Reply to “They’re only worth a few million. Not really rich”

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My inlaws are worth 3 million and then their house is another $900k. They are certainly rich by many standards. But if they go into nice assisted living that money will evaporate so fast. And it's what they saved for in the first place. Drove one Japanese car for 20 years before getting another, kept the house cold in winter and hot in summer, no European vacations for kids, no private, rare new clothes. [/quote]

This.  Without a pension, that money is unlikely to last until the next generation if one or both of them ends up needing long-term care.  It's a hedge against having to go into an medicare-paid nursing home, not a resource for free-wheeling living. [/quote]

I don’t really get the obsession with having the “gold standard” in long term care at the expense of otherwise being able to enjoy life when you are healthy.  News flash: all nursing homes are miserable places.   You might be bed-ridden and totally out of it, at which point do you really care if you are in a Medicaid place or not? (And not Medicare — that program generally doesn’t apply)  Will have given up those nicer vacations with your kids really be worth it when you can’t even remember who they are?  People who make posts like these assume they will the healthiest person at the nursing home and able to enjoy all these nice perks at a nursing home.   That’s a facade — and your health may be so bad that you can’t even tell the difference between the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Plus, the vast, vast, vast majority of people don’t have anywhere even close to $3 million bucks saved.   Not even anywhere in that ballpark.   Instead, they have modest savings and depend on SS and will depend on Medicaid if they ever need a nursing home.   The percentage of elderly on Medicaid in most blue collar states is very high.

Look, saving isn’t a bad thing.   More people should save more.  Agreed.  But some people who post here have very warped views of the world and warped views of nursing homes too.   [/quote]

NP here - Don't kid yourself - there is a HUGE difference between nursing homes and that different matters.  I've spent a fair amount of time with a couple different older relatives while they were in nursing homes.  Thankfully, none of them were in truly awful homes, but there was a fairly large difference between the mediocre and the great homes.  ( Also, my husband works in the medical field and has been in some truly awful nursing homes, so I know that they exist, even if I haven't personally spent much time in them.) At the high end nursing homes, there was sunlight in the rooms, flowers and nice decor in the common areas, all the patients (even the dementia patients) always had their hair done and looked cute and clean, the aides joked with the patients....and best of all, the place didn't smell.  Not at all.  My relatives did decline mentally, but they each had a couple of years where they were well aware where they were....and even during the worst mental periods, I think that they had some awareness of their surroundings.  And for the rest of us, it was much better to visit in a nice nursing home than a dark, kind of smelly one.

My family members didn't have $3M saved, but they did have savings and well as some pensions.  Also, they lived in a lower cost of living area, so they could stay close to their community (and family) and still have high quality care.  If someone wants to stay in a high quality facility in the Washington DC area, that will cost a lot more than my family member's care in a semi-rural area. And in my family, in all cases only one spouse out of the couple needed the nursing home care, so that was definitely a different situation than both spouses needing high intensity care.

I realize that there's absolutely no guarantee that I'll live long enough to need a nursing home, but looking at my family history, I'm certainly saving.  I'm glad that my elderly loved ones had good care and that I didn't have to watch them suffer in a crappy place (or take on all of the care myself), and I'd like my kids to have that same luxury.  I'm not eating beans and rice, but it's well worth it to me to keep my car for a couple of extra years and maybe not buy quite as much stuff.  I don't need all that stuff, and I sleep better at night. [/quote]

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