Coffee heat rising

Retirement

Home or Old Folkerie?

by

Sittin’ around the house thinking….

Am I gonna be able to stay in my home until I croak over?

Or will I be forced to sell this place and lock myself up in one of those prisons for old folks?

You know whereof we speak: “life care communities.” All the rage for keeping elderly delinquents off the streets these days.

Welp, y’know… Those institutions had just come into vogue as my parents entered their dotage. My father, having gone to sea all his life, was not the slightest bit daunted at the prospect of selling their little home in Sun City and consigning himself to the care of an institution.

But…my mother would have none of it! NO WAY in hell was she going to put herself in a nursing home before she needed it!

Little did she know how soon she would need it. She died on my birthday in her 65th year.

The cancer so generously gifted to her by the world’s tobacco companies killed her….less than a month after her 65th birthday. The nursing home was rolling her, in her hospital bed, down to the Medicare ward when she passed.

She was decently cared for in the nursing home…probably because my father drove in from Sun City every day. walked in the door when they opened at 7 a.m., and sat there beside her bed, watching, until they threw him out at 11 p.m.

But…

Frankly, I think my father was right: They should have imprisoned themselves in Orangewood, the “life-care community” of my father’s choice, before she got sick. He had discovered the existence of such places about eight months or a year before she fell ill, and he’d tried to persuade her to move into one. She would have none of it.

And…

Well, I don’t blame her. Personally, I loathe institutional living. Truly, truly hated living in the dorm. And that is why I don’t want to move into one of them. Too much like living in prison…

After she died, he promptly sold the little house in Sun City and forked over most of his net worth to move into Orangewood. And I can assure you that he liked it there. Well: except that he made a key and unreconcilable mistake: he married a horrible dragon lady who, once she had him trapped with a wedding ring, made his life miserable.

No, he wouldn’t divorce her, because

a) He was afraid she would “get all my money” in divorce proceedings; and
b) He was afraid of the gossip a divorce would create among the other prison inmates.

Dragon Lady was outgoing and busy: she was extremely popular with the Orangewood natives. And he probably was right: if he did divorce her, he no doubt would want — if not need — to move out of that place. But…those “life-care communities” glom ALL YOUR CAPITAL. He probably wouldn’t have had enough money to get himself into some other place, plus all the money he had given to Orangewood was basically disappeared.

Result of that: he lived out the last few years of his life in utter misery.

***

Would my father have been better off if, instead of institutionalizing himself, he had hired people to come in and take care of him at his place in Sun City?

Putting aside the fact that he was too tight to do that…let us think about it:

* Here, Pool Dude keeps the drink pristine. My father’s Sun City palace had no pool. However, because it was so poorly built (basically uninsulated), its AC bills were far higher than mine. So one might regard SC power bills, compared to my house, as a wash…in the pool.

* Wonder-Cleaning Lady comes in every two weeks and renders the house spotless. Because there are no kids or cats here, the place stays reasonably clean between visits.

* Gerardo wrangles the landscaping — which, because it’s xeric, doesn’t demand much. It has an automatic watering system: I don’t even have to do a hose-drag to maintain the place.

* I have no problem caring for a small dog. Ruby is basically effortless, as roommates go.

Given that my father’s house was paid for, to have stayed in Sun City and hired a yard guy and a cleaning lady wouldn’t have cost him anything LIKE what Orangewood cost. Not even if he hired someone to come into the house daily, check on him, take him to the grocery store, maybe prepare a week’s worth of meals for him.

Zillow estimates my house’s current value at $484,100. Borrowing against that would buy a WHOLE lot of service from Pool Dude, Lawn Dude, and the Cleaning Lady from Heaven. Years’ worth.

And again, let’s remember, he didn’t need either a pool dude or a lawn dude…

Now, what did my father get at the honored old-folkerie?

At Orangewood: a two-bedroom apt.  They refuse to tell you the cost on their website…which ought to tellya something….  As I recall, it took the entire proceeds of the sale of his house to get him into that place. The apartment was tiny: I would describe it as an elaborate studio apt. It didn’t have a real kitchen — just a counter with a minimal stove and a sink. The living room, dining area (if you could call it that), and kitchen occupied one (count it: 1) room.

