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Retirement

The Strange Benefits of “Lockdown”

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So we’re told that the “lockdown” of America’s population — basically urging everyone to stay in their homes, to shut down businesses, to stay at least six feet away from other people (preferably more), to stay away from church services, movie houses, athletic events, restaurants, and whatnot — has apparently begun to work. The coronavirus wildfire is beginning to cool. But we won’t be safe, not a chance, until a vaccine is produced. And when will that be?

“Given the current severity of the crisis, there are efforts to fast-track a vaccine for COVID-19 in as little as 12 to 18 months,” Dr. Abe Malkin, the founder and medical director of Concierge MD in Los Angeles told Business Insider.

A year to a year and a half? As little as? Seriously?

Our honored leader, dumb as a post as usual, craves to reopen the economy ASAP even though at the moment our country has the highest covid-19 death toll of any in the world: 20,000 of our people killed. This ill-advised desire of his is hardly surprising given that we’re headed into a depression the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1929 and that he campaigned on promises of invigorating the economy.

Meanwhile, those who understand economics warn that we’re skateboarding down the tubes at accelerating rates. “The pain will deepen,” opine the august editors of The Economist, “as defaults cascade through domestic payment chains.” Far as I can see, they’ve got that dead right. Recovery from this fiasco in the short term will be miraculous; in the long term it will require fortitude, patience, and — hang onto your hat — intelligent leadership.

If this thing goes on much longer, we could find that the measures we’re taking to save lives could alter the fabric of our society: change the ways we do things permanently.

On the other hand, not all is angst. Let us consider the strange benefits of “lockdown.”

• It has given Mr. Trump a royal opportunity to display what a bumbling clown he is. Maybe his performance will move voters off the dime to get him out of office.

• There’s almost no traffic! Even at 7 or 8 a.m., I can get across Feeder Street N/W without risking my life. The horrid Conduit of Blight Blvd. is relatively quiet and clear. Driving on a freeway is not the usual nightmare.

• I haven’t bought gasoline in a month! And the car’s gas tank is still three-quarters full!

• My auto insurer is refunding 15% of this year’s car insurance premium! Hafta say, it had crossed my mind to quietly resent having to pay to insure the tank for the weeks and possibly months that I’m not driving it. Since the cost of insuring that damn Venza is in the vicinity of $750, a 15% refund will go a ways toward next year’s tax & insurance budget.

• With people home all the time, the neighborhood is safer: fewer burglaries, fewer car break-ins, less harassment of women.

• Delivery services are growing. Getting someone else to bring your groceries to you instead of having to do battle with traffic and crowds is kinda nice. Walmart, Sprouts, Albertson’s, Safeway, Basha’s (a local grocery chain), Fry’s (Kroger), CVS, Walgreen’s, and Home Depot will deliver whatever your heart desires, right to your door. Right now I could order 20 pounds of (much-needed) birdseed from Walmart for a tiny fraction of what the same stuff goes for on Amazon.

• Restaurants are turning themselves into grocery stores. In addition to selling cooked meals to go, many are selling grocery items. One proprietor here will sell you a margarita to go, too, with your upscale gourmet “Mexican” meal.

• My son has been working at home for the past three weeks. He says his employer, a large nationwide insurance company, has closed and locked its large building in the East Valley. He’s afraid they won’t re-open it. Whether that means he thinks they’ll move their operation to some other city, laying off all their Phoenix workers, or whether he suspects they simply will ask everyone on their staff to telecommute has yet to be articulated. But…

Why not have all office workers work from home all the time? Companies wouldn’t have to rent expensive office buildings — these could be converted into homeless housing or retail space. Or  torn down to provide some green space. All a company would need is a meeting room to bring staff together once a month or so, and private space for one-on-one meetings.

• Meanwhile, my neighbor across the street, a high school teacher and English-as-a-second-language specialist, appeared to be relaxing on his front porch the other day, talking into his laptop’s microphone. In response to a quizzical glance, he announced “I’m teaching!“

Yep. I’ve done that. Created the Great Desert University’s first online course in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. It surely has its advantages over standing in front of a roomful of students for 90 minutes to three hours.

Why not put schools online all the time? Where schools exist to provide free lunches and baby-sitting services, why not frankly make them child-care centers? For single parents and couples who both have to work, existing school buildings could be converted into baby-sitting facilities with computer hookups to have the kids do their schoolwork online. Is it really necessary to congregate kids in prison-like facilities to teach them?

