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aging in place

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?

One Don’t-Wanna DONE!

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Admitted: I’ve let the Don’t-Wanna tasks pile up. You know: those little nagging chores that need to be done but can be put off. And put off. And put off some more…

The present case in point: a mound of Mexican primrose that has grown in the backyard for several years. Some there are who regard this plant as invasive, but in my experience it stays where you put it. Assuming, of course, that you put it in a flowerbed, not broadcast seeds over a hillside… 😀

Well, the primrose around the pool is very happy, but over the past year some kind of bug got into the backyard mound.  Because gardening is a laissez-faire proposition here at the Funny Farm, I never got around to doing battle with the critters. Think I sprayed them a couple times with dilute Dawn detergent — an effective insecticide, but you have to get it on the little beasts. And because the mound is kind of out of sight from the back porch and the pool area, it’s been out of mind, too.

Result: as spring is sproinging, those plants are nothing but sticks. Green sticks, promising a possible resurrection. But sticks. Meanwhile, the pool is alive with beautiful pink flowers, and some are even growing in the crevices between the flagstones. So it doesn’t look like the mound is going to come back this year.

So this morning being unduly cool, I trotted out there and pulled up or broke off all the denuded sticks. Presumably it will soon grow back — it’s hard to kill this stuff. And when it does revive, I’ll have to remember to mist it with Dawn every week or two.

A-n-n-n-n-d…what else remains to be done, having been put off interminably through all the tolerably cool winter months?

  • Trim back the plants along the east and west ends of the pool, which now block passage to all but the most intrepid of sherpas.
  • Pull out the primrose that’s gone a bit wild in its adopted home between the flagstones
  • Replace the now very agèd chard (it’s lasted a good four years!!) with new grown-from-seed babes
  • Clean out the flowerbed around the olive in front. That’ll take half a day.
  • Pull out dead plants in pots on west side; replant or else haul the pots away. Figure out why they’re not getting watered adequately.
  • Put Luis up to removing the overgrown Texas ranger in front. Get him to thin the trees.
  • Fertilize and deep-water the roses
  • Treat paloverde, Texas ebony, and desert willow with borer killer

None of these is very difficult. And in fact, despite a year of neglect and the rainiest winter on recent record, there just isn’t all that much that needs to be done.

This house is absurdly easy to take care of. But of course…I planned it that way.

It’s such a pretty little house now, I really don’t want to move: bum invasion, Conduit of Blight, Gangbanger’s Way, and outsized property taxes notwithstanding.

My friends who moved to the Beatitudes retirement home sicced that place’s marketing department on me. This morning a woman from their sales office called and asked if I wouldn’t like to take the grand tour and listen to her pitch.

Well. Sure. I’m willing to do that. They’re building a whole sub-campus of patio homes that look to me one helluva lot better than an apartment in a vertical hive. So yeah: I’m curious.

But…the fact still remains: I don’t wanna move out of here.

What I really would like is to live here until I die. Which is not at all out of the question, given how minimalist the maintenance tasks are. All that would be needed to keep me here into my full dotage will be a competent cleaning lady and a good yard dude. A decent handyman would be nice, too. And no matter how many people I have to hire to keep this place up and myself in food and clean clothes, the cost would be nothing compared to the cost of living in one of those old-folkeries.

And despite the Bum Express delivering drug-addicted derelicts to our front doorsteps, the fact is that this is one of the few even vaguely affordable in-town neighborhoods — if you think of $350,000+++ as “affordable.” Young people have discovered it. And they’re gentrifying in swarms. Just on Ruby’s short doggy-walk circuit, four houses are being renovated, big-time. One fix-&-flipper just sold for $729,000 — an outrageous amount that represented a shameless rip-off of an elderly single man, that’s true: but there it is. It still goes on the record as what these houses are “worth.” Even though that price is ridiculous, it nevertheless will push our values inexorably upward.

At this point, I could afford to move to Prescott, a sweet and scenic little burg where property values are inflated by incoming Californians. If my son didn’t live here, I probably would. But as long as he’s in these parts, I expect I will be, too.

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.

Downsizing: Is It Worth the Cost?

