Listen and hit ≡ in the player to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform! Or if you'd rather see our faces 👩🏽⚕️🧑🏼⚕️watch it here on YouTube.
Summary
In this episode of the CareLab podcast, hosts Emilia Bourland, Brandy Archie, and guest Kimberly Whiter discuss the financial challenges associated with aging and elder care. They explore why elder care is so expensive and what families can do to manage these costs.
Key Takeaways
- Extended Lifespan: Baby boomers are living significantly longer than previous generations, leading to prolonged periods of care.
- Healthier Aging: Modern healthcare has resulted in healthier aging, but with chronic conditions that require long-term support rather than acute medical care.
- Medicare Limitations: Medicare was designed for acute medical care and does not cover the long-term, non-medical support that many aging individuals need.
- Financial Strain: The cost of hiring caregivers and managing long-term support can be financially overwhelming for families.
- Importance of Planning: Proactive financial planning and understanding the scope of potential costs can help families better prepare for elder care expenses.
Transcript:
Emilia Bourland: Hi everyone, welcome to Care Lab.
Brandy Archie: It's Care Lab Day.
Emilia Bourland: Yay. We are excited to have you here. Okay, so obviously, so we have Dr. Kimberly Weider here today. I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about her in a second. But first, I have a much more important question to ask both of you.
Kimberly Whiter: I'm excited to be here.
Brandy Archie: We're ready.
Emilia Bourland: I'm not sure you are. Okay, but here we go. If you were a Spice Girl, which one would you be? Which Spice Girl would you be?
Kimberly Whiter: Just like, retelling on our generation, right? Like, now everybody knows what generation we belong to.
Emilia Bourland: 100 %
Brandy Archie: Thank you very much.
Emilia Bourland: Yes, yeah.
Kimberly Whiter: I'm gonna go with 40 spice just because I feel like that's my style. Like if I could go around in cool jogger -like type pants and a sports bra and comfy shoes all the time, like that would be how I dress. So yeah, there's my answer.
Emilia Bourland: That's a good one, that's a good one. Brandy?
Brandy Archie: I hate having to be pigeonholed into one thing. I don't like favorites. I don't have favorites. I don't like to pick one thing or anything. And I don't know why I have such a hard time with this. This is a complex I have. So I'm gonna say...
Emilia Bourland: This is a lighthearted question. Don't overthink it.
Brandy Archie: I can't help it. I'm like, it's, I feel like it's representing me.
Kimberly Whiter: Too late.
Emilia Bourland: I know, listen, we all know that you're a baby spice, okay?
Brandy Archie: Okay, so further from the truth I I Think that when they were really out I was sporty spice but now I feel like I resonate more with scary spice and Because I just wasn't confident enough to Dress like that or wear my hair like that now I do so or I did till I got locks But you know, so I'm gonna go scare space
Emilia Bourland: I couldn't be further from the truth, I don't think.
Kimberly Whiter: Mm -hmm.
Kimberly Whiter: Mmm.
Emilia Bourland: Okay, all right. So I would also say, I would also say actually back in the day, I was sporty spice, big time. And I think like that's 10, I'm still, you know, I'm probably wearing like tennis shoes or running shoes and leggings 90 % of the time, unless I'm at work now. But here's my twist, is that on occasion during karaoke,
Brandy Archie: Mm -hmm.
Emilia Bourland: And if you are doing karaoke with a group of women, you are going to do a Spice Girls song. If you are in your late 30s to mid 40s, probably. Which I am. So in that context, I am always a posh Spice. Mostly because I have short hair and I don't sing at all. I just stand there making the posh Spice like,
Kimberly Whiter: Ha ha ha ha.
Brandy Archie: You
Brandy Archie: Mmm.
Emilia Bourland: Pouty face.
Kimberly Whiter: Mm -hmm.
Brandy Archie: I can see you as Posh Spice for sure.
Emilia Bourland: Yeah, I just kind of, I like, you can't really see it. There's not enough of me probably on camera right now, but I do like the whole like pose. I pose. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm a poser. Thank you very much. Thanks, thanks, Kimberly.
Kimberly Whiter: You're a poser. Yeah.
Brandy Archie: Multiple senses of the word.
Emilia Bourland: You know?
Kimberly Whiter: and he's like, you look pretty when you do this.
None of us are Spice Girl. So, yeah.
