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Pests and Nuisances, Oh My! :-D

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Okay, so here’s something to amuse yourself…and all of us, should you wish to share: How many Pests and Nuisances rate as true pet peeves in your life? Because I’m a crabby old lady, I can count up quite a few. But it may be that normal people take a more equanimous view of Life, the Universe, and All That.

This reverie was spurred by a kindly ninny who elicited one of my favorite pet peeves: good-hearted souls who think God smiles on them when they cede their own right-of-way to people who do not want to invade their right of way and who just wish they would get going and get the hell out of the way. Yesterday Ruby the Corgi and I were headed out of Richistan across Main Feeder Street NW. Cars, as usual, were coursing up and down Main Feeder. We stopped at the corner, safely on the sidewalk, to allow all the motorists to pass. We were next to a stop sign on Richistan Way; there’s no stop sign on Main Feeder Street. This, as you  must know if you’ve ever driven a vehicle, means that motorists on Main Feeder have the right of way.

This woman comes along. She wants to turn right onto Richistan Way and then hang an immediate left onto the frontage road that runs parallel to Main Feeder. This is obvious. It is not disturbing in any way. It is a perfectly commonplace and benign maneuver. Ruby and I wait for her to make her turn.

But no. She stops in the middle of Main Feeder and waves her paw at us, demanding that I cross in front of her.

Dayum, but I hate that.

Look: When you have the right of way, you have the right of way. Do not wave people across the goddamn road in front of you when you have the right of way!!!!!!

Why? Is it not a good and Christian thing to do, to give others a break?

No. It is not. This is why:

When you fail to take the right of way that by law and custom are yours, no one knows what you are going to do. If I cross in front of you because you’re waving at me to go even though it’s your turn to go, and then you or someone else hits me, you idiot, that is taken not as your dumb fault but as mine!

I speak from experience.

My son was just out of infancy and riding in a car seat when I drove down to the airport to pick up his father, who traveled quite a lot. At the time, Sky Harbor had two one-way ring roads, one leading to the airport toward the east and a parallel one leading out of it toward the west. Each had two lanes. We needed to get across the eastward-bound road to get into the west-running lanes. The east-bound lanes were jammed. We sat at a stop sign for a few minutes, waiting for a break in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Suddenly a guy in the lane closest to us stopped, held up all the traffic behind him, and waved at me to proceed.

Still young and stupid, I didn’t know any better so presumed he knew it was safe to go. It was not. A car coming up beside him slammed into my car, causing quite the commotion.

Fortunately our baby was not injured. I was mad as a cat but shortly realized that was stupid: I should have known better than to trust a moron behind another steering wheel.

Don’t do that. If you have the right of way, take it and don’t make a nuisance of yourself.

In that same department, how about the nitwits that drive into your blind spot and stick there? Yeah: I had one of those today. He cruises up beside me in the left-hand lane, bearing north on Central Avenue, and parks there. Luckily I was able to see the clown in my side mirror — he was not visible in my rear-view mirror, as the ridiculous Venza has more blind spots than visible space.

If I sped up, he sped up to keep pace. If I slowed down, he slowed down. So, with no one behind me in either lane, I hit my brakes, damn near stopped before he grasped what was up, and swerved in behind the bastard. Defeated, he continued on down the road at a normal rate of speed.

A thousand curses upon his offspring and all their spawn!

And how about the air-headed women who effing bathe in heavy perfume? Ya know, laydeez (and gents): a little dab’ll do ya!

This afternoon I encountered not one but two of them in the AJ’s parking lot…just walking from the car to the door. No doubt their perfume was expensive and wonderful and sexy and seductive. But a) I have exactly zero desire to be seduced by some strange woman (or, oddly enough, by any woman); and b) one person’s expensive and wonderful is the next person’s pyuiieee!

Each of these women, who came along separately and appeared not to know each other, emanated a fog of perfume — in the middle of the damn workday! — that was enough to suffocate a vulture.