When I was teaching at the university’s westside campus — a commuter campus smack in the middle of a district where you really don’t  wanna put your kids in a public school — I was surprised to discover that a bunch of otherwise perfectly sane adult students were homeschooling their kids. Nooo, amazingly, they were NOT religious nuts or end-of-the-worlders. These were people who had tried the public schools in that part of town and found them beyond wanting. And because most were working-class folks, few of them were earning so much that one partner’s salary would be sorely missed. Several classmates explained that after doing the math, they realized that if one parent stayed home to supervise their kids’ homeschooling, it actually cost the family budget nothing — and indeed in some cases they came out ahead. This was because if one parent, usually the mother, stayed home, they didn’t have to pay for office clothing, for gasoline to commute, for higher auto insurance to cover commutes to two jobs, for lunches out, for day care, for summer child care, and so on. Not only that, but these people were convinced their children were getting better education — and having taught the products of Arizona’s public schools after they reach our universities and community colleges, I’d say they had somethin’ there. Not one but several of them reported that their kids could get through a whole day’s classroom instruction in two hours, sitting at the dining room table. They said that if they sat their kids down shortly after breakfast, the kids would go through the lessons, do the homework, and finish by noon.

They would then spend the afternoon in field trips, learning projects, music lessons, or other creative activities. Kids had no problem passing the standardized tests and no problem with the SATs.

Think o’ that… As for socialization, the public schools here are required to let home-schooled kids join in extra-curricular activities, so many of these kids were on track teams, baseball teams, band, debate clubs, even football teams. In addition, the Phoenix area has large kids’ soccer and baseball leagues, so there are plenty of PE-like things for home-schoolers to join.

I’m tellin’ you…if this lock-down maneuver goes on for very long, a whole lotta parents are going to figure that out. Why would you put your kid in a prison-like school where they’re going to bring home a disease, a pack of cigarettes, or a baggie of weed…when you could teach them better at home?

If that happens, school districts will (one hopes) respond by providing extensive online instruction. And then maybe all teachers will be able to hold forth from the comfort of their front patios.

And speaking of change in the offing…

• Sheltering in place is about the same as aging in place. This fiasco is giving me a chance to see what will be involved in staying in my house when I’m too old to go out and bat around the homicidal streets of Phoenix, and to figure out how to make it happen, while I’m still “young” enough and clear-headed enough to figure anything out.

Being forced to figure out how to get damn near everything delivered is good preparation for the Aging in Place Scheme. If all the places that are doing home deliveries now continue to do so into the future — and they probably will, because most of them are contracting out the service — it would be relatively easy to stay in your home (assuming no crippling disability) well into your dotage. All these delivery services essentially co-opt the largest part of one’s need to drive.

For other purposes — entertainment, for example, or church, or clothes shopping — Uber or else catching rides with younger friends will do the job.

What’s good about social distancing and self-isolation in your parts?

Of Taxes and Best-Laid Plans and Lamps…

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WonderAccountant is having a tax frenzy. Honestly…I don’t understand how anyone can do that crazy-making tax-prep ditz for a living!

I thought I’d set up my spreadsheets to totally simplify this year’s antics, but apparently I failed. One thing I didn’t realize is that repairs and maintenance on the house are now tax-related because we’re now a sole proprietorship, not an S-corp. It’s been many a year since I incorporated The Copyeditor’s Desk. We decided to de-incorporate, though, because she felt we would do better on the personal tax side if we did that.

This afternoon the young(ish) eldercare lawyer is supposed to call. I want to discuss the matter of the long-term care insurance, which everyone is telling me to get rid of. Naturally, when I called to cancel it, Metlife had a trained poodle on the phone coming up with every which way to keep me paying premiums.

So the next step was to plow through a four-inch-deep pile of paperwork from Metlife and its predecessor, TIAA-CREF. Metlife is truly notorious for trying to weasel out of paying benefits.

It was my understanding that if you quit paying, the issuer was supposed to pay back your premiums ($19,000, so far, since I started with TIAA in 2001). But…no. However, according to the original policy, which as far as I can tell was unchanged when Metlife bought TIAA’s LTC insurance business, they apply the balance to any nursing home bills you rack up — but they do not repay the unused premiums to you.

Well, after all these years, 19 grand would pay for 2.8 to 3.6 months of nursing home bills (private room/shared room)

Most people die within 3 months of admission to a nursing home. So what remains there would probably cover most of the bills.

If I quit paying premiums now and instead put the money in a CU savings account, at $133/month, that would add up to $1596 a year.

American baby-boomers can expect to live to be about 85, on average. So that would add $15,960 to the 19 grand already in Metlife’s coffers, for a total of $34,000 available (supposedly) to cover nursing home bills. Assuming I can get Metlife to return my money to me if I cancel their policy. At about $5,000 a month (by then, presumably), that would cover about 7 months in a home.

Some people, of course, are stuck there for a good deal longer than that.

My healthier relatives — the Christian Scientists who did not drink and did not consume coffee and walked daily and ate what we today call “whole foods” — lived to be 94. They each effectively dropped dead of heart attacks. Neither one went into a nursing home. But…let’s suppose you weren’t made of quite THAT sturdy stuff, but still you managed to stumble along to, say, about age 92 or so… Hmmm…. That would leave time, at $133/month, to accrue $27,132 for nursing home coverage. Let’s figure the price will be around 6 grand a month by then, eh?

