1. Aging-in-Place
Almost 90% choose to age in their own home rather than a facility. Doing so requires adjustment by everyone. Your parents’ needs change over time, and so does the ability of their home to fulfill those needs. You may need to renovate a kitchen or bathroom to accommodate their physical constraints. There are several minor changes that you can make without much work as well. We describe those in this lesson and point you to professional help if and when needed.
2. The Move
Moving your parents out of the home they’ve lived in for decades can be traumatic for them, for you, and the rest of the family. This move doesn’t have to be into a facility or retirement community. It can be in with you, other family members, or a group home. This lesson gives you options to consider when relocating your parents. It gives you guidelines to lower the anxiety of moving and figuring out what to do with all the stuff accumulated over the past years, some of which is probably yours!
3. Estate Planning
Although we do not provide Estate Planning services, we offer a set of steps to establish an estate plan for any assets your parents might have. Yes, almost everyone has some assets that will need to be taken care of once they are gone. We recommend you work through this with your parents beforehand as it will help in avoiding the court system after they pass and reduce or eliminate arguments over who gets what. We also discuss Trusts and Insurance in the lesson to help you understand how these might work to your parents’ advantage.
4. Documents
This lesson reviews all the documents necessary to manage your parent’s affairs, and yours as an added benefit. These should be established before they are needed. We recommend you get started on these right away, as in right after you finish this course. Once created, these documents will provide everyone with a clear set of directions and instructions on how to have your parent’s wishes known by the family and who can step in when your parents can’t speak for themselves.
5. Build the Plan
Our final lesson gives you the Plan to pull all of the previous recommendations and documents together in a short time frame. We have you set a schedule of events that can be coordinated with other family members while spreading out the workload. Once completed, you will have items in place that will reduce emotion, stress, anxiety, and fear of the unknown so that you can focus on what is important – being with your parents.
Throughout this course, we provide you with over 30 checklists and worksheets to guide you through each lesson. Following these lists and sheets will help you focus on what needs to be done so that you can spend more time together.
Price $75
A summary of the topics in this training.
You can see a an overview of the Complete Toolkit,
which includes Age-In-Place & The Move, at this link.
Count the costs.
Do it yourself. Some can do this and they do a fair job of it. But at what cost? Think about time spent finding all the pieces and parts you need , trying to put them together, communicating best guess’s with your parents and siblings, and potentially not knowing what you missed. If you start now it might take several hours a night over several weeks and months. How valuable is your time, especially if you’re in the middle of taking care of your parents now? Oh, and don’t forget all the other responsibilities you have, take a minute a list them before taking this step and choose those you can drop while searching and organizing.
Hire someone. A professional’s time is anywhere between $150 to $450 per hour, you are paying for experience. You will have to hire someone eventually, but do you want to be paying all the up-front hours they will need to sort out your parents life? Do you think it would be better to walk into their office with everything in place and only have to pay for what they do best?
You can wing it. Some people are really good at this, but you need to be aware of unintended consequences and the stress, anxiety, uncertainty, and doubt that comes with that. You may also miss important aspects of caregiving that could impact your parents and you. You’ll be putting you, your family, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, and parents through some stressful times. Wouldn’t it be better to know what’s coming and have a plan to follow so that everyone knows what to expect. Think hard about this choice. I’m not sure how to measure avoiding stress, but I know everyone wants to!
Our goal is that everyone in the family works together on this course. thereby spreading the knowledge around. It will impact your family for generations: your parents, you, your children, and their children. It is something that should be passed down for generations, to Honor your parents, so it goes well with you.