Don’t do that, please. And forgodsake don’t do it when you’re going to the office!

Then there are the nitwits who walk and text, proceeding across a parking lot or up a sidewalk utterly oblivious of where they’re going or who they’re about to run into. Encountered two of those in the AJ’s parking lot this morning, one as I was walking toward the store and one as I was walking out. The first numbskull was so enthralled with whatever was on her phone, she damn near walked into me. Only reason she didn’t was that I stepped aside before we collided.

Water-“saving” plumbing that doesn’t work. Is there any greater water-waster than this junk? The kitchen faucet that takes half your lifetime to fill a pot…hence, you go off to do some other small task rather than stand there and watch water dribble into the pan, so that by the time you get back, the pan is overflowing. That’s real ecological. The accursed toilets that supposedly take a third of the water needed by a real toilet to flush: meaning you have to flush three times to get everything down.

Yesterday the toilet plugged up. Nothing out of the ordinary had been flushed down there, and I just had the entire system roto-rooted a couple weeks ago, at great expense. Called the plumber. He didn’t call back until after 7 p.m. By then whatever was down there had dissolved, having sat in the pipe for hour after hour after hour, and along about mid-afternoon I’d managed to flush it down without overflowing the bathroom. God, but I hate those damn toilets!

See, one of the things I figured would happen when the climate-deniers took over the White House and the Congress was that maybe we’d get functioning plumbing and real light bulbs back. That would have been one good thing the Republicans could have accomplished. But ohhh no! They have to spend their energy on a hate campaign, and twitching around with a ridiculous clown in the Presidency. Ah: yes, there’s another pet peeve: the politics of the day. What a circus. If they’d given us back real light bulbs and working plumbing, we might have found some way to justify their existence. But noooo.

Speaking of gadgets, we have phones that require batteries to keep running. Jeez. One of my handsets apparently needs a new battery. This used to be an easy problem to solve: take it right up to the Radio Shack around the corner, where the clerk would kindly produce a new battery and prize the phone apart to install the thing. Now I’ll have to traipse across the city to a special store that sells batteries and try, as sweetly as I can manage, to persuade the sales staff to fix the damn phone for me. Good luck with that. If this scheme doesn’t work, I’ll have to buy a whole new set of phones, requiring all new programming and all new coordination of six handsets. Ugh.

A-n-n-d one last shot: the ubiquity of vast, privacy-invading monopolies that have taken over almost every aspect of our lives. They’ve done it so inexorably, so ingratiatingly, and so subtly that most of us aren’t even aware of how dependent we personally — and our entire culture — have become on organizations that are not are friends and not in our service. Take a look at what is happening as one tech writer tries to disconnect from five gigantic electronic entities…and consider the implications of what she discovered when she did.

And you? What are your pet peeves?

 

Pain Pain Pain

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So while Cassie the Corgi was in her last days, I had to lift her up, carry her outdoors, and set her down, then lift her up, carry her indoors, and set her down. Because she slept on the bed and was too small to jump up or down (even if she had that much strength at the end, which she did not), I had to lift her onto the bed and left her off. She weighed about 23 pounds. That’s not much, of course. But she had a habit of arranging herself in awkward positions, just out of reach on the bed. Upshot: I wrenched my back, but good.

At one point I felt something tear and thought “oohhhh shit!”

Falling and spraining my wrist did not help things. I expect the fall probably added to the back injury.

At any rate, it hurts a lot: enough to be disabling. Yesterday I had to beg off a volunteer chore because I can’t even begin to lift things. Experience shows that doctors can do little for back pain, so I suppose there’s no point in wasting my time traipsing across town to see Young Dr. Kildare. I’m allergic to aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen these days, so there’s basically nothing anyone can do. Whiskey works pretty well, as does wine. Or a couple of beers. A long soak in a tubful of hot water. Applying a heating pad. Tincture of time…

It’s nowhere near as bad as the time Anna the German Shepherd put my back out, thank gawd. Holy mackerel!

