| The Paradox and the Mind of the Mature Consumer
| Observations of a Newly Minted Older Person
| Louis Tenenbaum
This MarketWatch article caught my attention because it’s so close in spirit to Shall I Stay or Shall I Go? an OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) course I just taught for the second time. Victor Rezmovic, a friend of many years and a regular OLLI instructor, brought me in to co-teach. This time, Steve Gurney, publisher of Positive Aging Sourcebook & Community, joined us as well.
One attendee’s feedback stuck with me: the course, they wrote, “Made me aware of things my wife and I need to start dealing with today.”
Another wrote something similar: “The topic was exactly what my wife and I need to be thinking about right now!”
That’s been our intended purpose for the course, closing the gap between a hazy sense you should plan and actually starting, with info, direction, and resources in hand.
The MarketWatch piece lays out the dilemma well, opening with the blunt version of the question many retirees face at some point: stay in the home that’s familiar, or move somewhere with built-in care and support. Our OLLI course covered the same ground: Steve on senior housing, me on aging in place, and Victor on the move he and his wife had just made themselves.
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But it was something Steve said on day 1, almost in passing, that stuck with me: the enunciation of a paradox. I turned it into a rhetorical question for my session the next day. Paraphrased:
- About 80% of people say they want to age in place.
- Aging in place is the cheapest option available and often the only realistic one for people with limited resources.
- And yet many people with money choose to move anyway.
Which leaves the real question hanging in the air: If it’s what most people want, what’s keeping people who have the resources from planning proactively to age in place?
One attendee was almost angry I didn’t have an answer at the end of the session. Fair enough. I’ve been sitting with it since, and between the MarketWatch piece and a second one I found while writing this, by Andrew Montesi in HECMWorld, a trade journal for the reverse mortgage industry, this three-part column emerged.
A caveat: our course started, practically though not intentionally, with a premise of households with enough equity or savings so that moving or home modifications for aging in place are real choices. Several in the class pointed out, fairly, that many of the options we discussed are simply too expensive for many people. I will plan to speak to that more directly if we teach this course again.
The MarketWatch article blames inertia for a lack of planning. And inertia is money neutral, it has nothing to do with your bank balance. Neither pocketbook or passbook explains the psychology of putting off decisions until a crisis forces them. It happens whether you have $50,000 in home equity or $5 million. What changes with money isn’t whether you fall into a crisis, it’s how many ways there are to climb out.
You can’t plan for a self you can’t picture
Sara Zeff Geber, author of Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers, names part of it: people struggle to imagine their own future frailty. They assume they’ll always manage the trash, the finances, the errands. Money doesn’t fix that blind spot, it can mask it, since comfort in the present removes any forcing function to plan for a harder future.
Read our interview with Sara Zeff Geber
Joy Loverde, author of The Complete Eldercare Planner, adds the practical layer: even people who can afford to move can’t face the logistics of a lifetime of belongings. Those who tell themselves, “They’ll have to take me out kicking and screaming,” often wait too long, until a health crisis makes the decision for them, and their proclamation holds tragically true. Aging in place successfully requires forethought, and inertia pulls in the opposite direction.
I won’t dispute either point, but I have more respect for my cohort than those answers imply. We are wise consumers who have been around the block. We are not subject to the salesperson’s pressure to buy the shiny car. We buy when we see what we want or know what we need. I’m comfortable this is consistent with the “End of History Illusion”: When people are asked if the past 10 years went as they may have predicted, the answer is almost always, “no”. But when asked if they expect the next 10 years to go as they imagine now, the answer is almost always “sure.”
By this reasoning, in the case of a continuing care retirement community (CCRC) like the beautiful place where Victor moved, people are buying into the reassurance that things will be in place and managed if needs arise. Essentially, hedging (or laying off) their bets. The impetus may be a diagnosis of a neurodegenerative condition (like MS or Parkinson’s), or, in many cases, recognizing the significance of memory units, dementia. And these conditions highlight the weakness of aging in place in individual homes. When caregiving becomes significant, the dynamic management of care resources is the Achilles’ heel. (Read more.) Aging in place is the choice for those who do not see what they want or need in senior living. Our course helps them understand the risk they are taking.
Louis Tenenbaum is a longtime advocate for aging in place, co-founder of the HomesRenewed™ Coalition, the HomesRenewed™ Resource Center, and HomesRenewed Ventures, LLC and a nationally recognized expert on home modifications that support independent living. Discover more columns in this series.
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