In this episode of Retirement Unpacked, Al Smith delves into the nuances of planning for retirement as he converses with guest John Rush. They explore the often challenging and emotional journey families face when dealing with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Al shares historical tidbits about St. Patrick’s Day, mixing financial advice with cultural reflections. John brings a personal touch by recounting his family’s experiences with memory care, addressing the emotional turbulence and practical demands of finding the right facility. As listeners delve deeper, they gain insight into the hurdles of crisis decision-making and the pressing need for foresight and
00:11:20 Statistics and Financial Burdens of Memory Care
SPEAKER 01 :
Welcome to Retirement Unpacked with Al Smith, owner of Golden Eagle Financial. You want a retirement plan that alleviates your fears about the future so you know your money will last. As a chartered financial consultant, Al Smith will help you find a balance between the risk and reward of the market and the safety of your retirement income. And now, here’s your host, Al Smith.
SPEAKER 03 :
Welcome to another program of Retirement Unpacked. I have a really good show for you today with a special guest. from tomorrow, the 19th of March, at the Belmar Library. There’ll be an event where from 6.15 in the evening till 7.30, not terribly long, but packed with good information, essential tax strategies for retirement. If you would like to attend, call my office at 303-744-1128. Again, that’s the 19th. That’s a Thursday evening from 6.15 to 7.30 at the Belmar Library. The general direction for that, it’s very near Alameda and Wadsworth. Before I have a really good conversation with our guest, I want to let everyone know that in six days, we’ll be celebrating the death of Maywin Suckett. You’re probably thinking, what is he talking about? Well, that is the real name of St. Patrick, who was born about 390 A.D. and died 460. He was not Irish. He was… A British citizen, probably from Wales, right about the end of the time when Britain was dominating the British Isles. He’s the patron saint of Ireland. He was never canonized by the Pope. but he was still referred to as a saint, and they still celebrate that. And in Ireland, they celebrate it much more quietly, and it’s a religious cultural holiday. He took a name of Patricius when he became a priest. As a young man at 16, he was… Kidnapped by Irish raiders after six years, he escaped, returned home, and studied to become a priest, at which time he took the name Patricius, which in Latin means father figure. He used some of the… pagan things that were out there in Ireland as part of his evangelism, because he brought literally thousands of people to Christ in Ireland. He used the shamrock, for example, to demonstrate the Trinity. And it’s completely false about the snakes, because since the Ice Age, there were no snakes in Ireland. But if you want to learn a little more about St. Patrick, Google that, and you’ll learn far more than you will by drinking beer in six days. Green beer. John Rush is my guest today and we’re going to be talking about long-term care from a personal experiential frame of reference because I’ve talked about it with respect to statistics. statistics that you’re about 70% chance of needing care of some type if you reach age 65. How long that care lasts is enormous. But John, what were some of the biggest hurdles? Because I know you’ve spoken on your show about your recent experiences with both of your parents.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and thank you, Al. Thanks for having me. And Yeah. First of all, there’s a lot of things going on when those things happen. And I think mentally you have to prepare yourself for that. And this is where having some conversations on the front side with family members and if there’s more people involved than just you as to who’s going to be making decisions and so on, it’s a good thing to get together on the front side to start making those decisions. In our case, my mom was my dad’s caretaker, and then she passed, meaning we were really kind of thrown into trying to figure things out rather quickly. And I always say this a lot on all my programs. It’s always best to be able to plan ahead and do things when there’s not a crisis than when there is, because crisis situations typically don’t breed the best decisions. For us, we were very fortunate by literally god’s grace we were able to find my dad a place rather quickly that doesn’t always happen that’s something else to think about when it comes to long-term care especially memory care so memory care for those that maybe don’t know that’s for folks that have dementia or alzheimer’s and they’re at risk of leaving the facility meaning they need 24 7 somebody has to be there literally around maybe not exactly with them but around to make sure that they can’t just walk off or you see stories at times of individuals that do that sometimes leaving their own home and typically when when they get to that point they’ve needed 24-7 care and something happened whereby it just like a two-year-old it just slipped through the cracks and they were out on their own and now there’s a an alert for those individuals and so on so point being memory care which is different than regular even, you know, elder care. Memory care means they have to have constant supervision. The cost is much, much higher. And there’s typically, Al, a waiting list to get into memory care. That’s sort of scary in a way because what that means is there’s a lot of folks out there that need that, meaning dementia, Alzheimer’s is on the rise. We know that it is. And the point with this is if you’ve got family members whereby they have that illness, and they may still be able to be at home and somebody’s there to watch, you probably still need to be looking at what are some of the alternatives. What are the what-ifs? You talk about that a lot, Al. What if this happens? What do we do next with mom or dad or grandma or grandpa? Because that whole decision-making process isn’t easy.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, I would think the only really good thing about someone’s mental health declining is… And I’m not a physician or a neurologist or anything like that, but from what little I know, it doesn’t happen overnight unless someone suffers brain damage from an accident or something. But it’s something that’s very gradual. So if you have a family member, a parent, a brother, sister, a spouse… whom you see as having these kinds of difficulties, I would start the planning long term, not only for care in wherever they are living, but for possibly ultimately, you know, care in a facility. Yes. And that’s probably the good thing. Were you blessed with a little seeing ahead what this was going to look like?
SPEAKER 02 :
There is, although, and I’ll just be frank with everybody. I’ve told my story, so there’s nothing to be bashful about here. One of the things that every family, I believe, goes through, and I don’t think any family is unique to this. You’re going to find family members that understand fully what’s going on and can see sort of the handwriting on the wall. You’re also going to have family members that are in denial, that don’t want to admit that mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, whatever the scenario, brother, sister, whatever the scenario, you’re going to find some that just literally are in denial that this person is in decline Mentally speaking, physically, they might be doing great, by the way. They might be fabulous physically, but mentally, there’s definitely a decline. And usually, it starts with memory loss and repeating yourself or the same story over and over again. I mean, I can’t tell you, Al, in the last, even leading up to my dad going into long-term care, how many of the same story I heard over and over and over again, because they don’t know they’ve told the story already, so they continue to tell that same story. And those are some of the warning signs, I guess you could say, or some of the indicators that things are going on. But I’ll just tell you straight up, even in my own family, we had some, myself, where I saw it, I knew it was coming, it was very apparent. And yet I had other family members whereby, no, they were in total denial that things were happening in that manner. And what happens then is when you’ve got some family members that are knowing what’s going on and some that are in denial, well, that creates some conflict in and of itself because the person that is not in denial, they’re the rational ones. They’re typically looked at as the demonizer, if you would, because they’re now the bad guy because they’re seeing things realistically while everybody else is in denial.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, yeah. You want to put Dad in a home. You’re mean.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s right. You’re the bad guy now.
SPEAKER 03 :
Dad’s just a little bit drifty, that’s all. He tells the same stories over and over. Dad’s okay. But the reality is Dad’s not getting better.
SPEAKER 02 :
No, and unfortunately, this is something, and I talk about this on my program typically on Wednesdays during Health and Wellness, which follows not long after you, Al. But the reality is people go through denial. There’s not really any solid cure for Alzheimer. There is some things out there, and I talk about this on Wednesdays, whereby if you catch it early enough… You can do some staving off of and maybe even a little bit of reversal, but when somebody’s fully into it, to my knowledge, unless there’s somebody out there that knows way more than I do medically speaking, from my understanding, Al, once you’re down that path and you’ve got full onset of late-stage Alzheimer’s and dementia, there’s no coming back from that. It’s pretty much a done deal at that point.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, I was not at all involved in my father’s being put into a facility, but my mother took care of him when he had pretty severe dementia, and it wasn’t until his behavior became so… over the top and uncontrollable that she, being five feet, 100 pounds, wasn’t able to control him anymore. She had to go to the VA hospital or send him to the VA hospital and have him eventually committed. He fortunately only spent a few months there. And my mother’s grief over my father took place while he was living because she would go to see him. He had no clue. And his Alzheimer’s had progressed to the degree that he could only at some times form words. Other times he would sort of mumble and he lost his ability to speak.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, and other things start to happen. Again, everybody’s different. This is where it’s such a hard disease because it’s not completely textbook like heart failure and things like that. In the case of dementia and Alzheimer’s, different people can be affected in different ways. And what I also learned through all of this, and unfortunately, you see a lot more women in memory care than you do men because they’re affected more buy it more greatly than men are for some reason. And again, they don’t know exactly why that is, but I can tell you that just statistically speaking, if you go into a memory care unit, you’re going to see way more women than men.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s maybe the chicken or the egg because women live so much longer. Could be. Maybe that’s why there’s so many.
SPEAKER 02 :
Might be. Really quick, the point with some of this is, Al, financially speaking, which is where you come into play, these can be tremendous burdens. Not at all.