Anna was only a few months old at the time. She had already displayed her life’s ambition: to bring down a car or truck by the oil pan. This, she passionately desired. Even as a pup, she was a very powerful dog, fully capable of dragging a 130-pound woman into the road.

This one time, I had taken her for a walk in the ’hood, which means I’d taken her for a linear wrestling match. Without thinking about the fact that we were approaching the height of the rush hour, I turned onto Feeder Street NW, which runs through our neighborhood on its route all the way from Gangbanger’s Way to the state capitol downtown. Despite stoplights that last an eternity, many people prefer to drive through the city on this street because it’s less hectic than the main drags.

As we turned north, I realized a steady stream of vehicles was sailing past us…and so did Anna. Within a couple minutes, she realized she was in Predator Heaven, and she went bat-sh!t berserk trying to catch the cars whizzing past us. To avoid being yanked into the traffic, I had to pick her up and carry her back to another street deeper into the neighborhood.

She weighed about 40 pounds by then, I think. WhatEVER: she was too heavy for me to carry around, and certainly not to haul some blocks. I didn’t realize how badly this antic had hurt my back until, some hours later, I almost passed out from a surge of pain. When I sat down, I couldn’t get up. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such extravagant pain, before or since.

SDXB, who was living with me at the time, called 911. Paramedics showed up, loaded me onto a gurney, and carried me off to the hospital in an ambulance.

There they treated me by injecting me with ibuprofen or acetaminophen — don’t remember which. I had not yet developed the interesting sensitivities to these drugs, and so it worked without killing me. Today, that would be highly ill advised…

So that leaves booze and hot baths as the only analgesics. I guess I could go to one of those marijuana quacks and get a fake “prescription” to buy some dope. But I have a feeling that might be ill-advised…

At any rate, I’m getting damn tired of this. It’s been two weeks since Cassie was despatched to her Maker, and I’m mighty tired of hurting. But…apparently it can take six to ten weeks(!!) to get over a sprain. It looks like a month or so is more typical…but wow! That’s a long time to go with this kind of pain, especially when there’s no one around to do the household tasks.

The Queen Is Dead…Long Live the Queen!

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Yes. We have a new Queen of the Universe. Ruby the Corgi assumed the late lamented Cassie’s crown without a blink.

It took her about a day and a half to register that she had fallen heir to the throne. Forthwith she began to issue new edicts and rearrange the realm to suit herself.

Seriously: Ruby has become a whole new dog. She must have been utterly buffaloed by the Queen. As each day passes, Ruby grows and blossoms in some new way.

  • Along about yesterday, after the rains stopped and temps warmed, it occurred to her that she could take up a reclining position on one of the flagstones off the back patio, where she can keep an eye on the doings in the kitchen (lest the human approach the treasured Treat Jar) and at the same time watch the backyard for birds, cats, and Ratty whilst keeping audio tabs on everything the neighbors and the passers-by get up to. Hence, she has moved out from under the toilet in the back bathroom, where she used to reside.
  • She has trained the human to play with tennis balls, a major accomplishment.
  • She has trained the human to deliver chicken jerky treats several times a day.
  • She has trained the human to go out for a walk twice a day.
  • She no longer feels it necessary, at night, to perch on the edge at the bottom of the bed, so as to be ready to leap off at the twitch of an ear.
  • Nor does she deem it necessary to accept as an offering one of Cassie’s favorite treats, a blueberry: these, she ptuis out onto the floor. Ditto a piece of apple. None of that, Human!

For the human, that lowly creature, the New Reign means quite a few improvements.

First, for reasons unknown, the new Queen deposits many fewer mounds than the previous monarch. Picking up the backyard is weirdly easy. At first the human thought maybe Her Majesty was suffering some problem. But that does not appear to be the case. She simply dumps about half as much as her predecessor did.

This means that a Doggy Walk does not require a bulging pocketful of blue bags.