Median monthly cost of “independent living” in Arizona is $2,738.

He couldn’t have afforded that. ONE YEAR would consume almost a third of his life savings. That’s $32,856/year, bare minimum. Without maintaining your car, without going anywhere, without even buying clothes. Basically what was happening was that he was forking over ALL of his Social Security, plus a substantial chunk of his savings.

It certainly would not cost $35,000+ a year to hire someone to come in and take care of my house. The total cost of everything — maintenance, car, groceries, utilities, pool care, and general living expenses — may come to something like that. Or not…. just now I’m not drawing anything like that out of savings, but I get a decent amount of SS. Not enough to live in middle-class grandeur, but certainly not so little that I would starve.

What that suggests, IMHO, is that moving into one of those places would cost as much as — or more than! — I would have to spend to stay here and hire people to come in and help me. The money I take out of savings, in most years, is recovered because the remainder stays in professionally managed investments.

I would be better off — and my son would be better off — if I can manage to stay in this place until I die, or at least until a few months before that happens. Proceeds from the sale of this house would nicely plump up his retirement savings. Or he could sell his place, invest any profit from that, then move into this place and invest the monthly amount he’s been forking over to his mortgage company.

Speaking of the value of a shack, my parents’ house in Sun City last sold for $255,000: two and a half times the amount of my father’s life savings. Lest you think that was bargain, the place was about the size of the first apartment DXH and I moved into. I think they paid about $8,000 for that house.

Indeed, that first apartment may have been bigger than the SC house…it certainly was no smaller.

Our apartment:

dining area
living room
2 bedrooms
kitchen
Walk-in storage closet in kitchen
2 bathrooms????? Can’t recall…maybe not, though

SC house

dining area
living room
2 bedrooms
kitchen
2 bathrooms
Don’t recall a storage closet, but think there was space behind carport
Lots of wasted space in hallway

The SC house last sold for $255,000!!!!!  2 1/2 times the total nest egg that my father saved for his retirement!

Soggy Doggy Glorious Day…

by

WHAT a spectacular morning!

High clouds make for a glorious sunrise as Ruby the Corgi sets out to drag the Hu-mann around the neighborhood. Oh, my: it’s just gorgeous out there.

And damp. And sticky… Very humid: 31%.

What really, dear Wunderground, does that mean? Are you saying that 31% of the atmosphere we’re trudging through is water?

😀

Could be, I reckon. But Ruby doesn’t mind. She charges ahead, a little furry brown rocket. We fly through the ‘Hood, around Upper Richistan, up toward Gangbanger’s Way. Past Marge’s house, apparently unoccupied (????) but not for sale yet.

Marge was (is?) well into her 80s. She wishes, more than anything, to evade being stuck into the Beatitudes or Orangewood or any other such holding pen for the elderly. But there’s no sign she’s living in the house. So…I fear the worst.

She said she had willed the place to her son — meaning she willed him about half a million bucks worth of real estate. He doesn’t live here, so…as soon as title to the house passes to him, he presumably will put it on the market.

It’s a pleasant old 1970s ranch-style house. Not to my taste, and now needing a bunch of repairs and upgrades. But still…lots of people would fall all over themselves to get it.

I actually might be among them, if it weren’t so nerve-gratingly close to Gangbanger’s Way. The traffic racket there would be just unholy! It’s a drag strip for the local delinquents, so all night you get ROAR ROAR ROAR from the brats. And it’s a main drag into town from the west side, so every rush hour you get ROAR ROAR ROAR from the unholy mobs of commuters trudging to work. And let’s not forget the hospital up the road on Gangbanger’s, bringing you WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO WEEE-OOO from the ambulances racing toward the emergency room.

{sigh} I do miss Marge, who had become my morning walking buddy. I’m afraid she probably fell — or else had a heart attack or stroke — and ended up in one of those horrible prisons for old folks. She dreaded that fate even more than I do. Truly: I would so rather be dead. If she had passed on, surely her son would have sold her house by now (he lives in some other part of the country). She probably landed in an old folks’ slam and asked him to hang on to it lest she somehow manage to escape.

