Old and dying

[fvkasm2x]

I was talking with a friend about this today.

Neither of us really understand the Pension Plan and have no real understanding of what we will face when we retired.

Our conversation ended up with this conversation, I'd like to pose to you people:

Let's say you get old and retire. Or at least you are of that age and cannot work or cannot find work. You didn't plan and you have no RRSP's. You have no savings and family.

What happens?

The bank takes your home, or worse... you can't make rent if you don't own...

Where do you go? What do you do?

Would they put you in a care home? Would you have to live on the streets? I just can't imagine they'd up and kick people out of their house and say "too bad" without some sort of assistance.

[Catz]

I think CPP will be a thing of the past.
From what I have seen...they get placed with their families, they placed in the hospital, they get placed on the streets.
If you have no money, I think you are hooped, which is sad. To work your whole life to make ends meet and then end up on social services which pays squat....sad, kinda.

[grammafreddy]

For many people who will be "retiring" soon, this is a huge and very scary issue - and also for some who are not ready to retire and who are still able to work, but because of their age and the economy, they were laid off from their jobs and are unable to find another that will pay their shelter and food (and maybe medicine) costs.

If you are sick, you may be able to get into a care home - but the wait list is a couple of years long. Care homes are the most depressing places in the world. People there just wait to die. Many of them wish they could die rather than have to live that way. It is not "living". My mom spent a few weeks at Cottonwoods and died there - and I would kill myself before I ever went there. It's not entirely the staff - it's the funding. The gardens, however, are lovely if you can find someone to load you into a wheelchair and take you out there. Good luck with that. More likely you will waste away in your bed and see the flowers through a window - maybe.

Sometimes you can get a government funded 10x10 room in an assisted living place (usually privately owned places but some have a few government-funded beds) if, for health reasons, you are unable to live on your own but can still do things for yourself - like keep your room tidy, do your own laundry, walk on your own or with the assistance of a cane or walker. There is no health care there. You can have your own furniture there and hang your own pictures on the walls. You get a bathroom to yourself, too. All meals are served in a common dining room and usually three meals and sometimes snacks are provided. Some even have Happy Hour once a week and some bring in volunteer entertainment once in a while. My mom lived in assisted living for seven years and if you PM me I will tell you the name of the place. She was happy there but she longed for her own home as there were people there she didn't care for because they were abusive (some old folk get that way). She also wanted to eat healthier than what they provided for their residents. If you were to pay for these places yourself, you will have to come up with approximately $2,000 - $3,000 per month, plus your phone and cable, plus extra costs that get tacked on - helping with your meds, assisting with a bath, etc. Plus taxes.

I have known some seniors who, after 40-50 and more years of marriage, got divorced because single people get more funding than married couples. It broke their hearts but you do what you have to in order to survive these days and in some cases, it helped them stay in their own homes. Very few places (if any) have provisions for married couples to share a room and the government sure doesn't care if they split you up, putting couples in separate homes where they never see each other again.

If you are a smoker, any place funded by the government is totally non-smoking and you have to leave the grounds (ie go out onto the street) in order to have a smoke. If you are not mobile enough to get yourself there, well, tough luck, folks. Some of these older folks have smoked all their lives and it is not something they can just give up overnight. Personally, I think that just sucks bigtime and is totally unreasonable. You also have to figure out how you will get your smokes, too, if you are unable to shop for things yourself - and add personal toiletries into that problem as well - things like toothpaste, soap, incontinence products, and little snacks for in your room, library books, a mickey to nip on once in a while, etc. There is also the problem of how you will get to medical appointments if you have nobody to take you or help you get there.

The federal government website has information for seniors and calculators for how much pension (both CPP and OAP and the BC Supplement) one would receive.

http://www.actionplan.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?id=4117

http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/isp/ ... main.shtml

http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/isp/oas/oastoc.shtml

http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/sc/c ... sion.shtml

I did the calculations for myself and I will starve to death living on the streets - it won't cover my current rent and utilities, let alone prescriptions I need to stay alive and food. Kiss keeping any pet for company goodbye, too. Welfare pays even less and cares even less, too.

[Captain Awesome]

Not a good place to be.

[grammafreddy]

Not a good place to be.

