

She says the residents’ “eyes light up” when they interact with the children.

“You just step back and let this magic happen,” McClosky said. “It’s textbook — that’s exactly why we have this program, and it’s happening right here.”

Victor Warkentin has two children, ages 5 and 2, enrolled in the program. He thinks the ILC philosophy, which stresses problem-solving, has had a substantial impact on the way they see the world — from being able to problem-solve to being more comfortable explaining their feelings and taking new chances.

Warkentin sees the intergenerational aspect as an “added bonus” that just “makes the program that much better.”

Recently, Warkentin and his family moved from West Seattle to Issaquah, Wash. But he continues to make the trek to West Seattle.
“It’s worth it to me,” he said. “I haven’t found anything that comes close.”

Photo: Marie Loken says goodbye to Finn Boatman, 4, after the group made sack lunches for the homeless. The Intergenerational Learning Center is popular with young families looking to open their children to the realities of aging. (Erika Schultz/Seattle Times/TNS)

Fraudsters Targeting Senior Citizens Looking For Love Online

Fraudsters Targeting Senior Citizens Looking For Love Online

By Tim Grant, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (TNS)

When investigators in the fraud watch department of Washington-based AARP received a call from a senior citizen late last year who had lost $300,000 to a con man she met on an Internet dating website, the organization looked into the problem. It found that in just the last six months of 2014, an estimated $82 million had been lost to online romance scams.

The Internet Crime Complaint Center, a joint project of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, found that 29 percent of people targeted in such scams were women 50 or older, who accounted for more than 51 percent of all financial losses in romance scams.

“It’s a big problem for senior citizens,” said Amy Nofziger, director of AARP’s Fraud Watch Network. “The problem is a lot of them go on online dating sites and don’t even know fraudsters are lurking on them. That’s why we are educating them about this problem and ways to spot scammers and how to protect themselves.

“When victims believe their love interest is available 24 hours a day, it’s because they are working in teams and working off scripts,” she said.

A big red flag, she said, is when the online suitor spells his name different ways at different times, such as Steven or Stephen.

“Another red flag is if the online suitor’s emails contain many misspellings or bad grammar,” Nofziger said. “Most of the scammers are overseas. Their main intention is to steal your money, never to start an emotional relationship with you.”

Senior citizens are especially vulnerable to Internet dating scam artists because, like the $300,000 victim from Virginia, they are often widowed and lonely.

The Virginia victim met her suitor on the popular dating website Match.com, but all dating websites are potential playgrounds for people trying to trick others out of their money.

Many of the seniors who get wooed by online con artists are middle-class people who have scrimped and saved. The scams often occur over a period of time, sometimes up to six months, with the suitor usually asking for money in increments of $2,000 or $3,000 at a time.

They may claim they need cash to help a sick child or close relative. Or they pretend to be an American stuck overseas who will ask the unsuspecting senior citizen to send cash for travel expenses to visit America, but some tragedy will often occur on the way to the airport that prevents them from getting on the airplane — and requires even more money.

“The majority of these victims are financially secure, so $2,000 or $3,000 does not seem like a huge red flag to them,” Nofziger said. “They believe they are helping the scammer in some way, and they are in love. The victim truly believes this is the love of their life and they are going to start a future together.”

Nofziger said men are slightly more vulnerable than women to fall prey to Internet dating scams. But women are more likely to report it and talk about it. There can be embarrassment and shame when the victim realizes he or she was the victim of a con.

One way to double-check someone on the Internet, Nofziger said, is to put that individual’s photograph through the Google search-by-photo feature. Scam artists often use photos of models or military photos. The search will reveal where else that photograph has been used.

“We know many people have found their true love on these dating websites,” she said. “But by raising awareness, we will help educate them about the dangers that may be lurking on there.”

Anyone who believes they have been conned on an Internet dating website should call the AARP’s Fraud Watch Network Helpline number, 877-908-3360.

Photo: Pretty scary, right? Anonymous3000 via Flickr