$27,132 plus 19 grand (assuming Metlife even still existed to cough it up, assuming Metlife would cough it up) would give you $46,132 as a nursing home fund. Assuming nursing homes cost about 6 grand a month by then, that would last you about 7 1/2 months. According to my English-major arithmetic, which is nothing to place a bet on.

So…you’re takin’ your chances. My father was in a nursing home about two weeks before he croaked over. But…heaven help us! D-XMiL is a hundred and five years old and still alive, laying in a bed in a nursing home unable to see or hear. God help her. And she’s been in that state for years.

Interesting. Assuming inflation drives nursing home costs to “only” $5000 a month in 10 years (not a safe assumption) and to 6 grand in 15 years, the number of months that saving program would cover is almost same.

Jeez. Think o’that…

So after a brief telephone chat, our proposed new estate-planning/elder-care lawyer engineered a meeting in a couple of weeks. He thinks — contrary to the advice of the financial dude and the accountant but in accord with Consumer Reports’ opinion, that it’s actually a good idea to continue paying LTC premiums, if you can afford it. I can, but it frosts my cookies. PLUS: reviews of Metlife are awash in horror stories. Apparently they do every goddamn thing they can to avoid paying as agreed in their contract.

In less tenebrous climes…

Isn’t that a great word? Translations of the Greek epics describe Hades — which was just an underworld populated by the shades of the deceased, not Hell as in a place of torture — as “tenebrous.” Shady. 😀

In less tenebrous climes, the new glass shade arrived to replace the one I busted a couple weeks ago. None of us — we’re talking moi and not one, not two, but three lamp store and repair folks — could find one just like the deceased. The closest I could find is not opaline — it’s just milk-white — and is shallower & flatter than the late lamented shade. However, if you’d never seen the old shade, you sure wouldn’t know any better. I think it will do the job just fine. And to my amazement, it fits in the fixture and accommodates a 3-way bulb just fine.

The Lamps Plus dude proposed to adjust the fixture to make it fit exactly, which I suppose would be nice. But the fact is, it looks fine and I fail to see why it needs any adjustment.

And also in the lights department: The middle bathroom in my house is illuminated by a pair of matching wall fixtures, one on each side of the mirror over the sink, that each use a couple of small halogen lights. Naturally, one of those crapped out this morning.

So it was off to French’s Electric Co to try to snare replacement bulbs. Good luck, I figured, since every light bulb that works has been taken out of our sticky little hands.

To my surprise, they had a few! 40 watts, said he. So I bought the whole boxful, sensing that these will not be around much longer.

Indeed, when I got home I found that 40 watts was what the fixture was rated for…but that the other bulb in the lamed fixture was a 120-watt number. Jeez. So I replaced them both, elegantly not touching the glass on the things. Perfect!

Then I noticed that another bulb was out on the other fixture. Replaced that. Noticed that the two bulbs in there were also 120 wats. Hm.

BUT…the result was gorgeous! Much brighter than the incumbents…so much so that one could in theory paint one’s face in front of that mirror, which until today has not been an option. It’s been much too dim in that bathroom to make up your face.

I hope these will last. The upshot, though, was that I used two of the four lights I’d bought, trying to stockpile three of them for future use. So now I’ll have to go back over to French’s and buy another box of them, hoping to have enough to last into my dotage.

What a stockpile I have in the storage room! Almost every drawer is jammed with incandescent lightbulbs. That’s how much I hate, loathe, and despise the eye-stinging light from those horrid LED things. Once my stash is gone, I guess, I’ll have to switch to candles.

Since I habitually turn off the lights whenever I leave a room (unless I have to go out after dark and need to make it look like maybe someone’s home), light bulbs last a LONG time at the Funny Farm. A couple of those bulbs in the bathroom had been there since I had the fixtures installed — sixteen years ago. So I expect eight or twelve extras will last until I croak over. And then some.

Old Age: Fightin’ Back!

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Yay! This morning WonderOrthodontist decided not to perform the next step in replacing the busted tooth, because he felt it needed some more healing time. Six weeks!!

This was not something I was looking forward to: I’ve had about enough pokes in the gums to last me for the rest of my life. So despite having to trudge over to his place through the rain, I was delighted to dart in, socialize with his charming staff members, admire his cuteness briefly (this is yet another highly educated specimen of gorgeousness!), and dart out.

However…  Driving across town reminded me — again — that Old Age is creepin’ up. That would be old age in the form of freaking senility.

I have to admit that I am beginning to feel some concern about issues that seem to be associated (possibly) with age.

Ever since I tripped in the dark over that busted slab of sidewalk, I’ve felt weirdly unsure on my feet. Especially in the bathtub…but also just about anyplace in the house. I find myself picking my way across the floor, particularly near steps, for fear I’m going to trip or misstep again. That is not my style.

But given that I walloped myself magnificently and that it took weeks and weeks to recover, it makes sense. It’s reasonable, right?