It also means that picking up the backyard is

a) not much of a chore; and
b) not likely to produce enough obnoxious debris to contaminate incoming junkmail to a large enough degree to discourage garbage-scavenging identity thieves.

It looks like the identifiable junk mail will, like credit-card receipts, have to be soaked before discarding in the public trashcans…but in Clorox, not just ordinary water.

Both dogs ate the same amount of food per meal. But of course, in the absence of the late queen, the dog food bill (and cooking, and doling out) will be half of its former glory.

Next, we have decided the Human will be required to dole out a whole lot more doggy treats than under the previous queen regnant. Naturally, Costco has quit carrying the favored chicken jerky strips. Amazon has them…for…hang onto your hat…THIRTY BUCKS A BAG.

Gimme a break!

So we’ll be making chicken jerky on the barbecue. This is not difficult and the equivalent amount most certainly will not cost $30…but it’s another hassle. Oh well.

Ruby is easily up to a fast one-mile walk. Indeed, she’s up to much longer hikes than that. This afternoon we visited a cricket team at the park…that was fun. If I ever get off my duff this evening, we’ll rack up another mile.

Maybe. My back hurts and I’m exceptionally cranky.

A few days ago I busted a caster off the rolling clothes rack in the garage. This, I need to hold rags as they’re pulled out of the washer or the dryer. Propping that end of the rack up with a rock was less than ideal.

So I bought a nice new one at The Container Store.

Putting it together looked, however, like more than I wished to take on with a spavined back and a sprained wrist, so I asked my son to help. He was supposed to come over today for that challenge.

But, not surprisingly, he demurred.

Roundly annoyed, I now decide to try my hand at putting the new rack together. So I take all the parts out and organize them on the floor and pick up the instructions…and realize they’re SO complicated they might as well be written in Martian. It has 87 gerjillion little parts, each fitting on a left side or a right side or an up side or a down side. It would have taken half a day to put the damn thing together. Upon inspection, I thought no wonder the kid doesn’t want to spend half the weekend doing this. I wouldn’t have done it for my mother, either! So I returned it and got my money back. Went on over to Bed Bath & Beyond and discovered they had the same device: no improvement.

Okay, so when I drove up to the house after navigating the wacksh!t traffic, what should I see by Mr. WonderAccountant lurking amiably in his driveway, he and his son having just finished working on the family cars. So I asked him if he had a thought about fixing the wounded warrior.

What we figured out in short order was that the thing doesn’t really NEED casters. Duh! There’s no reason for it to roll around. To the extent you need to move it a few feet, it slides across the concrete just fine. So he applied the male muscle power to pulling out the surviving three casters, and now it just sits there peacefully and levelly on the garage floor.

Voilà! Problem solved, for free and with no hassle.

At any rate, now the old one is “fixed,” Red Green Show style. If it works, it works…

Is Your Contractor Insured? Really?

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So here’s another little life lesson I learned from the Olde Folkes yesterday. Decided to present this in a separate post, because it is a VERY big effing deal. Y’ere ’tis:

Whenever you have a contractor of any kind working around your house, ALWAYS BE SURE THEY’RE INSURED!

That’s even if you think they’re the nicest folks to come along since God created the Angel Gabriel. Even if they seem honest as Abe. Even if they work as hard as a plow horse.

Got that? Don’t just ask if they’re insured. Demand to see the policy. You want proof positive that they have general liability insurance or that they’re licensed and bonded with your state registrar of contractors.

When J & L sold their home of 40 years and moved to the Beatitudes, a life-care community, they hired two women who are in the business of helping elders move into old-folkeries. There are a number of these places in the Valley, and the pair have registered themselves with a bunch of them. For J & L, who are in their nineties and were moving to an apartment that was — maybe — two-thirds the size of their home, only with no garage and no garage storage and a tiny kitchen and no room for L’s office, these two ladies were a godsend. They advised on what furniture could fit into the new digs and where it could be fit, they packed up as much as could be stuffed into the apartment and arranged for movers, they put stuff away in closets and cabinets, they even got someone to custom-build a way to hang the expensive draperies J wanted to take with them.

