Relationships

My story for AARP on multigenerational housing has legs! Who knew that the piece would garner so much interest? I didn’t! Yet CNN and the Wall Street Journal Radio  wanted interviews (I obliged) and I was told that the Today show may speak with a couple of the families I profiled. Seems as if we’ve gone as a society from revering independence to embracing interdependence among the generations. Not a bad move.

The Ng family from Hawaii

Here’s my AARP Bulletin story 3 Generations Under One Roof:

Have you noticed more people around your neighborhood? That long-gone college grad is back across the street, and Grandma’s moved in, too. The older couple next door has a full house — their son, his wife and two kids. The ranch a few doors down was just bought — jointly — by adult children and their parents.

Photo by Daniel Hennessy of the Ng family for the AARP Bulletin

Now there are probably a lot more than just five caregiving mistakes! But in the process of finding out what they were–and please, add your own–I discovered a cool collaborative model I wanted to share. It’s a concept you’re going to be hearing more about. Concentrate!

Here’s what I wrote in my AARP blog:

Trend alert or rather, trend-to-be alert. I recently heard of a new concept that sounds like a caregiver’s dream: a team of professionals from various disciplines (i.e. legal, financial, caregiving) who specialize in aging issues. Someone on the team steers you to other experts you need — and may not even realize you need. These pros confer to make sure all your bases are covered.

Rod Chamberlin, a financial planner in Irvine, California, has one such team. Besides a financial planner and eldercare lawyer, it includes a senior care placement expert, long-term care specialist, family advocate aka mediator, personal business facilitator (helps Mom cancel subscriptions and insurance, arrange documents, pay bills) and geriatric psychiatrist.

Clients hire whichever specialists they need and pay each separately.

I asked Chamberlin for the most common mistakes his group sees boomers make regarding their parents’ financial, legal, and care decisions. This applies to you, too!

Here are his top five:

1. Becoming vulnerable to scammers and unqualified professionals. “It doesn’t just happen to dumb people,” says Chamberlin. “I’ve seen professionals whose parents were scammed!”
2. Not having proper legal, financial, and healthcare documents. At the least, you need power of attorney, a will and/or trusts and an advanced care directive.
3. Misunderstanding your options for senior care and how to pay for it: assisted living vs. a nursing home vs. memory care. They’re different, as is Medicare and Medicaid. Do you qualify for benefits i.e. a veteran or spouse of a vet may be eligible for paid in-home or long-term care? Some long-term care life insurance policies pay in advance on a death benefit (tax-free cash now), and, in some situations, a reverse mortgage makes sense to help bankroll care costs.
4. Holding inappropriate investments and/or selling investments that trigger unnecessary taxes. A professional can identify the best assets to sell (to pay for care or simply maximize investments) that won’t have a big tax impact.
5. Not taking advantage of tax credits, exemptions, exclusions and deductions. If you qualify, you may be able to claim your parent as a dependent or write off healthcare costs, for instance.

Chamberlin’s model is new; there aren’t many like it — yet. If you can’t find a similar group, then look for a legal or financial pro able to coordinate efforts with other specialists.

(Thanks, adult son, for the blog idea.)

Photo Courtesy of Ponyinarope via Creative Commons

Eduard Titov via Creative Commons

Here’s a trend with significant implications: Older adults are not just receiving care, but also providing (think sick spouse, a family member, friend, or neighbor). In one of my AARP blogs, I write about a study just released with steep statistics on this phenomenon. What community services do we have, do we need, to address these graying caregivers/care receivers?

Take a look:

A new national survey confirms what some of us already know: Many older Americans take care of others and are not just on the receiving end. Let’s get specific. In this first-ever United States of Aging survey, half of respondents identify someone as their caregiver, while nearly one-third say they care for another person.

Those are just two caregiving results culled from the survey, created by the National Council on Aging, UnitedHealthcare and USA Today. Its purpose is to gauge the readiness of communities and adults age 60+ to what I call the “silver deluge”—the 77 million boomers turning 65 to the tune of 10,000 a day.

The three groups decided to ask 2,250 adults age 60+ how prepared they are for their own aging and what they think of the resources available to them in their cities and towns.

Questions covered financial security, community resources, health and wellness, aging in place and caregiving. But don’t expect to see survey results here on all of these topics. Reminder: You are reading a blog on family caregiving!

Not to worry. You can still bone up on survey findings in these other areas.

