Old Happens, Part 1: A Clear-Eyed Aging Plan

Old happens. Like death and taxes, the only way to escape this truism is to die young. A better option, I propose, is to expect the decline of old age and plan for it. This is the first of a 3-part series covering how my husband and I approached planning for our late years. For those in a similar season, perhaps our decision process will help guide your own.

Roger and I find ourselves in the golden years, where, at least for now, we enjoy the prized trifecta — time, financial stability, and health. But at ages 72 and 65, respectively, we feel the ticking clock. How do we make the most of this golden season, while also planning for the next? Our conversations led us to an aging plan that has given us a sense of direction and confidence.

We started our plan by considering two questions: 1) what do we most want to do in the next several years, and 2) where should we live? To answer those questions, we had to prioritize our dreams.

Prioritizing Dreams

The first step in our plan was identifying how we want to spend our time for the next few years. After a lot of conversation, we found our dreams fell naturally into three buckets: family, travel, and hobbies.

Family

Our children are scattered across the country. Our son lives an hour away in Arkansas, but the girls are in Phoenix and Seattle. We LOVE spending time with our grandchildren, and are keenly aware of how quickly they are growing up. No matter where we live, we will be traveling for family time.

The other family consideration is that we want to make our final years as easy as possible for our kids. They are rooted in their respective locations by careers and family, and when we need help, we don’t want to add stress to their lives. For that reason, we foresee a likely move in our future. But when?

Travel

We both enjoy travel, but not exactly the same. Roger loves the idea of extended trips within the United States, whereas I favor shorter domestic trips with an occasional international adventure. Our favorite destinations are always in the West, with our home state of Wyoming being the top draw. We always said we would move back to Wyoming for our retirement years. Should we?

As an alternative, we considered embracing the nomad life with a motor home or a camper. We spent some time looking at RVs and campers to identify what we would want, then discussed the costs vs benefits.

Hobbies

Roger’s passion is old cars, and his collection (somewhere between six and eight…I lose track) fills a large shop. But here’s the thing: until recently, none of them actually run under their own power. What I’m saying is that these are project cars, not Car Show cars. He has years of happy tinkering at his fingertips.

My hobby is writing, and I can do that anywhere. My next book project is my great grandfather’s Wyoming homesteading story, which will require frequent time in Wyoming for research, but mostly a quiet space at home where I can spread out my documents and be productive. Realistically, this may be a three-year project.

Choosing a Location

Having clarified how we want to prioritize our time, the next question was where to live. Our thinking settled into three options (I’m detecting a pattern here…).

Follow Your Bliss

Option 1 – Move to Wyoming. The place we most want to be is Wyoming, but there’s a catch. In my perfect world, we would spend summers in Wyoming and winters in Missouri. In Roger’s perfect world, he could live happily anywhere as long as he would only be responsible for maintaining one home. We went round and round on this one.

It should have been a short conversation, because of course he was right. Having a vacation home in Wyoming didn’t work for several reasons. Financially, it’s costly to maintain two homes, and we are not made of money. Additionally, for him to pursue his hobbies, we’d need to move at least one of his project cars and the necessary tools to the summer home. That got complicated quick. Lastly, sometimes people who split their time between two locations find themselves never feeling settled in either one. I could see that being a struggle for me.

So we compromised. For years, we have rented the same cabin in Dubois, Wyoming, while I dreamed of someday owning my own cabin. In exchange for the privilege of NOT owning a vacation home, Roger was happy to continue to rent for as much time as I wanted, even for some extended periods. Deal. (During our last visit in September, the basement flooded. We high-fived each other as we drove away with no responsibility for the costly and messy repair!)

We also discussed the motor home/camper option and decided against it, largely for the same reason. We don’t want to own something that has to be constantly maintained. Plus, we had to admit that we liked the IDEA of camping more than the reality. Does it sound like we’re getting lazy in our old age? I prefer to think of it as spending our time and energy on high value pursuits. Maintaining “stuff” is not our idea of fun.

Get a Jump On

Option 2 – Move near one of our kids. We did years of long-distance travel to help my parents in their later years when they lived in Colorado and none of us lived nearby. It wasn’t easy to be as present with them as we wanted to be while juggling our own careers and families. We know we don’t want to make it harder for our kids when we need their help, so eventually we expect to relocate to live in the same city as one of them. But when?

We have friends who preemptively left their lovely home and network of deep friendships to move closer to their children before old age made that move necessary. It seemed smart to move while they were still vibrant enough to plug into a new community. They were social, fun people. How hard could it be? A year went by. Then two years. Friendships didn’t happen easily, and their adult children were busy with their own lives. Their well-intentioned plan left them lonely and disconnected.

As we considered the timing of a move, our own quality of life weighed more heavily than convenience for our children at this point. Someday the scales will tip. We pray for good judgment to recognize when it does, but we decided to postpone that move for now.

Embrace Roots

Option 3 – Stay put. I confess that I don’t love Joplin, Missouri. It’s fine, but it doesn’t have mountains or sagebrush. Nevertheless, we have 33-year roots here, and that’s not nothing. We have dear friends, and a network of people who know us and greet us at Wal-Mart. I like to think of it as the casserole test. If we had a health emergency, would anyone bring us a casserole? I believe we would have casseroles galore.

Financial considerations also played favorably. It’s expensive and disruptive to move, and Joplin has a relatively low cost of living. Staying put would be like putting money in the bank every month. When we weighed all the pros and cons, we decided there’s no place like home.

There was one little problem, however. We knew that our 3-floor house would eventually be hard to navigate in old age. The laundry room is in the basement, and the only bedroom on the main floor is tiny. The bathroom, too, is impossibly small at 5 ft x 8 ft. During the years when my mom lived with us, it was a daily challenge to navigate our small spaces with her walker. If we were going to stay in this house, we needed to make the house “old person” friendly.

We ended our initial months-long discussions with a clear picture of what some people call an “aging in place” plan. Turns out, that was the easy part! Stay tuned for Part 2 — The Plan!

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