As part of the bargain, once the couple was moved out the moving helpers were to arrange and supervise an estate sale, to sell off the (many) possessions that simply could not fit into a tiny apartment on the fourth floor of an old-folks’ home.

I remember thinking, as the two women were telling me this, I don’t recall seeing any ads from your outfit in the estate-sale listings to which I subscribe in gay profusion. Are you trying to say “yard sale,” dears? If so, how’s about telling the client that? But I kept quiet. Maybe, after all, they did their estate-sale business under some other moniker.

Okay. So this gigantic project chugs along and eventually they get the folks moved. They tidy up the remaining goods, and now this estate sale is supposed to take place the following day.

That night, the house is broken into and everything of significant value is stolen. The women say the lost items were appraised (really??? Who are you kidding?) at $5,000.

The house is locked up behind mighty iron security gates, brain-banging deadbolts, and an expensive and efficient alarm system. Sooo…WTF, say I.

J says the two women “forgot” to turn on the burglar alarm when they left that evening. The perps, who magically knew the alarm company’s stickers on the window alluded to nothing, broke a window, climbed in, and made themselves to home.

“Forgot:” Yeah. R-i-i-i-g-h-t.

So now the women tell them that they — J & L — will have to make this claim on THEIR homeowner’s insurance!

Say what?

Can’t you just hear the insurance adjustor’s reaction? “Ohhh no. Not a chance in Hell. You had already moved out of the place and you had consigned the property to these people; therefore the consignee was responsible.”

And…say what? Five. Thousand. Dollah? Don’t think so.

I’ve done a lot of yard sales in my life. And neighbors who used to live across the street from me, a  pair who became dear friends, were in the yard-sale business. And…well…y’know what? The entire contents of that house including all the stuff they moved into their new home were totally absolutely not worth $5,000. They had a few works of art that were worth something…but they took those with them.

So. IMHO we’re lookin’ at a scam here.

But that’s just IMHO, eh?

The point is, once the possessions had been handed over into the care of the assisted-moving business, they became the assisted-movers’ insurance company’s responsibility, not the homeowner’s.

Dollah to donuts, that is what my friends’ insuror will claim. And several dollahs to donuts, these women have no business insurance or anything vaguely resembling it.

At the risk of repeating myself…

Whenever you have a contractor of any kind working around your house, ALWAYS BE SURE THEY’RE INSURED!

Discoveries: A couple of life lessons learned

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Yesterday my agèd friends who just moved into the Barbizon Plaza the Beatitudes, a very fancy life-care community where business is booming, invited me join them at the institute’s fanciest dining room (it has three!) for lunch/dinner. The Beatitudes, in its current incarnation, is very nice indeed: much like living in a first-class hotel or on the Queen Mary.

(Yes, I once did cross the Atlantic on the Queen Mary. That ship personified luxury accommodation.)

And in that visit, I gained several valuable insights.

First off, after much worried clucking about how far the eateries are from their apartment (in their 90s, they both have their share of infirmities), they both said — out of the blue — that after having to walk around for just a few days, they’re each feeling a lot better. J. said her back and joints are actually improving, and she’s experiencing noticeably less pain. L. said he also was feeling, overall, better than he had in a long time.

So (said she, while loafing in front of her computer): those daily walks are not an option! If you want to feel as well as you can feel, get off your duff and walk around the neighborhood. Or the park. Or the indoor mall, if that’s what it takes. Apparently, the more you move, the longer you’re likely to keep moving.

Next: as to the long-term care insurance conundrum:  A lady came up and said hello to us, then disappeared into the scenery. In passing, my friends remarked that she had not bought into that place…that she rented an apartment instead.

Whoa! Hold the phone. That puts a whole new complexion on the long-term care insurance issue. Now that they mentioned it, I recalled that my father once rented an apartment at an old-folkerie associated with a nearby hospital (it’s quite a story…one day I’ll have to write it up for your delectation!). And it was possible to rent an apartment at the old-folkerie where he had used the entire proceeds of the sale of his home to buy in, though at his LTC commnity  renting was a short-term arrangement.