Fine. However, we have another issue that is much more worrisome: an apparent growing degree of confusion.

This is not forgetfulness, though like anyone over about 50, I forget where my keys are if I don’t put them away where they belong. As issues go, that one is neither very serious nor does it seem to be getting worse.

The problem has to do with not recognizing or remembering exactly where I am, even though I’m on a path that’s so beaten it’s practically polished.

I have been driving in this city since 1966. That is fifty-four years. I navigate by dead reckoning because a map of the roads and neighborhoods is imprinted on my consciousness like the migration routes in a mallard’s brain. Yea verily, I know the city so well I can get from point A to point B without even looking where I’m going. No, I don’t have to read the road signs anymore.

Except…

The other day I went out to the credit union, which lurks on the ASU West campus at 45th Avenue and Thunderbird. You understand, I worked at that place for ten years. I drove out there five or six days a week, every week, at least once and often twice in a given day. Frequently I drove out and back after dark, to teach night classes.

ASU’s westside campus is bounded on the east side by 43rd Avenue and on the west side by 51st Avenue. Both of these are faceless, bland, Southern-California-style runways that pass through faceless, bland tracts falling to decay and past faceless, bland strip malls that invite you to do nothing more than to pass them by.

So I’m cruising up 43rd, and on the way am looking for a Fry’s Supermarket that stands on an east-west thoroughfare called Peoria — another faceless, blandly ugly road. When I can’t find the thing, I figure it’s on the next road over, west of the campus, not east of it.

I know that is wrong, because I know what’s on 51st, and it ain’t a Fry’s. But nevertheless I come to believe that is the case. But here’s the thing: I think I’m on 35th Avenue and that the next road on the other side of the campus is 43rd. Which it decidedly is not.

When I realize I’m not northbound on 35th but instead am already on 43rd, I become seriously confused…as in I don’t know quite where I am. Not until my car comes up beside the campus do I recognize where I am, but I still can’t understand why 43rd is in the wrong place.

It’s not, of course…35th is the road I use to drive from the campus up to the Costco on the I-17 — it’s another couple miles to the east of the campus.

Even after I finish the errand in the credit union and climb back into the car, I’m still almost convinced that 43rd is on the west side of the campus. To wit: I’ve come unstuck in space!

That was creepy.

And now we have today. I head off to the orthodontist’s. His office is situated on a road I have used to drive home from the ASU Main campus and back and forth to various shopping and business venues for many, many years. I’ve been to his office several times over the past three months or so.

The usual route would be across Glendale (which gets renamed “Lincoln” as it passes eastward) to 36th Street, down through a ritzy neighborhood to Stanford, eastward again past the swankiest private school in the state, and then south on 40th to the doc’s office building. However, Glendale/Lincoln has been all dug up for yet another public-works boondoggle and is projected to be so for months. It is one of the most heavily traveled surface streets in the city, and so has been bumper-to-bumper all the way from 24th Street to Tatum, on the edge of Scottsdale.

Avoid!

Hordes of avoiders are driving all the way down to Camelback Road to move east and west across the north-central part of the city. Thus, Camelback Road:

Avoid!

So the plan is to drop down 7th Street (where I have to buy some gasoline) to a major feeder street called Missouri, cruise across that to 24th, and from there go north and then navigate east across Stanford to 40th Street.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

See…the problem is… Stanford doesn’t go through to 24th Street.

You have to pick it up on 32nd, where it debouches into the fast-moving traffic flying between Camelback and Lincoln.

I know this. I know it as well as I know where the water glasses in my kitchen cupboards are.

Nevertheless, I make my way across Missouri to 24th and then northward…growing ever more puzzled that I can’t find the turn onto Stanford.

Not until I get almost all the way up to Lincoln do I realize that I’m on the wrong road to turn east on Stanford!

Got that? I’m as lost and as confused as a flatland tourister from Cleveland!

This is alarming because I’ve used that Stanford cut-through for years to get across the city to and from Scottsdale, to get to my hair stylist, to dodge traffic while coming back from Tempe, and to evade the eternal mess on Camelback Road.

Holy sh!t.

It begins to look a whole lot more alarming than “losing” your car keys or your glasses. It begins to look a whole lot like real senility.

I should not be confused in any way about something I’m so familiar with. Something’s wrong there.

{sigh} Reflecting on this predicament this afternoon, I wondered if I might be doing something to cause this — other than simply aging. If so, what might that “something” be?

Well, there are several possibilities, to tell the truth. For one, I hardly ever go out any more — that’s why the mileage on my car is so low. I hate driving in Phoenix’s wackshit traffic, and so avoid it as much as possible. That’s why I quit the Scottsdale Business Association: that drive to the Pavilions, way to Hell and gone across two freeways in the rush hour, was more than I cared to contemplate.