Exactly, CA. And that's why I harp so much on here about personal financial responsibility and the way a lot of people spend every penny they make and drive up their debt levels charging all manner of things they don't need - and not saving a penny for their old age and retirement.

[Homeownertoo]

You ignored commonsense for 45 years and 'retired' with nothing. You will collect CPP (yest, it will be there) if you contributed, Old Age Security and GIS if you didn't contribute to CPP. When you're sick, gov't will put you in a care home and take 80% of your income, so you are better off having nothing to begin with. Gov't will pay for your prescriptions and other medical needs. The real suckers are those with a little savings that gov't will take but not enough to afford anything better than Cottonwoods.

[grammafreddy]

You ignored commonsense for 45 years and 'retired' with nothing. You will collect CPP (yest, it will be there) if you contributed, Old Age Security and GIS if you didn't contribute to CPP. When you're sick, gov't will put you in a care home and take 80% of your income, so you are better off having nothing to begin with. Gov't will pay for your prescriptions and other medical needs. The real suckers are those with a little savings that gov't will take but not enough to afford anything better than Cottonwoods.

I think it's a little unfair to call people "suckers", Homey. I would prefer to think of them as people who did not educate themselves well enough during their working years (and early enough) and have unwittingly placed themselves in a place of great hurt financially. From my own hindsight perspective, I would have definitely done things a lot differently - if I had been able to - given my own life circumstances (which I am not about to divulge on a public forum).

If anyone needs any motivation to start socking away savings, I highly recommend paying an impromptu visit to Cottonwoods - because that is where they will end up or places just like them. Look into the eyes of some of those people there and see the emptiness and poverty of their old age and talk to some about why they are there and where they would like to be - and how much money the government takes from their pensions and how much they are left with for their necessities. Also take note of the ones who are strapped into their beds because they are "quarrelsome" and who don't want to follow "the rules". Get a whiff, too, of all the old folks sitting in their own filth because staff is understaffed and has no time to clean them up.

Totally and completely disgusting. Start saving as much from every paycheque that you possibly can.

[AllthatFunk]

You ignored commonsense for 45 years and 'retired' with nothing. You will collect CPP (yest, it will be there) if you contributed, Old Age Security and GIS if you didn't contribute to CPP. When you're sick, gov't will put you in a care home and take 80% of your income, so you are better off having nothing to begin with. Gov't will pay for your prescriptions and other medical needs. The real suckers are those with a little savings that gov't will take but not enough to afford anything better than Cottonwoods.

I think it's a little unfair to call people "suckers", Homey. I would prefer to think of them as people who did not educate themselves well enough during their working years (and early enough) and have unwittingly placed themselves in a place of great hurt financially. From my own hindsight perspective, I would have definitely done things a lot differently - if I had been able to - given my own life circumstances (which I am not about to divulge on a public forum).

If anyone needs any motivation to start socking away savings, I highly recommend paying an impromptu visit to Cottonwoods - because that is where they will end up or places just like them. Look into the eyes of some of those people there and see the emptiness and poverty of their old age and talk to some about why they are there and where they would like to be - and how much money the government takes from their pensions and how much they are left with for their necessities. Also take note of the ones who are strapped into their beds because they are "quarrelsome" and who don't want to follow "the rules". Get a whiff, too, of all the old folks sitting in their own filth because staff is understaffed and has no time to clean them up.

Totally and completely disgusting. Start saving as much from every paycheque that you possibly can.

I agree that its rude GF. Not everyone has the benefit of growing up with parents/adult role models that know a lot about finances and the future. My Grandparents all worked very hard but all were very poor. I don't ever recall hearing them talk about saving for the future. I'm not even sure that my parents learned to save properly. Instead my mother was afraid to put her money into a bank. My parents didn't talk to us about savings plans & RRSP etc, I'm not sure if it was because they didn't know or we just didn't want to listen. We never went without , but we were not spoiled. My father was in the military and upon retiring and moving to Kelowna he could not get a job for the longest time. Nobody would hire him because he had too much experience and too much knowledge. They were afraid he would take their job. So he eventually found work and did the best that he could. In order to move from back east to Kelowna he took a lump sum payout upon retirement. Probably seemed like a great idea at the time but now I'm not so sure. Sadly, a year before he passed away he had to cash in his life insurance policy so that my parents wouldn't lose their home, it was during the 80's recession. That forced my mother to sell the home that they had come to love and live on her own on a very fixed income. Although she worked at Strathcona Manor and then Cottonwoods back in the early days and it did give her a pension its only enough to just get by. She never invested in savings plans or RRSP's, likely because she was never taught and didn't know what questions to ask. Yet, she has perfect credit and lives within her means. How she does it on so little income is beyond me. I just hope that by the time I'm ready to retire, I've got enough saved to keep me going.