If you could live at the Beatitudes, on a long-term basis, as a renter rather than as a member of their buy-in “community,” and if renting there would give you dibs on a bed in their nursing home, then it might make sense to keep up the LTC insurance. Here’s why:

If you’re living in one of those life-care communities, you’ve got access to its nursing home (in these parts, a VERY big deal, because decent nursing homes are few and far between here). You’ve got twice-monthly housecleaning. You’ve got daily access to prepared meals as part of the deal. You’ve got a secure environment that’s safe and free from bums and burglars. You’ve got a whole staff keeping an eye on you and likely to notice when you don’t show up because you fell in the shower and broke your hip. You’ve got staff who fix things that break.

But these outfits charge a huge entry fee, basically about what you would clear on sale of an upper-middle-class home. That entry fee effectively serves as nursing-home insurance: by getting you into the life-care community, it pays for access to the institution’s on-campus nursing home: if and when you need it, for however long you need it.

But what if they let you just live there as a renter, with no pre-paid nursing home care? (Pre-paid, we might say, on the come….)

If you did not have to fork over your entire damn life savings to put a roof over your head with guaranteed access to competent nursing care — if instead you could be pretty sure you would end up in a specific nursing home for a period that could range from a number of days to a number of years, as long as you paid for it as needed —  then it would make sense to keep the MetLife LTC policy.

It would, of course, depend on what the institute charges for rent. And whether it gives renters the same preferential access to its nursing home that it gives to residents who give them a giant buy-in fee. (These outfits generally guarantee residents access to the on-campus nursing home or, if the place is full when you need it, to a nursing home of comparable quality.)

For people who buy in, in addition to its stiff entry fee the Beatitudes charges around $3000 a month per person. Together, these charges act as de-facto nursing home insurance. The money buys you a bed in the nursing home should you need it, without an increase in your monthly ding. Of course…if you never need it, then that’s money down the drain. If you do need it, the arrangement could in fact save your heirs most of their inheritance.

But if you could rent to live there, without having to cough up a buy-in fee, it would make sense to keep the nursing-home insurance — that is, assuming a rental agreement includes access to the on-campus nursing home. The Beatitudes supposedly charges people who live in the wild something in the range of $10,000 a month for nursing-home care. This would quickly drain your assets.

It costs me $2,000 a month to live in my home, and I don’t get anyone else cooking my meals. Another thousand bucks to feed me, clean the house, change the sheets, and guarantee availability of nursing care is within reason, more or less….but only if I don’t have to give up whatever I would make on the sale of my home! If renting made that possible, with the understanding that I’d have to pay out of pocket for any nursing home care required, then…

a) Living there would be do-able; and
b) It would make sense to keep the MetLife LTC insurance, because $130 a month, even if I live into my 90s, is one hell of a lot less than the $350,000± that I’d have to fork over from sale of my house.

I’d really like this house go to my son so that he can either sell it and bank the proceeds, rent it out to generate some cash flow, or move into it if he pleases. That means I do not want to have to sell it and spend the proceeds to get myself into an old-folkerie when I can no longer manage the place. Next week I’ll call over there and arrange to listen to their sales pitch. And be sure to ask them whether you really can rent without having to buy in, and if so, what you get for the rent.

Long-Term Care Insurance? REALLY?

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Asking the Hive Mind: Is long-term care insurance (the kind that covers nursing home stays and in-home nursing care) worth the cost?

While I was working for the Great Desert University, I bought long-term care insurance through TIAA-CREF. The price was nominal at the time. Then TIAA-CREF decided insuring the future elderly against old age was not the best business to be in. They unloaded their policyholders on MetLife.