So we have some candidate causes here:

  1. Lassitude. I’ve stopped doing almost everything. I’m not even keeping up the garden.
  2. Lack of social contact. The church is the only place I see people anymore.
  3. Illness and injury. Neither of these can be helping the situation.
  4. Drinking. Possibly two or three glasses of beer, wine, or whiskey are 2 or 3 too many.
  5. Lack of interest in much. I don’t give a shit anymore.
  6. Desire to stay off the roads; increasing dislike of driving.
  7. Age.
  8. Possibly signs of senile dementia.

Could be any of these. Could be all of ’em, eh?

So the question is… Is there anything that can be done about this stuff?

Obviously, there’s nothing I can do about getting older. Nor, if I’m losing my marbles, can I do anything about that.

Maybe I can slow the process down a bit, though.

  1. Get off the duff! Get back to gardening (at least), get back to hiking in the mountain preserves. Pick up a goddamn pen and start writing again. Take the dog to different places to walk. Re-explore the Valley.
  2. Revive old friendships and relationships. Try to inveigle my way back into SBA or, failing that, rejoin the Chamber, whose avatars persist in nagging me to come back. Join one of the many groups at the church.
  3. Drink water, not wine or beer, with dinner.
  4. Get over it about the damn traffic! Stick the dog in the car and take her to other parks and hiking trails. Or just drive up the rim and hike in the sticks.
  5. Do some shopping. I haven’t seen the inside of My Sister’s Closet of Nordstrom’s Rack in two or three years.
  6. And…keep a record of these happenings, to see if they continue even if I manage to change the elements above.

Frankly, I don’t feel much hope that throwing myself around to bring a little more life back into my life is going to make much difference. Doubt if it’ll do much harm, though. And if I do have a record of this weird stuff, at least I’ll know whether it’s real. Or not.

 

Out of the Frying Pan into…?…

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A question that comes more and more often to mind: should you move out of your home and into a life-care community while you still can? They usually won’t accept you unless you’re ambulatory, so if you’re in a wheelchair, for many of those places, you’re no longer eligible. This means you’ve got to cut short time that you might be fully ambulatory and surrender your independence now to secure a place as insurance against the possibility that someday you might not be able to care for yourself.

Just this morning I found myself revisiting that question, when I came across this pretty nifty shack, on the market out in Sun City. It’s very different-looking from the standard Del Webb model, it’s been updated beautifully, and the seller is asking about $50,000 less than I could get for my house. Thus I could probably sell my house, pay the movers, and still have a few bucks in my pocket.

But still. It’s Sun City: a mausoleum for old folks who refuse to die and wish not to have kiddies around them. I lived there with my mother for awhile between undergraduate and graduate school and really don’t want to live there again. Not that it’s not nice and all…but…it is a ghetto for old folks. Ideally, I want to “age in place” in my present home. Yet it’s unclear whether that’s the best plan of action, given the costs and hassles, the crime rate here, the risks entailed in aging alone, and just the size of the property.

The alternative is a life-care community such as The Beatitudes, a destination upon which we have touched before in these precincts. One of my choir friends and her late husband moved into the Beatitudes and decided they didn’t like it. Even tho’ the outfit refunds your money if you decide to move out within a certain period, it must have been a mighty pricey fiasco for them. The cost of moving alone is a big hit, to say nothing of the costs of selling a house and then having to replace a lot of furniture that wouldn’t fit into a tiny old-folkerie apartment. Add to that the cost of having to buy another house and move again! Still, you have to think realistically about whether you can manage on your own if you age — even if you stay pretty healthy into your dotage, you’ll still be in your dotage. About the time you hit 85 or 90, you’re gonna need some help with everyday living.

Clearly, in a culture where adult children expect to pretty much divorce their parents, there’s no easy way to address the problems presented by old age. I figure the trick has got to be to plan ahead. Way ahead.

So if, like me, you’re inveterately rogueish when it comes to institutional life, then you need to come up with a plan that will work to keep you out of a warehouse for old folks, at least until you’re just a few months from the end. SDXB seems to have thought that through reasonably well. Consider what you need and don’t need:

Need:

  • A roof over your head without a lot of space to keep clean, and in good repair
  • A low-maintenance yard
  • Ideally, a place you can lock up and leave whenever the mood suits you — go away for the summer, go off on a cruise, whatever
  • Low costs
  • Reasonable safety (low crime rate; decent fire department)
  • Nearby medical care, hospitals, and yes — even nursing homes

Don’t Need:

  • A large amount of living space
  • Yard landscaping to take care of
  • Swimming pool
  • Central urban location (interestingly, now that the city has oozed that far westward, Sun City is “centrally located” in its space)
  • Pets
  • Children
  • Anything to hold you down

Well, Sun City exactly fits those needs. The floor plan of the house that SDXB found there is to die for. It’s perfect for one person, or for two people who like each others’ company a lot. If I could get that place and transport it to Prescott or Peeple’s Valley, I’d do it in an instant.

