Senior care is expensive. If you’re helping to pay for a parent’s care, you have probably already figured this out. Care is costly, and even when you have safeguards in place to help offset that cost, you are still going to have expenses that need to be covered.
Recently, MetLife’s Mature Market Institute came up with some ideas that you might be able to use to help make care of any sort a little bit more affordable. While their list certainly isn’t exhaustive, it should help get you pointed in the right direction.
One of the first things on the list was to think very carefully before you quit a job to help provide care yourself. Being a family caregiver allows you to provide free senior care to a loved one, but it’s not actually free. In fact, the average woman loses over $320,000 in lifetime wages when they leave a job to provide family care, and the average man loses more than $280,000. This is a big cost, and it is often far more expensive than paying for care. In other words, giving care yourself is a lot more expensive than you might think.
Also included on the list was the necessity of a caregiver budget. No one likes to make a budget, but the benefits in this case are well worth the task of drawing up the numbers. If you make a budget, you are likely to spend less on care, and you are more likely to focus just on the needed aspects of senior care, and avoid the unnecessary parts. For example, if you choose to purchase a long term care insurance policy before a loved one needs care, some of the add ons and riders might be deemed avoidable when you factor in the costs.
It might also be helpful to look for another method of care. For example, a nursing home can be extremely expensive, but it’s often the first thing considered when people look at senior care for a loved one. Instead of looking at a nursing home as your first and only choice, look at other alternatives. Both assisted living and in-home care are significantly cheaper than a nursing home. If your mom or dad needs more intensive care, than these choices might not be appropriate, but they are definitely an easy way to save money if they will provide adequate care considering your parent’s set of needs.
Paying for care is not just expensive, it can add to the stress of an already difficult situation. Seeing a loved one in need is never a fun event, and the extra stressor of trying to figure out how you are going to afford to make sure that they have all of the assistance and attention that is needed is just one more thing that you don’t want to deal with. Hopefully some of these tips helped.
The list, as reprinted by U.S. News, can be found here.
If you have any other ideas that were not included here, please feel free to leave a comment!
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