MetLife, which has also said it would like to be out of that business, has steadily increased its rates. This year I’m paying $130 a month. That’s $1,560 a year I could either put into savings or use to buy food. Problem is, this policy has (in theory) a deal where every couple of years you can opt to pay more for inflation adjustment. Shortly after I was laid off, the time came to opt in to that year’s extra gouge. But I was broke. I called and explained this, and the rep said they would give me a couple of months (by which time I would be receiving Social Security) and then offer the chance to opt in. They never did present that opportunity, and when I called them to ask after it, they said too bad, so sad. So that $130 a month is not covering the full current cost of nursing care. At best, it would only defray it.

Look up MetLife’s long-term care insurance on the Web and you find they work hard not to cover what you think they cover: so say Forbes Magazine and a whole raft of unhappy customers. Apparently Metlife is difficult to deal with and does everything it can to weasel out of paying.

The alternative is to move into a life-care community before you need its nursing home. Friends of mine just moved into the Beatitudes, a life-care campus whose amenities remind one of a fancy resort. My father, after my mother died, moved himself into a similar life-care community, which not only kept a roof over his head and two (truly mediocre) daily meals on his table but also covered the cost of any stay in its nursing home. In effect, it provides nursing home insurance: apartment residents have, as part of the package, guaranteed access to and coverage for the on-campus nursing home.

Out of curiosity, I looked into the Beatitudes and found they charge $10,000 a month(!) for nursing home care (unless, of course, you’re a tenant in their life-care community). The Beatitudes does the best it can to hide its costs from the Internet. One site, which more clearly is talking about life-care accommodation (not nursing-home care), estimates the average is $3647 a month; my friend’s husband remarked that they were paying around $5,000/month for a two-bedroom apartment, including utilities, semiweekly cleaning service, and meals. At Royal Oaks in Sun City, the cost is around $3600/month (my total average living expense here in my paid-off shack with yard guy., taxes, insurance, & utilities is around $2000/month). In effect, the elevated monthly cost of these places amounts to nursing home insurance.

However, one wonders whether that is worth the cost. Noting that 1 in 4 Americans will die in a nursing home, a study done between 1992 and 2006 showed the median length of nursing home stay was 5 months and the average length was 14 months. Interestingly, only 27.3% of the 8,433 subjects lived in a nursing home at the time of their death. Okay…  14 months at 10 grand a month would come to $140,000, which would nicely clean out the assets you’d like to leave to your heirs. Even 5 months would be ridiculous, but it would leave a few pennies for the offspring.

Let’s say one lives to be about 90 before needing such care. At $1,560 a year between my present age (74) and that age, I’d have forked out $31,200 to MetLife, which at today’s supposed rates would cover a little over 3 months of nursing home care. According to a recent Rand study, about half of middle-aged Americans will land in nursing homes at some point, but the cost will be only about $7,300 over a lifetime. If you put $130/month into savings, in 5 years you would have set aside more than $7,300.

So I question whether it’s worth continuing to pay $130/month (and more…and more…and more every year), when money is tight and I sure could use $130 to cover daily necessities. The original TIAA-CREF policy had a deal where if you’d been paying for awhile and then you quit paying premiums, some degree of coverage would remain. Apparently MetLife does, too: see page 4 of the linked PDF. If you put that $130 a month into a savings account (or invested it), after 20 years you’d have stashed over four times the amount needed to cover the typical lifetime cost of nursing care (according to Rand). Since I’ve been paying into that LTC policy for many years, a monthly $130 stash in a bank account plus whatever was accrued permanently at MetLife might cover most of my cost, especially if I were lucky enough to die within two or three months.

Still. It’s one bitch of a dice throw. If you have a stroke that disables you but fails to carry you away, if you come down with Parkinson’s or MS or ALS or Alzheimer’s or God only knows whatever open-ended horror, you in fact could need months or years of care.

That would clean out your estate, leave you living (after a fashion: breathing, anyway) on the public dole, and rob your heirs of everything you worked so hard to pass down to them.

So…what’s your opinion? Do you have long-term care insurance? Why or why not?