Costs are low out there because in the older tracts, there are no school taxes! When Del Webb started his first tract, he talked the County into exempting it from school taxes on the grounds that no one living there would be sending their kids to the local schools. Additionally, because people can get to shopping, churches, doctors & clinics, entertainment, and whatnot without ever leaving Sun City, car insurance rates are relatively low (though higher than you’d expect because the widespread senile driving habits do drive up the accident rate some); and because the houses are all block construction and most have no pool, homeowner’s insurance rates are in the sub-basement. So that fulfills three of the proposed six planning “needs”: easy-to-maintain living space, little or no exterior maintenance, and low cost of living.

Crime rates are very low. To the extent there is crime, most of it occurs along the main drags that run through the area, not in the residential parts, per se. This picks off two more criteria: low crime, and because of that, it’s reasonably safe to leave a house for several months at a time. And finally, there are two major hospitals out there, one of them among the three highest-rated hospitals in the state. They also have one of the best life-care communities in the state, if it should come to that.

My guess is that my father stumbled across Sun City — he was sailing out of San Pedro at the time and counting the minutes until he could retire. They’d seen a condo in Long Beach that I thought was very nice, but apparently it was also very expensive, something that was agin’ my daddy’s principles. With that idea vetoed, my father proposed that they move into a trailer on the coast: all very scenic…and appropriately cheap. My mother was having none of that.

Right about that time, Del Webb was building the first phase of Sun City, and he had a nationwide ad campaign going. My father must have seen some of that advertising or else one of the men on the boat knew about it and told him. Whatever, nothing would do but what they had to move to Arizona.

My mother didn’t seem to object to Sun City. They did, after all, have a house, not an apartment, for a change. The weather was nice most of the year. And she was an affable soul — made friends easily wherever she went.

SC worked out pretty well for my parents, but it must have been difficult for my mother. Her best friend lived in Long Beach, and her family lived in the Bay Area, a reasonably easy drive up the coast. She never complained, but my guess is she must have been only moderately happy there (which is a way of saying she may very well have been miserable). Long Beach was a city, part of the LA area. Sun City was a fake town in the cotton fields outside of Phoenix, which at the time was a dumpy small city/big town in the middle of nowhere. She was a city girl. Although my father’s brother & his wife moved there, as did two couples who had been longtime friends, if you don’t golf and you’re not into ballroom dancing or pointless crafts projects, there isn’t much to do other than play cards.

***

Now let us consider whether, if you were truly afraid to age in solitude (and there are good reasons to be afraid), the cost of living in a place like the Beatitudes would pay for itself.

Let’s assume that the rumor we’ve heard — a cramped two-bedroom in a tower at the Beatitudes costs $7,000 a month, inclusive all services — is actually true. That may not be a good assumption, as it may be based on the number of people occupying the apartment; and of course, it may be inaccurate. But let us assume.

At $7,000 a month, my total assets would support me for 25.9 years if I stayed in my home. At $3,500 a month (assuming the 7 grand figure is for two people and one occupant would be half that figure), obviously I could live here for almost 52 more years.

Although it’s not impossible that I’ll live beyond the century mark, it’s not likely, and so very probably that I could stay here until the end of my life. Especially since I don’t spend anything even vaguely like 7 grand a month, by the time I become infirm enough to need daily help, plenty of cash would be left to pay for it.

If I were to move into the Beatitudes now and fork over the total value of my home to move in there, then my remaining assets would support me for 17.8 years at $7,000/month.  And should I happen to live that long, I’d be 92 when the money runs out: right about the age when one really does need a life-care environment.

So: would it not make sense to stay in one’s home at least until one’s mid-80s? Preferably into one’s 90s, if one lived that long?

***

After my parents had been in Sun City about ten or twelve years, my father found out about life-care communities and, specifically, about Orangewood, an old-folkerie on the northern border of North Central Phoenix. My father thought the life-care concept was a GRAND idea. Even though the Sun City house was a low-maintenance affair — gravel lawns = no mowing! — he apparently was thinking they wouldn’t be able to care for themselves forever in a freestanding house, and they might as well get themselves in the door at Orangewood while it was still easy to do so.

My mother did not want to move to Orangewood and, for what was probably the first time in their marriage, she put her foot down and she got her way.

So they were still in the Sun City house when she succumbed to cancer. But as soon as she died — literally within a couple of weeks — my father applied to the place. The six- or eight-month waiting list was an exaggeration: within a few weeks they were welcoming him to c’mon in.

He didn’t mind Orangewood. It would have made me crazy, but he had lived on ships since he was about 17 and so was socialized to institutional life. And he was a guy who would eat whatever was put in front of him, so he didn’t seem to resent the awful out-of-a-bag-into-a-steam-table processed horrid food. He appeared to be happy there, at least until he was a couple years into the marriage with the dreadful Helen, who snatched him up the minute he walked in the door. The point being, if you don’t mind that lifestyle, including a life-care community in your long-term planning makes sense. In my father’s case, he rescued his family (families, actually) from having to shoulder a great deal of terrifying responsibility after he arrived on his deathbed. He received excellent care in his few final months, and for that matter, was kindly accommodated all the time he lived there. With the exception of a predatory doctor who was in the business of ripping off Medicare, staff at Orangewood truly were wonderful people.