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Recently Money Beagle ran a guest post whose author suggested that moving to smaller digs may not be the best choice for all of us as we fade into our dotage. It touches on a thought I’ve been ruminating on: the question of whether I should downsize now, while a) I can afford the costs and b) I still have the health and physical strength to engineer moving to another house. Actually, the question is whether downsizing is a good idea at all.

My house has four bedrooms. It sits on a large lot, almost a quarter of an acre. It has a large pool and a forest of trees. How much does one little old lady need to air-condition, heat, clean, water, trim, and maintain? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to move to, say, an apartment in Scottsdale? Or one of those trendy lofts downtown? Or a nice single-story patio home with no yard to take care of?

Or maybe at my age, with about 15 years of tolerable life remaining — at the outside — maybe it’s time to move into a life-care community?

Well. I wonder. Let’s consider the costs.

First, to sell this house:

6% off the top to the Realtor (the better ones in these parts get 8%): $16,500, on my $275,000 shack
Recording fees: $150
Escrow fees & title insurance: $2,500
Prorated tax: up to $2,500
Termite inspection: $300
Home inspection: $300

That doesn’t include a home warranty for the buyer or any blandishments you offer, such as a flooring allowance or a home warranty. Nor does it count the costs of repairs and upgrades at the new digs — how many of us have had to replace a water heater or a garage door within six months of a move? And do you really want to live with that harvest gold Formica countertop for the rest of your life?

If you’re at the age where downsizing makes sense, you’re past the time of life when you can pack up all your possessions and bribe your friends with beer to help you stuff your furniture and boxes into a U-Haul and then drag the stuff into a new house. That means you’ll need to hire a professional moving company, an expensive transaction: $2,000 for a local move; cross-country, $8,000. You could, of course, hire an estate sale company to yard-sale all your earthly possessions and then buy new furniture when you get to wherever you’re going: it costs about $10,000 to furnish an entire house. Probably less if you buy Ikea junque, but again: at “downsizing” age, who wants to live with Ikea’s kid-engineered throw-away gear?

Let’s see what we have here… Total cost of selling and moving: $22,250 (a conservative estimate). That’s 9% of the property’s likely sale value.

My house is paid for. To avoid a mortgage, I’d have to use the net on the house sale to buy the new place. But that place will have to cost about $25,000 less than I can get for this one. Let’s imagine that for $250,000 I could find something I’d want to live in, located in a safe, middle-class area that is NOT a retirement tract like Sun City. I’ve but begun to pay…

Buyer’s closing costs and moving cost for a house purchased in cash go like this:

Close of escrow: $250
Title insurance: $1350
House inspection fees: $200 to $400
Recording fees for deed: $50
Title company closing fee: $400
Property transfer tax: up to $1,000
Attorney fee: $500
HOA transfer fee: $300 to $400 (n/a in my part of town, thank goodness)
Moving fee: $2,000

Total cost of buying the smaller house: $3,550.

Most places I’d want to live in cost upwards of $300,000 these days. That would require me to take out a mortgage. So to the ~$3550 in buyer’s closing costs, we can add the exorbitant cost of taking out a mortgage. To get into a $300,000 patio home I’d have to come up with at least $50,000, assuming I put down everything I net from my home’s sale. It’s unlikely that I could get a mortgage for a sum that small, but let’s pretend…

Lender discount points, about 1%: $500
Loan application fee: $500
Credit report fee: $85
Loan processing fee: $75 to $400
Document preparation fee: $50 to $250
Property appraisal: $400
Prepaid loan interest: Heaven only knows!
Insurance escrow: about $150
Tax escrow: about $1500

I’m not including flood insurance or a flood certification fee because you couldn’t pay me to buy in a flood zone. So the upfront cost of taking out a small mortgage would come to $3,785 — and that doesn’t count the cost of 15 to 30 years of interest payments. So… Cost of buying a smaller house in a more desirable part of the Valley, with loan: $3,550 + $3,785 = $7,335.

Cost of selling present home + moving van and workmen + buying a lesser house in cash: $27,800 – 28,150.
Cost of selling present home + moving van and workmen + buying a smaller house in a safer part of town: $35135 – 35,485.

Y’know… You could pay for a lot of lawn service and cleaning-lady visits for $35,485.