Emilia Bourland: Okay. No, no, none of us are Spice Girls. For better or for worse. And that's probably okay. We are all women in business. And Kimberly, I'm gonna ask you obviously a little bit more about your business today, but let me do a quick introduction. So Dr. Kimberly Weider is the CEO of Eldercare Solutions and the mission...
Kimberly Whiter: I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.
Brandy Archie: That is true.
Emilia Bourland: of elder care solutions is to ensure that aging and caring for an aging loved one isn't going to financially break you. So I think keeping it short and sweet is helpful in these introductions. So I think that kind of says a lot of where we're going here. Kimberly, anything else that you would want to add to that? Are you ready to like jump into this tough, hard -hitting conversation about Spice Girls? No, not Spice Girls, about aging and...
and finances.
Brandy Archie: and nances.
Kimberly Whiter: Yeah, I think I'm ready to jump in. I'm so confident with my mission statement that it has laid the groundwork. So let's go.
Emilia Bourland: It is a good mission statement. So paying for like planning to get older, paying for care, paying for someone else's care is really, really expensive. I think anyone who's listening to this, who has an interest in it probably already knows that. But I think one of the things that's hard to understand is why is this so expensive? Can you speak to that a little bit?
Kimberly Whiter: Yeah, I think it's really important to lay some of the groundwork to answer that question because the answer helps you navigate a little bit. And so first of all, most of us are just extremely surprised when we start helping out a parent or doing full -fledged care for a parent at how much money is just getting forked over to different.
Businesses or entities or caretakers and we're like wait, I thought this was what Medicare was for right? And so that's just this Cognitive leap that everybody has to take and we're not educated well in the United States to know that that's what the reality is gonna look like so Some of the the reasons why I said there's like this perfect storm brewing with our our aged population right now, so we hear about
Brandy Archie: Mm -hmm.
Kimberly Whiter: baby boomers all the time or as my kids, you know, the boomers, which I am not. I mean, they'll stop mom, stop being a boomer. So far from it. Right. We are not boomers, right? You and I of our generation, though, we were...
Emilia Bourland: You're of the Spice Girls generation. We've already established this. Yeah, we know this.
Brandy Archie: We were seven since, yes. We've told our ages.
Kimberly Whiter: educated stuff, like we heard a lot about the baby members and probably a lot of what we heard about was like this huge giant generation, which is true. They are, it's a very big generation. But there are some other things that are very unique about them that has kind of flipped the aging landscape on its head. So one of those things is that they're living for a very long time. And so they are...
living 19 years on average longer than the generation right before them. So basically in one generation, two decades of life was gained in the US population and really, really worldwide, but most of the data comes from the US. This means that...
when we start taking on the care of our aging parents, it's not a short experience anymore. So if we think about our parents who maybe stepped in and helped like their mom or dad, it might've been like a three to five year experience. That's not it anymore. It's like 10 or 20 years of doing a lot of work for them. So that's one big thing. This is like a very long experience.
The other thing is the way that they're aging, is in a much more healthy way. So they are the first generation to have modern healthcare from the time that they were born all the way through their life. The generation before them did not have that. So they're aging in a much more physically healthy way, which means they do have conditions, but it's more of those chronic, well -maintained conditions.
So the type of care that they need is not like your parents. They need help doing all of their housework and managing and transporting and like all of those daily, we call them activities of daily living. Those types of things. But that's not medical. That's not in the bucket of what Medicare covers. And so you can probably start to piece together already why we're running into so many challenges, why it's so expensive. You were prepared to think about a medical issue and you were ready to accept that insurance would step in and take care of it. And that's not what they're dealing with.
And then the third thing is a lot of us are surprised to learn that Medicare actually was designed to address what they were seeing before this generation and we just never really updated Medicare. So Medicare was designed for acute, intense medical problems.
Brandy Archie: Mm -hmm.
Kimberly Whiter: So if you have a heart attack or if you need surgery or, you know, that type of thing, acute care, it's designed for that, but that's not how our aging population is experiencing the need. And so it wasn't designed for this huge wave of people that are experiencing this chronic kind of underlying need for help with non -medical things. And so we've got this gap. And because there's a lack of knowledge,
Emilia Bourland: So interesting.
Kimberly Whiter: around that, everybody is just like surprised and floored and then like, "I don't have the money to deal with this." And so that's kind of like the bigger picture of what's going on.