Oh well.

The spectacularity of the sunrise has now passed, and what we have are high, pale gray clouds. Not the rainy type…just the humid type.

What do I hafta do today?

* Pick up the office.

* Call Cox. Demand that they send paper bills. (They’re shifting to “paperless bills.” No, thank you!!)

*Figure out, come to think of it, whether Cox is auto-paid now, or whether I have to send the ba*tards an e-payment or check every month. I think the latter, because I don’t trust Cox.

* Make a grocery store run.

* Argue with my son over medical bullsh!t.

Hmm…. Actually, I could physically go to the credit union and have one of their staff check on the autopays for me. This, while it entails an annoying drive, would take me past THE best Sprouts store in the Valley. And that would allow me to stock up on a pile of outstanding foodoids.

***

Cleaning out the e-mail in-box. OVER 500 NUISANCE E-MAILS, just in August!

Can you imagine? Hope I’m not deleting anything important. I just don’t have the patience to check every goddamn one of those things — not even looking at the email but just checking the subject or sender line. So WHAM! They all get deleted.

But even that is a nuisance. After hitting mass-delete after mass-delete, there are still A HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-SIX junk-mail messages sitting there waiting to be sent to trash. And that doesn’t count all the real messages from outfits like Amazon and from my client whose work I’m not in the mood to do…

Crazy-making!

Soggy Doggy Day

by
Musical Instrument in the Sound of Freedom Band

Seven ayem: 90 degrees in the shade of the back porch. Overcast. Humidity: 34%.

UGH!  Feels just like (un)lovely Saudi Arabia.

This kind of weather, right on the shore of the Persian Gulf, was typical summer weather. It rarely got as hot as Arizona does, but on the other hand. Arizona rarely gets as humid as Ras Tanura did.

Rasty Nasty, as my father called it. Aptly…

Just back from the mile-long perambulation around the park. Not too bad, thanks to the Rasty Nasty weather: relatively small Dog Parade. Most people who have any sense refrain from walking their dogs (and themselves) through this stuff.

Didn’t count…but I’d guess we passed about eight or ten dogs, all of them surprisingly well mannered. No lunge-fests. No attempted fights. So that was OK.

Thinking about my mother, as we strolled about. My. but she loved Arizona!  She even loved the roar of fighter jets training at nearby Luke Air Force Base.

My father loved Sun City: NO KIDS!!!!

LOL! He really disliked kids, especially those under about 15. How she persuaded him to let her have one escapes me.

But he loved her. He adored her. She was the center of his universe — seriously. And if she wanted a kid, she could have one.

Fortunately for him, because of her childhood malnutrition she couldn’t hold a pregnancy. I came along after half-a-dozen miscarriages. And I guess once she’d managed to go through one entire nine-month pregnancy, she figured enough was enough.

She spent TEN YEARS in Saudi Arabia, in monstrously uglier weather than we have here. She thought Arizona weather was balmy.

No kidding.

Heh! Most of the time it is, actually. This kind of humidity is rare in Arizona. .

Boyoboy, am I glad we’re not out there in Araby now, with the Arabs and the Israelis having at it full-bore. The Arabs, who identified us whiteys with the Jews, just hated Americans — they tolerated us because our thirst for oil was making their royal family very rich, indeed. But most of them would kill the average Aramco employee in the street, if they dared.

And with that conflict going on, they’d be a lot more likely to “dare” than normal.

All that notwithstanding: this balmy day is the type that makes me long for San Francisco.

When my mother’s upstate New York grandmother died of diabetes, the bereft widower shipped the kid off to the California Bay Area, whence her trampy mother had come. She was taken in by her grandmother, a lovely old gal who was smart, hard-working, and incredibly unlucky to have given birth to a daughter who had some sort of mental or sexual disorder that turned her into a nymphomaniac. Said daughter went on about her trampy business, and my mother was cared for by her truly wonderful grandmother and her widowed aunt.