Consider this a baseline survey. Comparing subsequent reports to it will be particularly insightful. Here are highlights from the inaugural report:

• Close to half of caregivers say they would benefit from more community services. On that list is respite care.
• 61% know their community has services to help them, yet just 15% have used them.
• 21% more have no clue whether services are available where they live.

Have you ever thought about who will be your caregiver should you need one? How about who you may need to look after?

It may seem ultra premature to think about your own caregiving plan for the future. Get over it! You don’t have to make a move, but it’s important to begin thinking about positioning yourself so you’ll have an optimum caregiving situation. Will it be easier if you live closer to family or have them live closer to you? Can you create your own “family” with supportive friends, a retirement community, or consider other housing options?

Intergenerational cohousing? Aging in place and belonging to a “Village” membership network that offers social opportunities like movies, museums, theatre, a group meal, or book club, not to mention rides to medical appointments, discounted home repairs and even dog walking?

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking. Are you a caregiver who also needs care? Have any strategies you can share?

Just wrote a fun piece for the new PBS boomer website Next Avenue (tagline: “Where Grown-ups Keep Growing”).

Introducing three adult sons and their father who are in a thriving family meat business.  The four just received their MBAs and have attended night graduate school together to snag other advanced degrees. Read on!

courtesy of Demakes family

As soon as the professor in the Suffolk University Master’s of Business Administration course took roll call in September 2007, the cat was out of the bag:

Thomas Demakes? Here.

Elias Demakes? Here.

Timothy Demakes? Here.

Andrew Demakes? Here.

Not that patriarch Tom, 69, and his three thirtysomething sons, who graduated this May from the Boston school’s five-year night MBA program, were trying to keep their kinship under wraps.

MBAs for the Family

Tom thought an MBA would help the Demakes clan get better at running their fourth-generation national meat manufacturing business, Old Neighborhood Foods in Lynn, Mass. (The family also owns Thin ‘N Trim, a sister company that sells low-fat, low-sodium deli foods, chicken sausage and chicken hot dogs.)

And yet, being in the same classroom with Dad “could be embarrassing,” recalls Elias, a sales manager like his brothers. “My father says what he wants when he wants, and there were times I’d start to sink under my chair!”

But other students in the class were envious, telling the Demakes sons they’d love to get a degree with members of their own families.

Make that degrees.

A History of Enrolling Together

The four Demakes men have previously taken a real estate appraiser’s degree program as well as one in commercial real estate.

Why the focus on real estate if meat is their bread and butter, so to speak?

Tom insisted that the “kids,” as he calls them, work for someone else before joining Old Neighborhood Foods, and they all chose real estate, commercial and residential. (Tom also owns investment property.)

Although his sons grew up working at his plant every summer, Tom didn’t want to pressure them into coming into the business, the way his dad did in 1967 when Tom returned from Vietnam. Timothy and Andrew joined Old Neighborhood Foods around the time they started the MBA program; Elias began there two years ago.

The businesses currently bring in annual sales of nearly $100 million. They have 375 employees at two locations, supplying more than 100 products to supermarket chains, hospitals, restaurants and sandwich shops.

Tom led the charge for the gang to get their latest degree, paid for by their company. He has long insisted that they continue learning every chance they can. “My father is the consummate professor,” says Elias. “You can’t just hang out and relax!”

Business School vs. Real Life

Tom, who graduated from William & Mary, was intrigued by the Suffolk MBA program because he wanted to know what business school taught these days and how the curriculum related to real-world experience.

His conclusion about the instruction: “Some is a little idealistic, some is spot-on.”

Tom also wanted an MBA so he’d stay in step with the current business environment and his employees.

“I have a lot of younger people working here,” he says. “By going to school with hundreds of men and women like my kids, I got a sense of how they think and what is important to them.”

Not in the Curriculum

The Demakes took the same entrepreneurial and branding courses, sat in the same classrooms, were often on the same teams and worked on papers together. In one marketing class, they met an advertising CEO who wound up redesigning their websites.

One subject not in the curriculum: complaining.

Although the brothers sometimes found it tough to juggle full-time work and academics, they knew they couldn’t grouse to their dad about it.

Andrew says that while they were taking one or two classes a week, “we traveled a lot and sometimes we were tired. We would do whining and moaning on our own. But with my father, it’s not much of an option.”