Emilia Bourland: Okay, so this is so interesting because I do think, you know, when we think about aging, we kind of think about, you know, like end -of -life care as being the primary concern, you know, but that's not really it. You know, as you're pointing out, it's not about those final weeks or days or whatever, months even, but it's these decades that we're tacking on where there's these gaps that...
Kimberly Whiter: Yeah.
Emilia Bourland: have to be managed that I think as a culture we don't really think about a whole lot. And I also think it's interesting that, you know, the people that were looking ahead to Medicare when that was developed just did not foresee what would happen.
Brandy Archie: Yeah, it makes sense that that's where it was based.
Kimberly Whiter: Yeah.
Emilia Bourland: Yeah.
Brandy Archie: And this is such a complex and dense issue, but I'm so glad that you have an easy to say mission statement because I'm sure it's not easy to solve that. So can you tell us more about what you do with elder care solutions to help us manage all of this?
Kimberly Whiter: Yeah, it's one of those things that I have a, um, not-so-secret motive behind my business, and that is...
to really push on the awareness and advocacy side of this issue. So there's a great need for policy change at our state level and at our national level to make changes to help this growing problem because, I mean, we are going to continue to age as a population. This isn't going to stop, right? So we have to have some broader changes happen. So what we do on an individual family level to help families that are currently struggling with it is to help them understand what
Emilia Bourland: Mm -hmm.
Kimberly Whiter: resources are available to them, because there are actually a lot of resources available. It's just kind of hard to find them. It's very time consuming. You know, if you've got one parent in a hospital, the other parent is calling you constantly. You still have a job and kids to take care of. You're not gonna like take a few hours of your day to get on the internet and go through like the time suck that is the internet trying to find information. You're just not gonna do it. And so, you know, we help them kind of navigate those resources.
But the other thing that we do is help them strategically plan what their costs are going to be and then what money they have available to them. And you can always take a step back and plan for the future. So if you're not in that caregiving position yet, you can think forward and plan forward and that's really what we like to push families to do as much as possible.
Emilia Bourland: So you mentioned you have a not-so-hidden agenda, a not-so-hidden mission. What is that mission? Tell us more about that. How are you advocating? What do you want to see change? I mean, I know what I want to see change, but that's not what we're talking about.
Kimberly Whiter: Yeah, well, so, um, I don't want any of us to feel burdened by having parents age, right? Like, so it's supposed to be this joyful time where you're building memories and having all this time to hang out with your parents as they age, but it's really hard to experience that when you're under so much stress about figuring out who's gonna show up tomorrow to take care of them. And that's just one small example of that.
But I really think that the Medicare system needs a massive overhaul, right? And we need to build it for the type of care and the type of lives that our aging population is actually experiencing. So that's one big thing. But the other thing is, um, funding research for other financial solutions, right? Like, we have research for really everything. If we just fund it, we can find new ways to do this better.
We can find ways for, um, services and communities to work together better. But we need, we need all of those wheels moving to figure out how to make this happen. And, you know, it's, it's a big issue. So to get started on it, really, I think all of us just need to start talking about it more. So I, I really am so grateful that you guys had me on today to talk about this.
Emilia Bourland: Absolutely. Well, and the more we talk about it, the more people know and understand, right? I think you're so right. It's just not something people are aware of and they kind of get, they kind of get blindsided by it. I know for me, you know, I'm an occupational therapist. I've worked in elder care my entire career, and I still wasn't really prepared for some of the issues that my parents are facing.
Brandy Archie: So true. Yeah, same here. Um, I am really curious because we keep talking about this idea of what can you do before you're in that crisis state? Um, can you give us like an example of one of the things you help a family do when they're like, okay, we want to prepare for this. We're not there yet, but we see it coming down the road.
Kimberly Whiter: Yeah, um, so if they're already of age, um, I mean, we do some work with families that are of age and have, um, no, no care needs yet. We do some work with families that have very young children and they're starting to plan forward to their own aging. So I can give you an example of both, but one example of, uh, somebody who is already like a Medicare beneficiary, for example, is looking at what are some of those...
options within the Medicare world that are going to give you access to some of those additional supports. So, for example, we know that some of the Medicare Advantage plans are adding in caregiving benefits. And so we want to think about how do we prepare for those? What are those needs going to be? What are those costs going to be? And then when we plan out, OK, if you need a caregiver five years from now and you're using Medicare Advantage, here's the plan to use.
