{Dunno what’s the matter with WordPress, but I simply cannot get the paragraph formatting in this post to stick, no matter how much I hassle with it. Sorry, folks…but some of the grafs here are going to lack extra spacing, ’cause I give up.}
***********
Wanna know how the weather can be searing hot and dripping soggy at the same time? Visit the lovely Valley of the Sun in August!
***{sigh}***
My dear friend and sorta substitute dad, L, passed away last week. To no one’s surprise: he was 94, and had gotten pretty decrepit over the past three or four years. Connie is one of his daughters…yea, verily, she’s the famous Connie the Long-Haul Trucker. Unclear to me whether she’s going to make it into town for the obsequies.
Connie is on the road, in Montana. Fortunately, the family is significantly larger than mine was. Lee has daughters on the West Coast and a fine son and daughter-in-law here in lovely Phoenix.
So plenty of middle-aged relatives are on hand to help J in her newly minted widowhood.
J dragged L out of their pretty patio home (which was her house, built years ago by J and her late husband) and into the Beatitudes. He did NOT want to go into the prison for old folks, and he said so vocally.
But there was nothing he could do. He’d given essentially all his money to one of the kids; and the patio home belonged to Joan, 100%. So he really could not say “nnnooo i’m not moving into that place with you.”
The Beatitudes, like every other old-folkerie that I’ve seen, is as depressing a prison as you can imagine, and for a person who starts out with an “i-don’t-wanna-be-here” mindset, it would be just hideous. As it no doubt was for L. But he was old, he was frail, he kept falling…and when he did fall, J, who’s 5′2″ in high-heels, couldn’t get his 6′4″ frame off the ground. Compounding the risk, they had a lunatic neighbor in the patio home complex, who kept trying to run L down in her car! The HOA, even though its president was the vice-mayor of Phoenix, could do nothing to keep this nut case under control. Sooo…it made a kind of dismal sense for them to move into the old-folkerie, which has a whole staff of people on duty 24/7 to help in case of mishap.
Common sense, however, did little or nothing to make the move palatable for poor L.
I think they’re having a viewing down at the church just now. If I were a decent human being, I’d show up down there, huh? {sigh} Well. “Decent” is surely not my middle name. My parents didn’t believe in elaborate death celebrations — my father was a committed atheist who deeply loathed and despised all organized religion. So here I sit…
***
{sigh} How to cope with decrepitude????
***
For what it costs to move into that place, you could afford to hire one HELL of a lot of nursing and household care. J told me getting in there took all of the proceeds from the sale of their house — which was comparable to mine. Here in the ’Hood, we have Marge, a neighbor whose son (only child) and husband predeceased her. She lives in a nice sort of North-Centrally ranch house (generous in square footage, not vast) a block or two south of Gangbanger’s Way, a major thoroughfare that traverses the Valley from the far west side to the SR 51 freeway.
So instead of selling and moving into an old-folkery, Marge borrowed against ALL the equity in the house (which of course keeps growing as property values run amok…) and is using it to hire folks to take care of her in her home.
I’m thinking that’s a highly viable idea. Our neighborhood isn’t very safe, though…so one would have to come up with a blandishment.
Another couple of pals, a gay couple of considerable class and professional standing (let’s call them J2 and L2), sold their home in tony North Central and bought a very nice two-bedroom apartment in one of the newer Central Avenue mid-town high-rises. The view is to die for…and that place is a two-bedroom apartment, as opposed to the J & L’s “two bedroom” cell at the old-folkerie — which is about the size of a motel room.
Seriously: J & L’s so-called “two-bedroom” apartment at the Beatitudes is smaller than the one-bedroom garden apartment I rented in graduate school. It’s not a lot bigger than the studio apartment I rented with the salary from my first, vastly underpaid job. Meanwhile, J2 & L2 have two spacious bedrooms, a kitchen that’s bigger than mine(!!), a view of the entire East and North Valley, parking space in a real garage (not a tin-roofed lean-to)… And the light-rail runs right past the front of their building. They could walk to AJ’s, but why walk when you can hop a train? And Central Avenue is lined with restaurants of every variety.