How Their MBAs Helped

Ideas picked up in the MBA classes led the Demakes clan to rethink ways to sell current products and come up with new ones.

For instance, they previously sold shaved steak only to sandwich shops, restaurants and food service institutions. Now they’re offering it in supermarkets, too. “Business school reinforces ways to grow business and extend your brand,” says Elias.

The Demakeses say that getting their Suffolk MBA together deepened their bonds with one another.

“Business school has given me a chance to know my sons better and for them to know me better,” says Tom.

Marill Demakes, Tom’s wife of 35 years, is fiercely proud of her husband and their kids.

“When have you ever heard of a father and three sons going to grad school together?” she asks. “It’s very inspiring.”

Another Degree Ahead?

Now, with their freshly minted MBAs, Tom is floating a new idea: Why don’t he and his sons all go to law school?

Elias is intrigued. “Being able to represent my own company would be quite a feat and an asset to our business,” he says. “But I’m not sure my father will be able to get my brothers on board!”

If history is any guide, the four of them may soon be sitting in another classroom.

Divorced, single and struggling--photo courtesy of AARP

Divorced boomers, like Edith Heyck, are finding creative ways to make it on their own after a split. — Photo by Robyn Twomey/Redux
Reasons vary: Longer lives mean more years with an incompatible spouse; no kids to use as a reason to stay together; less stigma about splitting; more women working, some outearning their spouses; and a remarriage failure rate of 60 percent.

The surge has spawned the term “gray divorce.” As Jay Lebow, a psychologist at the Family Institute at Northwestern University, says, “If late-life divorce were a disease, it would be an epidemic.”

One out of three boomers will face older age unmarried, says Susan Brown, codirector of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in her new study “The Gray Divorce Revolution.”

That’s significant. The fact that onetime legally bound partners have gone their separate ways later in life — or are single by choice or circumstances — has many personal and societal ramifications.

More on Gray Divorce

What happens to your Social Security after a divorce? Read
Everything you need to know about dating after divorce. Read
How divorce hurts adult children. Read
Join AARP Today – Receive access to exclusive information, benefits and discounts.

Paying on your own

Even if not divorced, older adults can be vulnerable financially in today’s economy. But a split-up hardly helps. “You end up with only half of what you had when you were married, and half can feel like nothing,” says Ginita Wall, a San Diego CPA and certified divorce financial analyst.

“Keep in mind that many consequences of divorcing later in life revolve around one fact: less time to recover financially, recoup losses, retire debt and ride the waves of booms and busts,” says Janice Green, an Austin, Texas, family law attorney and author of Divorce After 50.

More than half of all workers or their spouses have less than $25,000 in household savings and investments, according to the 2011 Retirement Confidence Survey, published by the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute. Women also still earn less than men and have a longer life expectancy, which puts them at greater economic risk. “Once women wind up older and alone, whether it’s widowed, divorced or never married, they’re at a fairly high rate of poverty, on average 20 percent,” says Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Singles will also depend more on public benefits, such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, according to Maya Rockeymoore, a Social Security expert. With the oldest of the 78 million boomers turning 85 in 2031, the government tab could be staggering. In 2021, Medicare alone is expected to cost taxpayers $1.1 trillion — up from $586 billion in 2012.

To stay afloat, some singles, like Eileen Lewis, 66, take in boarders. Divorced at 50 after a two-decade marriage, she rents out a room in her Catonsville, Md., home. The income helps her pay her utilities, gas and part of her mortgage — and enabled her to take a cruise, “something I never would have been able to do before,” she says.

Someone to watch over me

Caregiving adds to the burden of aging alone — and it, too, typically affects women. A 2009 National Alliance for Caregiving/AARP survey found that 66 percent of caregivers were female, with women providing on average 21.9 hours per week vs. 17.4 hours for males. And, according to a National Alliance for Caregiving/Evercare survey, the average out-of-pocket expense for caregivers is $5,531 a year, $8,728 if helping from a distance and $5,885 if the caregiver and care recipient live together.

Older men may make out better financially than women, but they don’t fare so well at finding someone to take care of them when they’re older. “They often don’t have alternative care networks the way women do,” says Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. “If a man gets divorced, his support in later life is gone. Plan B may be to remarry because he needs a caregiver.”

After divorce, children often live with their mothers. If dads move away or don’t stay close, adult children may not be willing to be caregivers when needed.