My father’s Grand Plan for old age (first in Sun City; then, as an afterthought, in a lifecare community) worked well for him, except for his having married Helen. After the honeymoon wore off, she drove him nuts. At one point — get this!! — he found a similar life-care old-folkerie down the road, except you didn’t have to buy in: you could rent! So…being a wily old bustard, he snuck over there and rented a studio apartment. This he outfitted with an easy chair, a television, a lamp or two, and a coffee pot (no doubt a bottle of Canadian Club, too). He would tell Helen that he was going about one errand or another — usually his excuse was he had to take the car to the repair shop, and he was going to wait there for the work to be done. He must have had other excuses, too, but I have no idea what they might’ve been. Then he would drive over to this apartment and spend the whole day in blissful peace and quiet, parked in front ot the television set! 😀

After a few months of this, he gave it up. He sold the bargain furniture and TV set and returned to domestic…uhm…bliss at Orangewood. He must have been miserable. He told me he was afraid to divorce her because of the community property laws: “she’ll get all my money!” And, her mother being a Superior Court judge and her son-in-law being an accountant who also had a law degree, he could’ve been right…

  • So, item: Do not mess up your old-age plan by remarrying, should you be widowed. Far better to live in sin.
  • Item: In that department, a live-out arrangement is infinitely preferable to a live-in arrangement.
  • And item: Consider all the potential alternatives to your plan.

Rain!

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At last! Monsoon season is almost over, and here we get our first thunderstorm of the summer — with rain. About time, I’d say!

Ruby the Corgi is unnnerved. She contemplates jumping off the bed, but it’s a drop from the top of the mattress to the floor. Too exposed up here: she craves her den, under the toilet.

Clearly, under the toilet is the only safe place to be during a noisy storm. 🙂

And noisy it is. The light show is going on about 5 to 10 miles away, by my count. But still, a few thunderclaps are…arresting.

Amused myself this evening by starting to figure out next year’s budget, the annual required minimum withdrawal having just arrived from Fidelity. The numbers do not look good.

It appears that over the next year, I’ll have a shortfall of $12,470. This year’s RMD plus Social Security total up to $31,460, but when I set aside the amounts I paid for 2019 taxes and insurance plus the $300/month for emergency savings, the net available to live on for a year is $20,085. Meanwhile, my total average living expense per year is now $32,556, not including any little surprises like dental work and pool repair. That’s a shortfall of $12,471. If I don’t put anything aside for emergencies, we still end up with a shortfall of $8870.

I got by for about 10 or 11 months this year on the RMD and Social Security, but had to take the RMD a couple of months early. Financial Dude just transferred $16,500 from Fidelity, but after taxes & insurance, that will not cover my costs for 12 months. Or even, I’m afraid, for 10 months.

Coincidentally, we’re de-incorporating The Copyeditor’s Desk, changing it from an S-corp to a sole proprietorship. What that will mean tax-wise escapes me. But the business account has just about enough to make up the shortfall, assuming I don’t have to buy any new computer hardware. But…that’s this year.

Then what?

 

How to Age in Place…

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As you know, my dear friends from church have moved into the Beatitudes, one of those old-folkeries presently dubbed “life-care communities,” where you take up residence in an apartment, eat in the institution’s chow line, get first dibs on space in the nursing home should you need it, and are generally watched and entertained 24/7. Sorta like a prison for old people. Or a rabbit warren.

It looks like Nirvana – just think! Never have to change your own sheets again! Never have to mow another lawn! Never have to wrangle a repairman to fix the plumbing! Never have to cook another meal! Wooohoooo!

Yeah. Freedom’s just another word for….

Not that I don’t understand where Mrs. Friend was coming from in deciding that they would make this move: they’re both in their mid-90s, Mr. F has fallen three times, he has glaucoma that soon will render him pretty much blind, and he has serious heart problems. She has a bad hip and is now too old to get it replaced, meaning she’s in pain all the time. And they had a bat-sh!t crazy neighbor who was bound and determined that they would not use the common walkway between their houses to roll out the weekly trash pickup. Even though most of the exterior work was covered by the HOA and most of the housekeeping was done by a cleaning lady, taking care of the house was getting to be a bit much.

But…hmmmmm….

Yesterday we all went out for lunch with Connie the Long-Haul Trucker. Mr. F ordered a bowl of chili, apparently something he orders with some frequency at the Institute. Along it comes. When he sees it, he remarks, “This bowl contains three times as much chili as we get at the Bistro” — which is what the old-folkerie calls one of its three chow lines. We eat and yak and carry on. Some time later, we’re about to settle up for the lunch, and he remarks again, “I got a lot more chili, and the quality is far better than the Bistro’s. And the meal was cheaper than what we’re paying.”

