Tag: financial safety

Finding and Paying For Long Term Care

 

You have found the home-care provider or facility you want to help with the care of your aging loved one, but how does one pay for this?  If your loved one doesn’t have long-term health insurance, things can get expensive very quickly.   This government website answers the many confusing questions involved with the financial end of providing care.

Included in this link is a search engine for finding facility care, home care, and just about anything else you can think of provided in this resource.  The fact that it is not a private industry that receives pay for recommendations is a good way to double check on what’s available to your family to care for your loved one.

 

Millennials As Caregivers

We typically think of family caregivers as women in the Baby Boomer generation, age late 40s to late 50s. But new information from AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving reveals that a full 10 percent of family caregivers are Millennials. That’s 10 million people!

The typical profile of this person is someone who is 27 years old, works part time, and has household income below the national medium.

Why this increase?

One reason is some Baby Boomers need a little help with older loved ones.  And it seems Millennials are actually happy to help.  Of course there are some circumstances where Millennials have had to step up for the care of their own parents.  After all, diseases like early onset Alzheimer’s are being diagnosed more frequently.  But for the most part, Millennials are helping Boomers take care of what is left of the Greatest Generation and perhaps the first wave of Boomers.

Millennials who are supposed to be at a stage of life where they are absorbed in their own careers and families.  Often they are balancing a career, getting advanced degrees, caregiving and raising children, making them some of the youngest to handle sandwich generation stress.   This makes caregiver Millennials a unique group.  Of those 10 million Millennial caregivers, there is an equal split between men and women.  That’s a little different than the typical caregiver demographic, which skews toward women.  But Millennials attitudes toward masculinity have changed and men are more likely to see themselves as nurturers, too.  For additional data on millennial caregivers, see this article.

Technology Millennials Use

The genus™ App is truly something Millennials gratefully grasp onto.  They grew up with technology and embrace the opportunity to use it to provide the best care possible for their loved ones.   With so many Millennials having to work far from where their parents live, having a tool like the genus™ App allows them to fulfill their career goals while attending to family responsibilities.   They are thrilled to have a platform that coordinates outside help, visits, medical information, and valuable resources, all ready to be accessed at the touch of a button.

Helpful Checklists for Givers of Care

Home Safety

The most important checklists you will need right away when caring for an aging loved one are listed below.  To print these checklists for use at home, you can access this article from your home computer by going the website.  https://www.giversofcare.org

This website is where all the articles from the Genus App are housed, so if reading from a computer is easier, you can have access from this site.

  • This checklist will help you with the many things to think about when looking for a long term facility for providing care for a loved one.
  • This checklist will help you choose an agency for In-Home-Care.
  • A medication checklist that you may want to use if you are not documenting meds in the Genus™ App.
  • This checklist will help you gather all the important financial and legal documents and information you need to have on hand when caring for a loved one.
  • A home-safety checklist is always a good idea to make sure your loved one is safe.
  • The VA provides some more useful checklists when caring for a Veteran on this site.
Disclaimer:  These links are being provided as a convenience and for informational purposes only; they do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by the genusConnect™ of any of the products, services or opinions of the corporation or organization or individual. genusConnect™ bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality or content of the external site or for that of subsequent links. Contact the external site for answers to questions regarding its content.

Teaching Our Loved Ones to Ask for Help

rings5Most people want to be independent and do not want to be a burden on the family, hesitating to ask us for the help they need. When dealing with a family member who still has fairly strong cognitive abilities, we can only know where to provide help if we can teach our loved one to ask for help.  Of course we will see some obvious areas where help is needed, but in order to provide the best possible care, we need him/her to be open with us.

Teaching our Parents

When dealing with my father’s Alzheimer’s and my mother’s declining physical health, we had to convince Mom that it was better for us, if she could try to communicate her exact needs to us.   Once she realized that she was “helping” us by asking for what she needed,  then she could do it more easily.   We just needed to turn the tables for her realize that the best way to help us help her, was to be as specific as she could about what she needed.

When Mom saw some of the systems of organization (scheduling, medical, legal and communication) we had in place using the Genus™ App, she could see how knowing what help was needed ahead of time, could help us plan more efficiently and save us time in the end.   Thus, allowing a better quality of life for us all, not just Mom and Dad.  We had to convince Mom that by allowing her children to help with Dad’s Alzheimer’s, she was giving us a chance to give back to them.   She was enabling us to feel empowered about this frustrating and heartbreaking situation.  Again, it took some time for this change to take place, but with loving reminders from her children, she was able to more clearly communicate to us what exactly she needed help with.  This in turn, saved us valuable time as we tried to efficiently manage our personal lives along with caring for our parents.

Four Areas of Safety

But what about when our loved ones don’t even know what they need help with?   Whether it is because of a cognitive decline, or just the fact that our person of care is completely overwhelmed, he/she cannot communicate where exactly help is needed.   It is in this instance we need to remember that there are four areas of their safety to consider.

  • Physical
  • Emotional
  • Medical
  • Financial

It might seem overwhelming at first, but if we break it down into these 4 categories and tackle them one at a time, it is definitely doable.   In the Genus™ App, there are numerous articles, videos, and resources centered around these 4 areas of care:

Physical:  Think basic needs.  Food, shelter, clothing, water.  Also think about their mobility and pain factor, although this crosses over with medical.

Emotional:  Is our loved one getting the social interaction daily that is needed?  How about their mood?  Is your POC staying positive?  Do they need more social interaction?  You can track this using the Genus App.

Medical:  Do you have all the important documents and medical information filed in one place?  Are you tracking any specific vitals that need to be communicated to the doctor?  Do you have Medical POA?  If not, who does?

Legal and Financial:  Who is on the bank accounts with your loved one?  Who is helping him/her keep track of spending and finances?   What about plans for the future?

All of these areas are equally important, but some may take priority over others, depending on the situation and depending on timing.  One thing you can be sure of, things change constantly when caring for a loved one.  Keeping track of the changes is what can make the difference between a more positive experience and a very frustrating experience.  The best piece of advice I have here is:  Keep documenting, everything.  You won’t be sorry.  I found that by using the Genus™ App, I could more easily track the mounds of vital information.  Keeping me from feeling completely overwhelmed. Better yet, feeling as if we really have this situation under control.  That truly is the most comforting feeling of all when facing the challenge of caring for a loved one.  Knowing that this person we love so dearly is getting the best possible care we can provide.