Seems to me that if you were based in an upscale apartment building like that, you could pretty much duplicate the blandishments of the Beatitudes (possibly with the exception of the available 24/7 nursing care) without handing over your kid’s patrimony. Seriously: buy an apartment, and you retain equity in the dwelling; move into the Beatitudes, and you fork over all the equity that you extract from the sale of your home. Permanently. If you croak over while you’re living in a fancy condo, your heirs get your equity; if you croak over at the Beatitudes, they get nothing.
Why on earth do you suppose this doesn’t seem obvious to people?
Consider my father, who moved into one of the first such “life-care communities” in the Valley. In 1977, he sold his house in Sun City for about four times what they’d paid for it in 1962, and it took ALL of the proceeds and then some to buy him — and only him, my mother having recently died — into a prison for old-folks. He still had to pay a hefty monthly fee.
Before he stumbled upon the life-care scheme, he figured he would be able to leave me about $100,000 (about $521,000 in today’s dollars) plus the value of the SC house. After he sold the house, moved to the old-folkerie (forking over most of his liquid assets), and married the horrid woman who glommed onto him there, he lived in profound unhappiness for another eight or ten years. He would (IMHO) have been much better off to have stayed in his paid-off house in Sun City and used as much of his assets as needed to support himself comfortably. Or else…if the house was too depressing for him after the horror show he endured there, to have moved into one of the very nice patio homes out in Sun City, which he could have purchased for less than the net on sale of the house.
The point being, I s’ppose, that if you reach your dotage with enough capital to move into one of those dreadful places, you have enough to take care of yourself in your own home for as long as you’re likely to live. Take my father’s pension plus a modest return on his savings plus his Social Security, add ’em up, and you get more than enough to live on in his pleasant little paid-for house in Sun City.
A-n-n-d, with my mother gone, — relieving him of the cost of feeding her, clothing her, and underwriting her six-pack-a-day smoking habit — his retirement and savings income would have been more than enough to pay people like Marge’s helpers, who do the housework and the yardwork, drive her around, schlep groceries, and sometimes even walk the dog.
A high-rise apartment like J2 and L2’s, smack on tony North Central Avenue — where the lightrail glides by the front door several times an hour and within walking distance of a major regional hospital, of AJ’s magnificent grocery store, of a Sprouts, and of more restaurants than you can count — would cost just about the same as you would clear from buying one of our houses in the North Central district. If I sold my house today, tomorrow I could move in next door to J2 and L2, without having to come up with more cash than I would net on this place.
And…if I didn’t like it, whether now or any time in the future, I could sell such an apartment and move back to ground level, probably with cash in my pocket. At the Beatitudes, you have a short trial period in which to decide whether you want to spend the rest of your life there. Miss the deadline, and you lose all the money you gave them…which amounts to all the cash you would net on a four-bedroom house in a good neighborhood.
In other words, if you’re going to use up your assets to support yourself in your dotage, it looks very much like you could fund the old-age care you need by borrowing against a paid-up house to hire help, or (with luck) by using your savings. It would require you to keep a firm grip on your marbles, or else to have a trustworthy relative or agent to oversee expenses and spending. But the truth is, despite our presumptuous fear of Alzheimering out, most Americans do retain their marbles through their old age. Today about 10% of elderly Americans develop Alzheimer’s, down from 13% in 2011. It gets less and less likely that you’ll become too air-headed to live on your own…
I’m sorry for the loss of your friend.
I know the question of where to live out your later years has been on your mind for a while now, and I think you’ve come up with a very practical solution.
My condolences on the loss of L.
Your last paragraph about losing your marbles was both reassuring and hilarious. I’ve met too many younger people who don’t seem to have any marbles to lose.
LOL!!! Ain’t that the truth. The only way you could survive to adulthood in this Brave New World would be to start out marble-free