[fvkasm2x]

You ignored commonsense for 45 years and 'retired' with nothing. You will collect CPP (yest, it will be there) if you contributed, Old Age Security and GIS if you didn't contribute to CPP. When you're sick, gov't will put you in a care home and take 80% of your income, so you are better off having nothing to begin with. Gov't will pay for your prescriptions and other medical needs. The real suckers are those with a little savings that gov't will take but not enough to afford anything better than Cottonwoods.

So your advice would be either:

1) Save enough to cover your butt and be "safe" when you retire

or

2) Save nothing so you don't get totally screwed

This is kind of what I had assumed would be the case. You could etiher afford to look after yourself and would be "well off" as a senior, or you'd have the government look after you (but it would be miserable).

[Captain Awesome]

Not a good place to be.

Exactly, CA. And that's why I harp so much on here about personal financial responsibility and the way a lot of people spend every penny they make and drive up their debt levels charging all manner of things they don't need - and not saving a penny for their old age and retirement.

Yeah, although you do it to benefit people and everything, very few people would actually do something until something happens. Even then...Sad reality of "people never learn" reality.

[Homeownertoo]

I think it's a little unfair to call people "suckers", Homey. I would prefer to think of them as people who did not educate themselves well enough during their working years (and early enough) and have unwittingly placed themselves in a place of great hurt financially. From my own hindsight perspective, I would have definitely done things a lot differently - if I had been able to - given my own life circumstances (which I am not about to divulge on a public forum).

If anyone needs any motivation to start socking away savings, I highly recommend paying an impromptu visit to Cottonwoods - because that is where they will end up or places just like them. Look into the eyes of some of those people there and see the emptiness and poverty of their old age and talk to some about why they are there and where they would like to be - and how much money the government takes from their pensions and how much they are left with for their necessities. Also take note of the ones who are strapped into their beds because they are "quarrelsome" and who don't want to follow "the rules". Get a whiff, too, of all the old folks sitting in their own filth because staff is understaffed and has no time to clean them up.

It was a little harsh. And while contemplating the conditions at Cottonwoods, ask why management ranks there have exploded while the number of line workers keep shrinking. Once it was home to 325 patients, cared for, and adequately so according to staff who remember those days, by a single top manager who oversaw the nursing staff allotted to each unit and the care aides who deliver the day-to-day, hour-by-hour support for patients. Today, Cottonwoods and its growing team of highly paid managers and shrinking crew of nurses and care aides, oversees a similarly shrinking number of patients, down now to about 210, as people who might once have been cared for in this facility are now "managed" in their homes or in the private sector.

And the management team, instead of being mainly nurses, is drawn from people who lack that medical background and intimate contact with the patients. But they do have advanced degrees in management and offices in which to carry out their strategic plans for boosting management ranks and thinking happy thoughts to bolster morale of aides and patients.

[Homeownertoo]

My Grandparents all worked very hard but all were very poor. I don't ever recall hearing them talk about saving for the future. I'm not even sure that my parents learned to save properly. Instead my mother was afraid to put her money into a bank. My parents didn't talk to us about savings plans & RRSP etc, I'm not sure if it was because they didn't know or we just didn't want to listen. We never went without , but we were not spoiled.

You could be describing my family. But that was then and this is now. The media today is awash with financial information and the need for people to plan for their futures. And we live in a much richer society today than the one I, you or our parents grew up in, so people have greater resources with which to prepare themselves. But many, many people would rather waste those resources keeping up with the Joneses. I am retired (at a very early age) and able to buy pretty much anything I want short of expensive vacation property but I am appalled at the trivial waste of money and extravagant spending I see all around me in younger families who don't have our financial resources, let alone the savings they should have in place to prepare for later years. These are the ones I called suckers, and there are many of them.

