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Angst

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?

The Never-a-Dull-Moment Department

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Really. There can’t be a dull moment, can there? No such thing can ever be allowed to happen, can it?

Classic Glendale cottage

Some time back, my friend VC and I had planned a shopping junket to our favorite boutique and its associated kitsch shops over on the west side today. After impoverishing ourselves on appropriately countercultural costumes, we would go over to our favorite tea room for lunch.

Downtown Glendale is full of vintage bungalows, dating back to the 1910s and 20s. They’re now occupied by quaint little gift, clothing, and (heh!) “antique” shops. On the way from the favored clothing boutique to the coveted restaurant, we stopped at our favorite kitsch shop, which indeed did offer the ridiculous object I’ve been searching for these past few weeks. Woo hoo! I knew it!

But…when we bounce in the front door, I trip over a three-inch high step at the entrance and fall flat on my face. I put my hand out by instinct, and of course spavin my wrist in the process.

I think it’s not broken, because it doesn’t swell and I still have the full range of motion. But it hurts like hell. Really: I hafta say it hurt more than any acute injury I’ve ever enjoyed. Felt like surely a fracture must have happened in all those complicated little wrist bones.

But shortly the worst of the pain passed. I put a decent face on it because I didn’t think I was seriously hurt, and the shop’s proprietor was in a panic.

Ohhkayyy…so there we are: the drama of the day. Never fails, eh?

From there we proceed next door to the restaurant, where…really, given week after week after week of shit,  I just do NOT feel like eating. Order a cup of soup that I don’t want; choke on a spoonful of it; set it aside. Hurt, whine, and worry. (I’m very good at whining, as you might imagine…) Visit the laydeez on the way out; have one heckuva time wriggling out of and writhing back in to the ever-so-slightly too tight size 8 jeans, using just one hand.

We each head back into Phoenix in our respective chariots.

Driving with one hand, I get about halfway across Glendale Avenue when I think…damn! Where’s that doodad I bought?

Not in the car, that’s for sure. So have to pull a U-ie and schlep ALL THE WAY back into Glendale, park, hike to the restaurant. Amazingly, no one had stolen the just-purchased doodad. Someone had set it aside in the Laydeez Room, and the maîtresse d’ found it.

Back into the homicidal traffic: retrace my steps toward home. Debate, each yard of the way:

  • Call young Dr. Kildare?
  • Call the Mayo, get routed to a PA on the phone, who will just guess at the problem??
  • Drive to the urgent care facility up the road in the hood, which no doubt will be full of gunshot, knife, and overdose victims???
  • Go home, wrap an elastic bandage around the wrist, and hope for the best????

As I’m contemplating those alternatives, I approach Conduit of Blight Blvd., and there…what should I espy to my amazement but a BRAND-NEW BANNER HOSPITAL URGENT CARE FACILITY! Right on the corner of Glendale Road and Conduit of Blight!

Hot diggety!!!!!

Veered across the train tracks into the parking lot, charged in the front door, and…there was NO ONE ELSE THERE!

Got right in…before I could even sit down in the waiting room. They X-rayed the wounded paw from several directions and then, taking the opportunity to nag me about the osteoporosis and the osteopenia, said there was no fracture. AND they kindly gave me this velcro splint thing that really helps with the pain. Not only that, but it leaves the fingers free to tap the keyboard. 😀

Poor li’l medic also fretted about the blood pressure: astronomical. Right. A-n-n-d why would that be?

Why, indeed:

  • The patient is in a freestanding ER, an environment she hates, and is about to do medical business with people she’s never seen in her life.
  • She’s just driven, steering with one hand, way to Hell and gone across Glendale Road through homicidal traffic, a junket in which she’s had to navigate an aggressive U-turn, traipse all the way back into an adjacent city, park, beg for a carelessly lost package, and then retrace her route back through a fairly dire slum.
  • Her hand hurts.
  • Despite having just gone to the bathroom, she again needs to pee so bad she thinks she’s going to explode.
  • Her pants are way too tight.
  • They’ve perched her on the side of an examination table with her feet hanging in the air (this drives up BP numbers) and they’ve let her hand fall into her lap (ditto).
  • Plus of course she hatesloathesanddespises having her blood pressure taken, and she feels about the same in regard to filling out forms and answering nosy questions.

Is there a reason why the BP figures indicate I’m in orbit around Saturn?

Well. I’m still alive. So the neglected little dawg and I went out for the mile’s walk that we missed this morning.

😮 😀 😮

Wow! How amazing. I was so thrilled to find that place. It’s a new addition to our part of town, and it could NOT have been more perfectly located. The staff were very kind and acted like they knew what they were doing.* And I got an X-ray promptly, it was seen by a real radiologist promptly, and within minutes I had his (reassuring) opinion.

*Well. Except for not knowing how to take a reasonably accurate blood pressure reading…

Images

Glendale: John D. McNair house. By Marine 69-71 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25316396
Hand splint: DepositPhotos

 

 

New Robocaller Exploit? Or…just coincidence?

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I think — being the paranoiac that I am — that a robocaller just broke one of my landline handsets. As you know, I now subscribe to NoMoRobo, which works with amazing effectiveness against telephone pests. And you can be sure that the electronics the pests use can detect the presence of NoMoRobo when the program derails incoming nuisances.

So this afternoon the phone jangles. Caller ID reads, weirdly, Welcome! Please wait…

WTF?

So I wait for it to ring through to my voicemail so I can capture their data and, if as suspected it’s a sales pitch, I can hang up on the bastards. When they give up, I click on the “last call” button to capture the phone number and caller ID so as to send it along to NoMoRobo, which collects this stuff. And what I got was…NOTHING.

