Everywhere I go these days I hear stories about the challenges of aging and the complexities of multigenerational care. Friends and colleagues are supporting aging parents and other loved ones, and increasing numbers of our clients are experiencing challenges that require them to lean on their adult children in ways that they didn’t expect and may not even want. This stage of life is an epicenter of unique emotional and financial decisions, which in many families may never have been discussed. Parents and children are trading places in knowledge, capacity to execute, and power. And truth be told, neither side is particularly happy about it or feels well-equipped to navigate it with confidence.
Last week we held an event, Supporting Aging Parents Without Sacrificing Yourself, at Communities Foundation of Texas with Calvert Collins-Bratton, Chief Relationships Office, and Stephanie Bernal, Family Care Concierge and Founder of Vista Advisers. Our goal was to provide the audience with an understanding of the complexities around aging, as well as a starting point to address them. What we find – especially for successful adult children like business owners, company executives, attorneys, and other professionals – is that they want to lovingly support their parents but simply don’t have the time available to adequately provide the care they need.
Many attendees asked us how to handle specific challenges with their family members. While this is exactly the type of work that Stephanie does with individual families, the answer is that there is no one magic answer. Whether you are the parent or the adult child, the amount of conversation required to gracefully and confidently navigate this time of life is more than most families expect. We encourage families to start these discussions early, to unearth some of the frustrations between family members, assign duties, and discuss the resources available to pay for mom and dad's care.
Most financial planning centers around exciting life goals – weddings, sending children to college, retiring and traveling the world. When a child is born, people swoop in, and a wide variety of resources are available to help. However, the resources are not as clear or sometimes as plentiful in the last stage of life as adult family members need more help. Seldom is there a true financial plan around this inevitable but less glamorous time of life. Choices that require substantial resources of money and time should be meaningful. Does your family have a financial plan for how to support your parents as they age? Or better yet, how you want to age?
Each family is distinct, in both needs and resources. Care needs range from the acute (such as a sibling or spouse with early onset Alzheimer’s, ALS, or a late stage cancer diagnosis) to the minor (occasionally helping an older parent without an illness). Meanwhile, chronic conditions normally require the ongoing and increasing support of family members over time. The range of resources varies widely for many reasons, including geography, family dynamics, net worth, and knowledge.
Whether you are supporting loved ones as they age or thinking of your own future, you should have a plan for the life you want throughout your whole life. In a recent conversation about this with a longtime client, he described it crisply: “I want to have a plan that keeps me from being warehoused.” Wow. That defines what he doesn’t want. When pressed about the life he does want, he was clear that he wants to be out in nature regularly, no matter what happens to his body or mind. Nature is a great source of joy and peace in his current life, and he knows that he wants that to continue. Given that vision, we can plan for the “what if” scenarios that he may encounter during his lifetime, allowing him to make decisions now about how to create the best version of a life if his abilities one day are limited.
Many decisions intertwine to bring a financial plan for these scenarios to life. Understanding a person’s goals for aging and long-term care, as well as the resources aligned to those goals, is critical. We provided a curated list of resources for the event attendees, which we encourage you to explore if your family or another loved one is going through this transition. We included a mind map of all of the ways that aging affects your loved one, from financial and legal to social and spiritual. We also designed a list of twenty questions for adult children to ask of their parents to understand how they want to age and to open the sometimes uncomfortable dialogue about what the last stage of life should look like, and even borrowed some resources from our friends at Dallas nonprofit Senior Source. If your family needs additional guidance on comprehensive financial planning for all stages of life, please contact us at hello@bfsadvisorygroup.com.