In a lucky break for my mother, her mother’s astonishing sexual adventures led to an astonishing case of uterine cancer — so we’re told. She died — so we’re told — when my mother was in her mid-teens, and my mother was left in Berkeley to be raised by said grandmother and aunt.

Truth to tell… I’ve found convincing evidence that her mother — my grandmother — did NOT die at that time. Apparently she put on a melodramatic show, the purpose of which was to convince the unwanted daughter that she had passed on to another plane…when in fact, the plane she passed onto was high society in San Francisco. She married an influential businessman in the City and apparently, like all the other women in the family who refrained from digging their own grave with a cigarette butt, survived well into old age.

Oh well.

My mother loved to pile up the day’s first mound of cigarette butts sitting on that back porch in her beloved Sun City house, listening to fighter jets roar in and out of Luke Air Force Base. Yes: incredibly, she liked the sound of F-16s.

Those things are SO LOUD we can hear them here in the ‘Hood, over 20 miles away.

And apparently sound carries better through humid air. On a day like today — damp, overcast, and hot — those planes sound like they’re just down the road.

Which, I suppose, they are…in relative terms. Soggy terms.

Retiring to the Life of Riley?

by

Gettin’ old…gettin’ old. 

My son is beginning to fret, far more vocally than before, about my staying here alone in my middle-class four-bedroom house. Quite reasonable is his fear that I’ll trip (AGAIN!) and fall (AGAIN!!), but this time inflict some much more serious harm (breaking a shoulder was quite enough…) or even kill myself.

So he’s begun lobbying for me to sell this place and move into one of those horrid holding pens for old folks, like the one my father went into.

Now…my father went to sea all his life. He ran away from home at the age of 17, lied about his age, joined the Navy, and never looked back. And it was a good life: he earned a good living without a college degree (in fact, I don’t think he even graduated from high school). He saw the world — big time — there are not many countries outside the Soviet Union that he didn’t visit. And he landed a harbor pilot’s job in Saudi Arabia that, thanks to the hideous living conditions, paid enough for him to retire at the age of 50.

He did, eventually, have to go back to sea — he didn’t understand about inflation and so found himself short of enough to support himself and my mother for the rest of their lives. But it was only for a year or so.

After my mother died, he immediately moved into an old-folkerie — uhm, “life-care community” — where he lived out the rest of his life in brain-banging misery. No, not because of the institution, called Orangewood, which treated him well — after 30 years on tankers, he was used to crowded living conditions and bad food. But because he stupidly remarried and ended up stuck with with a harridan. He probably figured he could rebuild his former life by replacing my mother with another old gal. But…oh, my….

So my view of old-folkeries is tainted by his remarkably unpleasant experience…which admittedly was tainted not by the old-folkery itself but by the bitch he married.

Let’s suppose I were to give up on staying in my own place and succumb to my son’s demands that I move into an institutional setting…

What would you need to know about a place to live in your dotage?

  • What services and physical amenities would be needed for one to live on one’s own?
    • Meals (served in a student union-like setting)
    • Cleaning services
    • Repair services
    • Chauffeuring (in a limited way)
    • Power bills
  • Could you provide them for yourself?
    • I’m already doing that, except for the chauffeuring…and we do have plenty of those services hereabouts
  • How much would providing them cost?
    • Certainly not as much as your entire net worth, which you pay to get entry to one of those places

What attracted my father to the whole idea of Orangewood, at the outset?

  • He didn’t want to deal with the work of maintaining a house, i.e.,
    • yard work
    • repairs
  • Utility bills were probably included as part of the monthly Orangewood bill
  • Meals were provided
    • He didn’t have to make regular or large grocery-store runs
    • He didn’t mind institutional cooking
  • Orangewood staff would drive inmates to doctors & other destinations
    • In fact, I think they had a bus service that would tote the inmates to grocery stores. Yea verily…I do remember he and Helen ended up sitting for hours in some doctor’s waiting room until the OW bus showed up to drive them home. Hardly ideal!!!
  • He was used to living in an institutional setting, and did not mind cramped, noisy quarters

The fact is, he probably would have been fine there if he had not become involved with Helen. This hints that trying to replicate what made you happy in your previous life is not a good idea.