Emilia Bourland: Yeah.
Kimberly Whiter: that makes sense. Here's some of the supplementary products you might need to add on. Here are the types of cost shares you need to be prepared for. And then we start to think about like, okay, how do we actually put money away for this?
Brandy Archie: Oh.
Kimberly Whiter: One of the biggest like gaps I think I see is families that never think to buy long-term care insurance. And so if we can get people thinking about the financial planning aspect of aging, they're going to be so much better off. So even if long-term care insurance is expensive, if you're buying it when you're young enough, it's not as expensive and it's certainly less expensive than the amount of money you'll pay for care down the road.
Brandy Archie: Mm-hmm.
Kimberly Whiter: And so there's things like that, that, you know, if you're thinking, "Well, if I start thinking about this at 50 or 55, I might be able to start making some good changes for myself and set myself up better." So those are just like small examples of the types of things we do when we're really planning forward. And then on the other side of things, I would say younger families that are thinking about their own aging, it's very important to start putting retirement funds away early.
But one of the other things that we really like to work with families on is their overall asset management, right? So what are you doing with the investments that you have? How are you planning for those investments to change over the course of your lifetime so that you are making your money work for you? And that's a big piece of what we do is making sure that families really have their money working for them in the best way so that by the time they need it, there's plenty of it there to spend.
Brandy Archie: This is a real big question, but what about for those people who don't have much to save? I mean, especially if we're thinking about people that are starting out in their 20s and 30s now and, you know, they're living paycheck to paycheck, not able to save for retirement or even think about retirement. What do we do about that?
Kimberly Whiter: Yeah, and that's one of the really important areas where we start to talk about other types of support. So, um, it might be, I, I'm a huge proponent of people in their 20s and 30s not waiting to start investing. It is not hard to invest a little bit of money and it's amazing what that will do for you over the long term. So I'm just like everybody that's in their 20s and 30s, just invest some. You don't have to invest a lot, but just start doing it and get used to that because you will see how much that builds over time and it won't be a big deal.
But when we're talking about not having a lot of money, this is where I think it is so important for us to really start using our voices to talk about things like this need for policy change, right? And for making sure that our population in general is aware of that, we need to really think about and support our social safety nets, and then think about ways that we can also personally build safety nets for ourselves.
So one of the other things that a lot of people are surprised to learn about is the resources that your state or your local area have available to you. And you might not ever think about that, but there's a ton of things that happen at the state level that aren't necessarily need-based. So they're not income-based, but they're there to support you. So things like what our Area Agencies on Aging do, they're there to help you. They have a lot of resources that are available to anybody.
And so you can lean on those resources that way you don't have to fork out a ton of money for things that you didn't think about. And I would also say there are other things that people just don't think about, like how do you actually apply for VA benefits? How do you apply for Medicaid if you do need it? Those kinds of things are all the resources that people can use to help themselves out financially, but those financial pieces aren't going to add up to a lot. And that's where it really becomes important to start thinking about the policies.
And making your voice heard in terms of advocacy.
Brandy Archie: Mm-hmm.
Emilia Bourland: Yeah, there's, I'm sure there's, we could probably talk for like hours and hours about this, but yeah, there's, there's so much to know and so much to learn, you know, if we want to get prepared.
Kimberly Whiter: Mm-hmm.
Emilia Bourland: And so much we need to do, like you said, as a culture, as a society to prepare. So I feel like this is a really big topic. I'm so glad that you're doing this work, and I'm so glad that you could be here to share it with us today. Thank you so much, Kimberly.
Kimberly Whiter: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. And, you know, the more we talk about it, the better, right?
Emilia Bourland: Exactly.
Kimberly Whiter: So thank you.
Emilia Bourland: Yes. Brandy, anything to add?
Brandy Archie: No, this was great. Thank you so much.
Kimberly Whiter: Thank you.
Emilia Bourland: All right, well, I think that wraps up today's episode of Care Lab. If you enjoyed today's conversation and want to hear more from experts like Kimberly Whiter, make sure to subscribe to the Care Lab podcast on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. Stay informed, stay prepared, and let's navigate the journey of elder care together. See you next time!
Do us a favor and subscribe to the CareLab podcast on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts! It will help others find our conversations and grow the community and you’ll stay updated with the latest insights and expert advice on elder care.