So let’s say you hire a cleaning lady because you’re feeling too frail to scrub, scour, vacuum, mop, and dust — I believe La Maya pays her housecleaner about $80 to $100 per visit (though her house is a thousand square feet bigger than mine). Xeric landscaping costs just $85 or $100 for monthly clean-up & grooming. Cleaning lady comes in a couple of times a month; that makes her cost $160 to $200. So routine maintenance of the existing manse would come to $300/month. The $35,485 it would cost you to downsize from a midsize tract house into a cottage would cover 118 months of routine house and yard maintenance, during which you would never have to raise a finger to clean or do yardwork. That’s almost ten years!

From one point of view, then, it would take around ten years to recover the cost of downsizing from a four-bedroom house on a quarter-acre lot with no neighbors sitting on top of me to a two- or three-bedroom apartment or townhouse in a rabbit warren, complete with HOA fees and politics.

Because I’m in the Salt River Project, my utility bills are low. Because I live in an old neighborhood, I have no HOA fees. Probably on average my total utility bills for electric, water, and gas run about $425 a month — less than that, really, because winter power and water bills are very low and in the summer, the cost of natural gas is nil. In a “better” neighborhood, I’d be in the Arizona Public Service district, where power bills are much higher. And many parts of Scottsdale and North Phoenix have no gas service, so the stove, water heater, and central heating run on expensive electricity. Utility bills in a smaller house could  easily exceed what I’m paying here.

The pool costs about $40/month to run and maintain (exclusive of repairs). The yard guy: $85/month.

In a patio home, yard and pool maintenance costs would disappear, only to be replaced by a monthly HOA fee. From what I’ve seen at places I’ve looked at, $125 a month is not an unusual HOA charge.  At Pebble Creek, for example, the HOA fee is $250 a month. For an apartment…uh, condo…about $100 to $125 is probably average. So costs to live in the smaller place would probably be about the same as I pay here. The only real advantage would be fewer rooms to clean and less outdoor space to have to maintain.

So, if there’s no advantage in utility and maintenance savings, why spend $28,000 to $35,500 to move?

• It would be worth it if your neighborhood were deteriorating.

The opposite is happening here: this neighborhood, like the entire central city, is gentrifying apace. My neighbor sold her house — only 340 square feet larger than mine, on the same size lot — for $285,000. It hadn’t had a serious upgrade since it was built in 1971. The kids who bought it have spent months in renovation.

And, we might add, every other young couple and every other fix-and-flipper flocking to the ‘hood have done the same.  If the slumlords to the west of Conduit of Blight get some help from the government, they could make a handy profit by condo-izing the deteriorating apartments that now front on the urbanite-friendly lightrail line, thereby getting rid of a major source of crime and rescuing the school that was overwhelmed and ruined when the city allowed the people warrens to go in. It’ll take some time before any such thing happens…but if it does, the property value increases we’re seeing now will look modest by comparison.

• It would be worth it if you wanted a zero-maintenance place where you can lock the door and take off for weeks and even months.

In Arizona, many ordinary houses meet that description. An intelligently designed xeriscape can look very nice and need almost no regular maintenance.

• It would be worth it if you lived in a place with a harsh climate.

Arizona’s summers are pretty fierce. On the other hand, for $40 a month plus occasional repairs, the pool makes the summer heat tolerable. Electric bills to power air-conditioning run about $230 a month, hardly enough to break you up in business. And again: at $40 + $230, the $35,485 would pay those bills for 10 years. How much are winter bills where it snows? Or where it’s foggy and chilly year-round?

• It would be worth it if your kids moved out of town and you wanted to live near them.

Maybe. Following the adult kids to some new locale can be a recipe for depression. Your grown children may not feel very invested in spending large amounts of time with you — except insofar as needed to obtain free babysitting services. Meanwhile, you’ve left behind friends who want to hang out with you, to say nothing of your favorite shopping, your church, your clubs, your cultural life, your beloved doctor, your competent dentist, the only hair stylist on the planet who can cut your hair the way you like it…

Overall, then, if your present home is in good repair and in a reasonably safe neighborhood with nearby shopping and lifestyle infrastructure, downsizing to a smaller place could represent not a savings in maintenance but a net loss, one that could extend over quite a few years…possibly to the end of your lifetime.

So: think twice before jumping into the downsizing pond.