  • There was no way another woman could replace or duplicate my mother
  • The apartment quarters were too cramped for a couple to live in comfortably unless they were hardly ever home.

If this observation is accurate, then it would seem you have two choices:

  • Don’t remarry or otherwise try to rebuild your prior lifestyle. Engage the new life and do as much as possible in new ways and different ways.
  • If you just must remarry, do not imagine the new married life will be anything like your prior lifestyle. ENGAGE CHANGE and build an entirely new outlook and lifestyle in the new married life.

Why did my mother not want to move to Orangewood?

  • She loved that house in Sun City. She repeatedly told me how much she loved the house and liked living there.
  • She had dear friends out there.
  • She had no desire to leave those friends or build a new social circle
  • After a lifetime of major moves, she probably had figured the move from Long Beach to Sun City would be the last household move she would have to make, and she didn’t want to do it again.

Why might she have been willing to move?

  • Orangewood was within walking distance of my house (but she couldn’t or wouldn’t walk that far)
  • Luke Air Force Base generated a LOT of noise (although she was not bothered by it)
  • She might have felt safer, given her burglar paranoia
  • She would have been closer to fancy shopping centers
  • Although probably unaware of this: she would have had access to better doctors and medical facilities

None of these were strong enough motives to make her want to move.

 What are the pro’s & cons of my own place vs an OldFolkerie? Can these be weighted for comparison?

Pro’s

Staying here:

  • Maintain independence
  • Yard
  • Private pool
  • Spare room for guests
  • Quiet: privacy
  • Full kitchen
  • Separate freezer
  • Indoor, private garage for car
  • Own washer & dryer

OldFolkerie:

  • Communal living: meet new friends
  • Communal living: authorities keep eye on you
  • Relieves my son of responsibility
  • Bus to take you places

Is there a way to replicate the benefits of an old-folkerie?

Along those lines, note this site: https://my.aarpfoundation.org/ Many resources that could help you stay in your home.

Weighted value of pro’s & con’s:
(Sorry: WordPress will NOT let me format this table sanely…and just now I’m not in the mood to retype the whole thing…)

Issue/item Cons, my pl Pro’s, my place Cons, OW Pro’s, OW Real & potential drawbacks
Independence 2 10 1 2 Risk of fall
Yard 3 10 10 0 No yd @ OW
Private Pool 3 8 10 0 Expense, risk
Privacy 5 10 8 1 Limited, OW
Full kitchen 0 10 9 1 OW: no full kitchen
Sep freezer 0 10 10 0 OWs: none
Private parking 0 10 5 5 OW: none
Own w/d 0 10 10 0 No w/d in apt.
Hired workers 2 10 5 5 n/a
Taxi/Uber 3 10 3 10 T/U: about the same
Trans included 0 10 8 8 Slow, PITA; no transit officially “included” at my place
Meals 8 10 8 5 OJ food was awful! Limited mealtimes
Frees Son 10 2 2 8 Need to find services to help when he is unavailable
Social life 8 2 3 7 Need to reach out to make friends here
Sum above 54
Cons, my place
 112 Pro’s, my place
 92
Cons, Orangewd
 52 Pro’s, Orangewd

 

If this list is reasonably complete (is it??), from my point of view: the pro’s of living at my place outweigh the pro’s of Orangewood by more than twice; the con’s of living at Orangewood outweigh the cons of staying here by almost twice.

If fear of a catastrophic fall or a sudden health emergency is the main motivator for institutionalizing oneself, would it not make as much sense to ALWAYS CARRY A CHARGED-UP PHONE or one of those call-for-help buttons?

Either of those is infinitely cheaper than forking over the value of your home plus still more of your assets to some institution. And, IMHO, infinitely better  than consigning yourself to a prison for old folks.

What Does Inflation Do to Your Savings Goals?

by

Every now and again, I think of my father and his goal to earn back the substantial fortune his mother had squandered that her father, the 19th-century buffalo hunter, had accumulated in the process of clearing the Plains of Indians and wild livestock.

