Thanks for visiting. This Blog and is intended for individuals with Net Annual Income of $105,000 or more. Get Rich Slow + Get Rich Quick = Get Rich Slick. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.

PBS had a two hour show on taking care of elderly parents entitled Caring For Your Parents last night. The show featured different families in different scenarios all of which are having to take care of their elderly parents. Some interesting things from the show I gathered were:

1. It costs about $250,000/year to take care of an elderly parent when factoring in health care costs, nurses, specialty services and other expenses. State/Fed government helps pick up some of the tab but it’s still expensive.

2. It takes a “team” of people to take care of an elderly family member: nurses, doctors, specialists/therapists, chauffeurs, maids, wheelchairs, wheelchair modification to car, etc.

3. If you have a daughter, you are less likely to end up in a nursing home as your daughter will likely care for you instead. Contrast this with some Asian cultures where the son cares for the elderly parents.

On a personal level, I can attest the validity of these claims as my mother has been taking care of my grandfather for a year now. My grandmother passed away last year and once that happened, my mother moved my grandfather in with her. It does take a “team” of people to take care of my grandfather from state subsidized nurses, chauffeur, doctors and nurses to help take care of him. I’m not entirely sure how much money is spent on all these things and my grandfathers social security likely barely pays for much of it.

Now take the above scenario and multiply it by 80 million boomers and you begin to wonder what is going to happen to American society in the future. If it takes a team of say 5 people to care for one person then you’d need 400 million people to take care of the boomers. We’re short 100 million and this assumes that kids would chip in to help and all other jobs would be put on hold while we help take care of the elderly. Even if you assume that each person only had to volunteer 1 hour out of their day then you’re talking about 80 million hours of lost productivity in the economy.

I’ve been on this issue since this blogs inception and have written numerous posts on it:

Grey Haired Old White Men - What happens Next?

Do Markets Go Up Forever?

The Collapse of Health Insurance

Synthetic Financial Disasters - Boomer Armageddon

And I have yet to read any single solution that attempts to address these problems. Politicians don’t even touch the problem with a ten foot pole. The Fed has at least repeated acknowledged that there isn’t enough money to cover these problems and things will get ugly in the future but no one dares even suggest a solution. I honestly don’t think it’s a money problem either because if there simply aren’t enough people to care for the elderly then what’s going to happen to them?

Perhaps the 1973 flick Soylent Green wasn’t so science fiction after all given all the problems we have these days….