Blank. Nothing. Dead as a doornail.

Well, f**k.

So I tried another phone set, and from that was able to download the (without a doubt spoofed) phone number. Sent this and a report of the exploit along to NoMoRobo.

But…this is a new one. That phone was not out of juice. It was sitting on a charger when I picked it up. And yeah, the charger was plugged in. So drained was it that it took about ten minutes for the handset to come back to life.

Now, you know and I know that I am batsh!t crazy. With that in mind, you will have to add whatever grains of salt you choose to this speculation:

I suspect that somehow they did something to disable my phone.

We know this is possible for cell phones: the technology exists to drain a cell phone’s power. Maybe this works on a battery-operated landline extension????

Why? Somebody out there (not surprisingly) really, REALLY does not like people to subscribe to NoMoRobo.

Anybody had this experience before?

Merry Christmas…i guess

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Christmas treeWelp, Merry Christmas one and all. Think some spiritual thoughts…that will take Herculean effort. (So we invoke one ancient culture’s religion when we see our own, as interpreted by its fundamentalists, has failed). Personally, I find it a shade difficult to choke up much merriness, given that we’re watching our country crash in flames.

Thank God I’m too old myself to be called into active military duty, or to have a kid young enough for that. The mess the Trumpites are making in the Middle East sooner or later will come back to bite in a big way, and at that time a mere force of mercenaries will not suffice. Expect to see your sons and daughters — or grandsons and grand-daughters — called up for active duty within the next decade. To say this bunch has plunged the country into chaos is, my friends, an understatement.

Or maybe we ourselves will want to join up, if the military will take us. God knows, we’ll need the money.

Watching what appears to be the start of the Bush Crash redux, I have exactly zero confidence that a collapse of this magnitude is going to do me any good in my enforced retirement. What I do feel confident of is that it will leave me with nothing like enough in savings and investments to support me through my dotage. It is almost certain, thanks to the lunatics who put a seditious fool in the White House and inflicted their set of wackshit discredited economic theories on us all, that I will not have enough to live on for the rest of my life.

During the 1970s, I watched my father’s savings — an amount he thought would support him comfortably through a lengthy retirement — melt away under an inflationary blowtorch. Now we get to watch my generation’s retirement savings disappear, too.

Lovely.

Oh well. There’s not a thing we can do about it. If you haven’t hunkered down yet, financially speaking, it’s too late now.

Remember what I told you, some time back: Politics is economy; economy, politics.

In one last gasp of optimism, tonight I’m singing with the choir for the evening service and then for the midnight service. That will be fun. The church tends to overflow on these big religious holidays. Though it’s not exactly empty the rest of the time, on Christmas and Easter people flow into the parking lots.

We — the women’s chant choir — sang for Compline last night. It’s a very short but very lovely service. The entire thing is sung, much of it in chant. It’s  relaxing and soothing, something that’s much needed these days.

In between the two Christmas Eve services, we have a potluck dinner. That should be fun. I’m hoping SDXB will show up for that and for the late service. Connie the Long-Haul Trucker is in Moab, headed toward the Valley as fast as she can fly for as far as the gummint will let her drive in any one 24-hour period: expects to reach the truckyard about 10 a.m. tomorrow. So she will miss the Xmas festivities, but will be here to see her family on Christmas day. That’s something. I guess.

Cassie the Corgi continues to have her ups and downs. Yesterday was a definite up. Today she seems to have crashed, along with the Trump economy. {sigh} Not only can she barely hobble around but (to continue the endlessly amusing simile) she seems confused. It’s like she’s not sure where she is. She’ll get outside and look around, appearing utterly flummoxed, like she’s wondering Where am I? What is this place and what am I supposed to be doing here? Eventually she’ll pee on the ground and then stumble back in the house, evidently only slightly enlightened.

That’s today. Yesterday she was downright peppy and for a moment was actually running around the backyard (very, very briefly) after Ruby.

So one is led on a merry psychological chase, in which one moment you think gosh! maybe she COULD recover somehow and the next you’re figuring where to dig her grave.

The neighborhood is brightly decorated. One street is completely lined with luminarias. Young people love to gussy up their places for Christmas, which is a delight. I personally am too lazy to feel inclined to climb on a ladder to hang up lights, then climb up again to take them down and then make myself crazy wrapping them back up and putting them away. Never have been much for conspicuous decoration, myself. But that doesn’t keep me from enjoying other people’s displays.

Luminarias line a garden path as part of Hispanic celebration of Christmas

 

 

Uhmmm? Is there something we should know?

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😀 😀 😀 The new handyman showed up today to install a back porch light fixture that replaces the motion-sensitive one that morphed into motion-insensitive. And…well…there’s something weird here. This guy SO MUCH resembles my son that if he were just slightly less chatty, you would think the two of them were separated at birth. The way he looks: check. The way he talks: check. The things that interest him: check.

Well. Not identically. But one could imagine that they sprang from the same sire, about 12 or 15 years separated.

And. Uhm. Therein lies a tale.

About at that distance of birth-date separation (around 15 years), when I was thinking of exiting the relationship with D-XH, along about midnight one fine evening a friend of mine who was kinda “fast” was in a girlie bookstore where, she swears by every Bible that can be stacked, she saw then-DH cruising around.

At the time I thought, Oh yeah? Sure! Right, sistah!

But…

At this point, he and I were not sleeping together. He could easily have slipped out of the house sometime between, say, 10 p.m. and midnight without my knowing about it.

Holy sh!t. Tell me this is ridiculous, willya?

It is scary weird how much this young man looks and sounds like my son, only about a decade & a half younger.

Cripes. I think I’ve come unstuck from reality…