10 tips to help you and your ageing parent
In normal times, many of us anticipate retirement, not with trepidation, but with expectation – a time for pursuing previously forsaken opportunities, a release from the cares and worries of raising families and those pesky work responsibilities.
The sensible ones among us actually do some forward planning for this time in the sun. Most of this planning revolves around money and lifestyle and the ubiquitous questions – what will we do, where will we live and how long will the money last?
It’s supposed to be all about you, isn’t it?
After some 20 years of working with, and advising families, and elderly parents, I’m afraid I have to tell you something, it’s not just about you.
Your retirement orbit cannot escape the gravitational pull from the needs and increasing demands of your ageing parents. Regrettably few advisers, particularly financial advisers, ever ask you as part of your retirement planning “How can we plan for your aged care?” They will almost never ask you the next questions “How can we plan for your parents aged care?”
But that’s not your problem is it?
Deep down, we actually think it is. If pressed I suspect most retirees would say that their biggest, albeit repressed, concern in their retirement is the fate of their ageing parents, particularly when those parents start to suffer the ravages of ageing and become frail and dependant. But we suppress any overt discussion about it. It’s not a catchy topic at the family BBQ and your parents will want to avoid it too.
This is where my experience come in. Put simply, the failure of families to confront this, in advance, will, and does, lead to family dispute, dysfunction and ultimate implosion of families. Trust me, I have seen it many times before.
I felt I had to share those experiences of all those family failures I have been involved in. There was a constant message coming from my work – avoidance and laziness in retirements are recipes for disaster – not really what you want in this much yearned for period of your life.
My book “Avoiding the Ageing Parent Trap” is a comprehensive mining of all my experiences on how families do so badly in addressing these later life events, punctuated by real life stories just to make the point. But it also offers up solutions and advice on how to avoid these destructive consequences of not facing up to reality.
