Caregivers and Stress

[Kelt]

Originally Posted by easygoingfemme

Kelt, hoping you get results from the tissue sample very quickly and that the results are not worrisome...

It's good news, the cancer has not returned. The infection is a weird one and quite large, but we are treating it aggressively with antibiotics (which I hate but are sometimes what you have to do..), topical steroids, and probiotics that will continue for three weeks after the antibiotics so that we can help her system rebuild when this is hopefully past. Thank you for keeping in touch on this .

Originally Posted by Kelt

On a side note: I posted some time ago an article about the cost involved in "the last five years" of the three primary ways people go, cancer, heart or dementia/AZ and the ranges given were $200-$300k for the five years. As I look at my mothers actual expenses now with fairly low needs I think those numbers are wrong, it must discount housing or something because she's about $50k per year after taxes now ($250k for 5yr) and it will only go up from there. The place where I have her is within a couple hundred bucks a month of the other places so it isn't much out of line with "average" independent living + six hours a week of personal care. By contrast, when my father was dying that last month when he was under hospice the SNF charged $10k for the one month room and board and that didn't include supplies or medical. I guess that's just to say the numbers used by planners might not pass the reality test.

I wanted to come back in on this since I came across something new to me and I learn everyday how much all of this costs.

I was looking at a "Long term healthcare cost calculator" on the Lincoln Financial site since mom has an annuity there and I am sort of looking at whether or not I should do a long term policy or annuity for myself. It was interesting that instead of using the $200-$300k figures for 5 years used by financial planners, their tool uses $91,250k per year with anticipated inflation of 2.9% per year. That is just the default starting point, the calculator has sliders to change the basic variables to test different scenarios. I'm sure other companies have similar tools. Granted this is a type of company that sells large and complicated insurance products it would be in their interest to use higher numbers to sell bigger plans.

However, it seems like maybe they are closer to the truth, and maybe under still, to what I'm seeing with my friends and myself dealing with this.

Food for thought...