Last night SDXB invited me over for dinner and an outdoor concert at the bandshell in Sun City, where he lives. Uhm, in Sun City, that is…not in the bandshell. 😉
His home is in one of the older sections of Sun City, a term that actually denotes three developments: the original Sun City proper, Sun City West, and the much more recent tracts of Sun City Grand. All of these occupy a vast segment of the West Valley and, as a tax bonanza, have largely been engrossed by a town called Surprise, once a migrant worker settlement but now a suburb of Phoenix.
The original Sun City tract, which Del Webb began to build in the early 1960s, has seen its better days. During the recession, most of the little businesses in the development’s strip malls closed, and to this day many storefronts are empty. Near the bandshell, one strip mall is filled exclusively by second-hand stores. Although I’d heard, some years ago, that poverty is far from unknown in the Sun Cities, I was surprised to see a large food bank as we drove into the more venerable part of town. It occupies a defunct Safeway site and serves 400 people a day. In addition, Sun City hosts five other food pantries.
In the original Sun City proper, 6.48% of residents live in poverty, up from 4.61% in 2000. In Sun City West, where the population is younger and more affluent to start with (houses cost significantly more in Sun City West), the poverty rate 2.7%.
The old section is poorer than the newer tracts in Sun City West and Sun City Grand. This is not surprising: many residents in the original Sun City have been there a long time and now are in advanced old age. As you age your way through retirement, you run out of money. Residents in the newer sections by and large are younger and less likely to have outlived their savings. And the tract houses in the original Sun City are relatively cheap. Some duplexes and garden apartments there are very cheap, indeed, and there’s even a trailer park. So, younger seniors who move into that part of the Sun Cities are probably less affluent to start with.
No doubt the biggest contributor to poverty in Sun City is uninsured infirmity. Medicare does not cover nursing home care. So if one member of a couple has a stroke or comes down with, say, Parkinson’s, MS, Alzheimer’s, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, obtaining care for the person will (not “may”) drain their savings to zero. In SC West the disability rate among poor males is 51.2% (as opposed to 25.9% among local residents not classed as poor and 16.0% among Arizonans in general); among poor women, 49.1% are disabled, vs 22.7 of female residents not “poor” and 19.1% of Arizonans in general. Clearly, with age comes illness; with illness comes poverty.
Only after your savings have been drained and you have divested yourself of most of your property to pay your medical bills are you eligible for Arizona’s version of Medicaid. While my mother was dying in a nursing home, my father met a woman whose husband had been in that dismal, cruel place for TWO YEARS, with no end in sight. He’d had a stroke, was a vegetable, but could not die. Keeping him there to rot away was costing everything they had. By the time he died, she expected, she would be utterly without assets.
Once you’re old, the only way to protect yourself from this fate is to divorce or, if you’re already single, divorced, or widowed, never to marry. If you want to be with a partner, live together in unwedded bliss and keep your assets separate.
To protect his mother’s few remaining dollars and keep her out of the most abject imaginable poverty, SDXB had to arrange to divorce his Roman Catholic parents as his father lay dying, ruinously, after 18 years of Parkinson’s disease. When his mom died, a couple of decades later, she was living in an aging trailer park and had $6,000 to her name — and no, she did not live high off the hog. Never did, during her entire life.
If you’re not approaching your dotage yet, there are a few ways you can protect yourself. But you’ll need to start planning ahead now. Bear in mind that about 40% of elders will spend some time in a nursing home before they die.
Number one is to get yourself some long-term care insurance. Companies are trying to phase out this kind of coverage, and so it probably would be wise to get at least some coverage now, even if you’re under the recommended age of about 50 or 55. The younger you are when you buy this kind of coverage, the lower the premiums are. Conventional wisdom has said you should wait until you reach your 50s to buy long-term care coverage, thereby saving on the costs that would accrue over a lifetime if you bought it at a younger age. However, obviously if long-term care insurance is going away, you would be wise to grab it while the grabbing’s still good.
This is really not an option. The median cost of nursing-home care is $207 a day. That’s upwards of $75,500 a year! At that rate, a long-term infirmity will drive you and your spouse into true penury in a brief period. Even if you die after, say, two years in a home, the cost could consume half or more of the savings intended to support you and your spouse to the end. And costs are rising swiftly.
Second, try to take care of your health. Keep your weight, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels under control as you enter and pass through old age. Don’t smoke, don’t do recreational drugs, and don’t drink to excess. Drive carefully and wear your seatbelts.
Third, have an exit plan. You need a way to finish your life when livable life is over. Actually, you need more than one way:
a) Be sure to have a living will — doesn’t matter how old or young you are — and that you have given powers of attorney to someone who can be trusted to carry out your wishes. Do not rely on a doctor to do this — after my father had a major stroke at the age of 84, his doctor refused to abide by the terms of his living will. Appoint someone who understands with and agrees with your wishes.
b) Quietly prepare yourself to provide your own exit, if need be and if opportunity arises. When there’s really no hope for survival and the future holds only suffering and prolonged infirmity, you may have to find your own way to the door. And you know, you should have those plans in place before the need arises.
It’s a sad thing when people have to contemplate suicide by way of protecting the future of a spouse or an infirm dependent. However, it’s a reality we have to deal with.
As Walter Cronkite used to say, “That’s the way it is…” Monday, October 7, 2013.
This post was included in the October 23 Carnival of Retirement at Mom and Dad Money.