Remarriage for either ex is murky territory, too. “If you acquire a stepson when you’re 60, will he help you when you’re old?” asks Cherlin. “We’re creating complex family relationships where we’re related to more people but obligated to fewer.” Even if there is a close bond, children may not live close by.

When asked who they’ll turn to when they’re older, single men often cite paid help, says Teresa Cooney, a gerontologist at the University of Missouri. But paid help is pricey, and can be hard to find. Up to half of the 5.4 million adults with Alzheimer’s have no identifiable caregiver. Former spouses often step in, mainly to spare their children, or because no one else can, says Cooney.

New configurations

The end of a marriage often leads to the formation of a new family, with relatives or friends assuming the caregiving role of a spouse. It can also lead to some unexpected living arrangements.

After her marriage of 32 years ended in 2008, Ellen Rittberg, 60, of Long Island, N.Y., moved to her mother’s home to save money. A year into the arrangement, her mom broke her pelvis; Rittberg decided to stay. Now they care for each other. “It is mutual love and companionship,” says the mother of three and grandmother of two. “I went from being embarrassed that I was living with my mother to feeling so lucky we’re close, and that I can do this.”

Not everyone has family, can live with them, or wants to. According to AARP, 22.3 percent of women and 12.5 percent of men age 50-plus live alone. With people living longer, adult children could wind up caring for three or four parents, plus stepparents. Already, one-third of all female caregivers care for two or more people.

Though most people want to grow old in their homes, some don’t have that choice. Those living in the suburbs or a rural area with limited public transportation and social interaction have additional challenges.

Some singles who don’t want to burden their children are creating their own support systems. Arthur Okner, a divorced, retired management consultant, owns a condo in a Boulder, Colo., cohousing community, where decisions are made by consensus. “I have very little family,” says Okner, 70. “Here, I belong to a community.”

Also on the rise are “villages,” where older adults living on their own have access to vetted services, like home repair, as well as trips, lunches or evening events for an annual fee, $350 on average. Other singles make their own arrangements. Edith Heyck, 61, an artist from Newburyport, Mass., shared a condo for three years with another divorcee in her 50s. “I enjoyed the companionship and it was a financial relief,” she says. When her friend sold the condo, Heyck moved in with an older woman, until Heyck lost her place to a new boyfriend. Now, Heyck is “sofa surfing,” until she’s eligible for senior housing. “I never planned for my financial future,” says Heyck. “I just assumed I would be married.”

Sally Abrahms, coauthor of What Every Woman Should Know About Divorce and Custody, writes about boomers and aging.

Staggering statistic: 61.1 million Americans care for older friends or relatives (AARP). Here’s another: Caregiving costs U.S. businesses nearly $33.billion a year in productivity (MetLife and the National Alliance for Caregiving).

Okay, it’s a dilemma for both sides. In my AARP Bulletin piece http://aarp.us/oslBAh, I talk to working caregivers, some of whom feel penalized for having aging parent responsibilities.

I also ask negotiator extraordinaire Susan Hackley, executive director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, for strategies to discuss caregiving responsibilities with your boss.

Here are a couple of her tips (read the rest in my story):

1. Level with your boss and explain you can do your job and take care of Mom, Dad, or a spouse.

2.  Describe the problem and have solutions ready, from working from home a day or two a week or leaving early and making up the time. Invite your boss to discuss his/her concerns.

Other resources you can check out:

The National Alliance for Caregiving www.caregiving.org

The National Family Caregivers Association www.nfcacares.org/

Just read a piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/125272069.html) that says one-quarter of all divorces happen in 20+-year-long marriages and terming boomers “the most divorce-prone generation in history.” Stats show 23.4% over age 70 are divorced, while it’s 35.7% for people in their 50′s.

That validates what I’m seeing. I know of several couples married more than 30 years who, in the last two years, are splitzville. Lots of speculation why, from better health, longevity, and expectations, less stigma, to being at different stages to no commonalities. Any thoughts?

Also just ran across a Wall Street Journal piece on Generation X parents–the kids of those boomer divorcees–who vowed not to behave like Mom and Dad. It doesn’t always turn out that way. Here’s the link: http://tinyurl.com/3zaqfy8

Some people have so many friends that the thought of making new ones is exhausting. But many baby boomers feel the loss of easy friendships created through the kids when they were younger–steady encounters on the soccer field and elsewhere. You don’t have to be a sadsack or have few or no friends to want to be part of more people’s lives. (more…)