[Homeownertoo]

You ignored commonsense for 45 years and 'retired' with nothing. You will collect CPP (yest, it will be there) if you contributed, Old Age Security and GIS if you didn't contribute to CPP. When you're sick, gov't will put you in a care home and take 80% of your income, so you are better off having nothing to begin with. Gov't will pay for your prescriptions and other medical needs. The real suckers are those with a little savings that gov't will take but not enough to afford anything better than Cottonwoods.

So your advice would be either:

1) Save enough to cover your butt and be "safe" when you retire

or

2) Save nothing so you don't get totally screwed

This is kind of what I had assumed would be the case. You could etiher afford to look after yourself and would be "well off" as a senior, or you'd have the government look after you (but it would be miserable).

Not sure if it's my advice, but it's a reasonable conclusion to arrive at. Many people simply hide their assets and income from gov't. Illegal, yes. Often these people are immigrants who are schooled in such practices as they come from corrupt countries.

[Queen K]

As a homesupport worker I am proud to say that we keep many many people in their homes longer than they normally would have been able to stay there in the past. But our own ranks are shrinking but not because of management issues, but rather because it is not a cushy job and young people quit homecare within months.

Cottonwoods used to to have more residents because there simply was not the bed space competition that there is now. Simple like that. Many more residential care facilities have 1. opened up or 2. being up graded in the last five years. Of course they've represent competition for staff as well. Off the top of my head I can think of Brookhaven (older but it took pressure off of Cottonwoods immediately when it opened), but then the absolute newest place, Brandts Creek Crossing is full as well. Sutherland Hills up-graded and expanded significantly (my own relatives were in there when all that started), Westside Care Center turned into "Village at Smith Creek" with up-graded and expanded facilities, Joseph Ben. and Still Waters has significantly changed and expanded and renamed "Village at Mill Creek." Mountainview and a few others have multi-level care. Not to mention Three Links Manor, DLJones and a few others. Even the Hospice is open now right. Also, it used to be that people were placed due to their age. Not so anymore, it's health that makes the criteria. No one gets in without an intense anaylsis from an RN case manager, in other words, someone can not just be ousted from their house by their kids just to sell the house. There has to be severe mental health issues for that to happen, and because people can present well even with dementia, everyone could have a story of "so and so was ousted and there wasn't a thing wrong with them." Sorry, but unless you were inside the situation, you have no idea.

Many more "independant living" residences have been added, and the staff and IH homesupport work diligently to keep people in their homes there for as long as possible. I know we do. GF described the places pretty good but I'll add something that I see because I'm in them alot. These places really try to provide a lot of entertainment, roadtrips, special occassions are recognized, birthday parties, stores, bars, movie nights, exercise rooms, pool, darts, libraries and services come in like footcare specialists and hairdressers.


And just try to get a bed elsewhere, the minute a bed is available I'm afraid there is intense competition for that bed and not just from those in Kelowna, but from all over the Okanagan. Some people try to get their parent(s) closer to them by bringing them here, but believe me, I've seen many seniors move out of Kel. to be closer to their kids.

And yes, start to save your money, it all costs. Even to be in the Hospice it is 30 dollars a day.

[Queen K]

I also want to add that many people opt for a different kind of expense rather than selling the house and losing equity through real estate commissions etc.

That expense would be home upgrades. Yes, those electric stair lifts really do work. Many people have them. Compare the cost of one of those with selling the home with the cost per month in an independant living home which can run from $1,500/month to over $3,000/month.

Also upgrading bathroom fixtures and tubs. Yes, those things with the little side door really do work. They have their own challenges, but do the math. It pays for itself in under 5 months.

Same with taking out doors, widening door frames and a dozen other tricks we see all the time that helps keep people in their own home.

The only thing worse than moving too soon is not dealing with assets (stuff) in the house, yard, garage until it is too late. Too late means you are now forced to live in a carehome or independant living residence but did not deal with multiple vehicles, collections, valuables before being able to be physically on site to sign papers or sell goods without the issue of how to get to your house or bank, or insurance office. Most often I see people waiting for the "ride". Their son or daughter or friend or whomever who is freed up at the most convienent time to deal with stuff with you in the vehicle. Believe me, nothing makes people feel more helpless than waiting around.

And don't get me started on Estate planning. :purefury: