Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann
A common advice is to get a trust in place.
With regard to adult children assisting aging parents, outside north America, the multigenerational home is the norm or at least more prevalent. And the atomized family in North America is a relatively new thing. It's great for shareholder earnings when a family needs 6 houses and 12 cars rather than 2 houses and five cars, But that's a great wealth mover... upward and with end of life care, it's a great destroyer of generational wealth.
And so we have this by your bootstraps mutant society that doesn't take care of one another very effectively. I have no solution, it's just the part of the world we live in.
But yeah, I'm having a fishing accident before I'm too old to get to the lake if I don't have enough non-transferable flight points for Europe.
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Yeah, that's another thing I've been thinking about a lot. We're having to take care of my MiL and we've had discussions about how is the family (as a whole, her kids and their spouses) going to take care of her when she has no savings and no resources. I am trying to come to grips with the idea that I could be forced to jeopardize my ability to retire and my kids future to go "above and beyond" when taking care of my MiL, as heartless as that sounds (though I also know there are filial responsibility laws in many states ... not sure how many dictate that we'll need to bankrupt ourselves to care for the elderly). And also, I want to leave something behind for my kids because they're growing up in an age where they're going to possibly be priced out of a lot. If I can leave them a decent sized trust and property that can be split between them so they can get a leg up in life, I'll consider myself successful.