Mr. F is not a whiny guy…he’s a retired nuclear engineer with a lot of common sense. I’ll tell you, I was unimpressed with the quality of the Bistro’s food, myself. They had me over for breakfast…not my favorite restaurant meal, since I can’t eat eggs and I don’t care for cereal and I detest pancakes with sweet gooey gunk slopped over them. So I order an alleged “Belgian waffle.” Out comes a little waffle-shaped thing, about four or five inches in diameter, no powdered sugar on it. Looks like one of those things that you take out of a box and pop into a toaster.

I asked for extra butter (because lots of butter is the only way to gag down pancakes and waffles made from a mix, if you dislike syrup), and they brought me four or five tiny individually wrapped packets. The waffle thing wasn’t hot enough to melt the butter — would’ve done better to have ordered a couple pieces of toast. But more to the point: on the way out I realized my mouth was puckered-up parched, so salty was this fake waffle.

Ugh. Four years of bad student union food at the University of Arizona was enough for me. I sure don’t want to spend my dotage eating that junk.

This is the trouble with institutional life: it’s not life.

For three to seven grand a month, they could provide you with decent food. REALLY decent food. And more to the point, what the hell are they doing, serving up packaged foodoid that is so oversalted it leaves your mouth puckered up half the day to freaking old folks, most of whom presumably have cardiac issues?

So….

Yesterday afternoon I started calculating how on earth I can stay in my house until I croak over… Checking out a price comparison, it seems to me that even if you have to hire a 24-hour caregiver, it may be cheaper to stay in your home than to move into a storage bin for the elderly.

One person told me the Friends are paying 7 grand a month to stay in the cramped two-bedroom apartment they’ve landed in. The house wasn’t large, but it was one helluva lot more comfortable than four small rooms and a kitchenette. Actually three rooms: the dining and living rooms are separated by a sort of partition that doesn’t quite make them separate spaces.

The Beatitudes works hard to keep its rates off the Internet. One site says the place charges 5 grand a month…but that’s for a studio or one-bedroom apartment. For one person. So $7,000 for the two of them in a two-bedroom suite is probably about right.

Even hiring someone to come in and take care of them 24/7 in their house would not have cost $7,000/month. Even if it did, they’d still be in their home.

The Institute gave them each one of those electronic dog tags to wear around the neck, to summon help if they fall or have a heart attack. But forgodsake! You can get those for free at Amazon. The best of them, which summon the EMTs or police as needed and come with a lockbox for emergency workers to retrieve the house keys, have a subscription rate that’s only about $20 or $30 a month…again, a far cry from 7 grand.

That’s 7 grand a month plus all the return on the sale of your house: they had to pay ALL that they netted on the house sale to buy into the place. They got about 360 thou, from what I can tell.

Uhm…let’s think on that….

I figure that if, like me, you have nursing home insurance (one reason to buy into the place is that you’re guaranteed a bed in the nursing home, when the time comes), all of your living expenses and all the services they’re getting would run you around $2292 to $2323 a month if you stayed in your home:

They didn’t have a pool at their house…nor did they care to use one. So knock $240 a month off those totals for a person who lives pool-free.

As for transportation: they’ve kept the car, even though driving has become a challenge for them. But let’s say you used taxis or Uber to get around. Everything they needed was very close to where they lived. If they were like me, they could keep the driving junkets to one every two or three days.

Take the cost of your vehicle (about 28 grand. paid in cash) and prorate it plus the taxes, insurance, and routine care over 12 or 15 years: you get a monthly cost of $797 to $836. With that bracing calculation in mind (it doesn’t even include gas!), judicious use of taxicabs would be significantly cheaper. Let us say that on the low end they actually are paying $5,000/month to live in the warehouse. Five grand would buy you one helluva lot of taxi rides!

If a typical taxi trip cost you $50, that would be a hundred rides per month! If you went out twice a day (!!), the junketing would run you $3,000/month, significantly less than the rent at the old-folkerie; if you even went out once a day (which would be about three times more often, on average, than I drive anywhere), at $50 a trip it would cost you $1500 a month. While that’s more than owning and driving your own car, it’s a far cry from living in that place, where the transportation is a shuttle-style jitney ride to the doctor’s office or a grocery store. A-n-n-d…$827 a month to own and operate your own car — which doesn’t include gasoline) — is not that much less than $1500 a month for chauffeured rides…I spend about $60 a month on gasoline, which would bring the total to around $887 a month. And I think that’s pretty conservative. It assumes you paid for the car in cash — if you didn’t, your monthly cost would be a great deal more than the proposed taxi rides.

With grocery stores and Amazon now delivering orders, including whole ready-too-cook meals of fresh food, I think you could stay in your home and live better — and no less safely — for a lot less than it would cost to institutionalize yourself.

Got a thought? Am I nuts?