She herself was an Indian woman: Choctaw. If you happened to know that and you looked at my father closely, you’d realize “yup! Injun lad.”

Not surprisingly, she had no inkling of what money was or how to manage it.

When she refused to accede to her husband’s demand that she abort the unplanned, late-in-life pregnancy that produced my father, said grandfather(again!)-to-be climbed on his horse and trotted off into the Texas boondocks, never to seen alive by her again.  Supposedly, he shot himself, but when you get into the facts of the story, it looks suspiciously like he was murdered by a guy who had been an inmate where he — the father — had been a prison guard.

WhatEVER…the whole drama essentially burned a brand into my father’s psyche. It produced an obsession:

He would earn back the entire sum that his mother had squandered: $100,000.

Today, that wouldn’t seem excessively difficult.
Hell, I’m worth three times that…and what am I? A freakin’ teacher!

In those days, though, a hundred grand was a LOT of money. By 1962 (when he tried to retire), it would have been something in excess of $300,000.

Understand: my father dropped out and joined the Navy a year or two before he finished high school, out in the Texas boondocks. So his target actually represented much, much more money and MUCH more work than he understood. In today’s dollars, it would come to $3,131,660.

Can you imagine? For a guy who doesn’t even have a high-school diploma…

Well, he did it. By dint of canny investment and a lucky choice of investment counselors, when I went off to college in 1962, he had his 100 grand in the bank, and he retired from his job with a pocketful of dollars.

That didn’t last long.

Remember: this was a guy who did not understand the first thing about economics.

By the time I graduated with a BA, we had hit a recession and his vast fortune went down the tubes. He panicked, packed his bags, and went back to sea, leaving my mother in Sun City…a hole in the middle of the Sonoran Desert into which to dump elderly folks.

That which he did not understand — the mechanics of inflation and deflation — eventually came to pass, and by the time he died he did have a pile of dollars to leave to me, despite having moved into a rapacious old-folkerie.

All very nice…but the point to the story is that the workings of the larger economy have a much greater significance for the individual’s savings and retirement plan than most of us realize.

For one thing, you need to bear in mind that the absolute value of the dollar slips and slides over time. Sometimes, yes, over time the value goes up. But more likely, it will go down…and down…and down. By the time you’re ready to retire, a hundred grand will be worth….far from a hundred grand!

This implies, of course, that you need to inflate your savings goal by some extravagant factor if you are to arrive at a sum that can be expected to support you through your dotage. Take the amount you think you need to live in retirement and multiply it by about 3: that will probably be the minimum you’ll need to have on hand when you finally quit your job.

Because, y’know: inflation.

 

THIS Is Life in the 21st Century?

by

Holeeee shee-ut! I have been left SO FAR BEHIND in our fine 21st-century culture that I can’t even speak to today’s fine moderns.

Today, I sat in a Mayo Clinic doctor’s office while she explained to me, in words of one syllable, how to use a paper calendar!

No joke. Apparently their clients have become so accustomed to using electronic devices to track time and appointments that they no longer know HOW to use hard copy!

Understand: I’m an old lady. I’ve used paper calendars for the past SEVENTY YEARS. I do not need to be instructed in the use of a hard-copy calendar formatted as a booklet that you can carry in your purse.

So…I was just astonished when she launched into an explanation of how to use a paper pocket calendar to keep track of the current ailment. Incredibly, she assumed that I would not know how to use it.

It was a tiny sliver in the woodwork of a nightmare day. By the time we left, my son (who drove me out there) was not speaking to me. We made the entire hour-plus trip home in silence. That was jolly.

Clearly, I’ve outstayed my time on this planet. When the time finally comes to exit, stage left, I will not regret it. Of that, you may be sure.

Don’t get all panicked, please. I’m not ready to jump off the North Rim. Yet…

But consider: it’s true, we are living in a dystopic culture. It makes Brave New World look tame. All you’ve gotta do is look at the news of the day to know that. But…just passing day by day on the ground in America also will go a long way toward convincing you of it.