Facing Financial Ruin as Costs Soar for Elder Care

“The anger has diminished from the early days,” she said last year.

But earlier on, she had resorted to calling the police when he acted erratically.

“He was hating me and angry, and I didn’t feel safe,” she said.

She considered memory care units, but the least expensive option cost around $8,000 a month and some could reach nearly twice that amount. The couple’s monthly income, with his pension from Seattle City Light, the utility company, and their combined Social Security, is $6,000.

Placing her husband in such a place would have gutted the $500,000 they had saved before she retired from 35 years teaching art and French at a parochial school.

“I’ll let go of everything if I have to, but it’s a very unfair system,” she said. “If you didn’t see ahead or didn’t have the right type of job that provides for you, it’s tough luck.”

In the last year, medication has quelled Tim’s anger, but his health has declined so much that he no longer poses a physical threat. Margaret said she’s reconciled to caring for him as long as she can.

“When I see him sitting out on the porch and appreciating the sun coming on his face, it’s really sweet,” she said.

The financial threat posed by dementia also weighs heavily on adult children who have become guardians of aged parents and have watched their slow, expensive declines.

Claudia Morrell, 64, of Parkville, Maryland, estimated her mother, Regine Hayes, spent more than $1 million during the eight years she needed residential care for dementia. That was possible only because her mother had two pensions, one from her husband’s military service and another from his job at an insurance company, plus savings and Social Security.

Morrell paid legal fees required as her mother’s guardian, as well as $6,000 on a special bed so her mother wouldn’t fall out and on private aides after she suffered repeated small strokes. Her mother died last December at age 87.

“I will never have those kinds of resources,” Morrell, an education consultant, said. “My children will never have those kinds of resources. We didn’t inherit enough or aren’t going to earn enough to have the quality of care she got. You certainly can’t live that way on Social Security.”

Women Bear the Burden of Care

For seven years, Annie Reid abandoned her life in Colorado to sleep in her childhood bedroom in Maryland, living out of her suitcase and caring for her mother, Frances Sampogna, who had dementia. “No one else in my family was able to do this,” she said.

“It just dawned on me, I have to actually unpack and live here,” Reid, 61, remembered thinking. “And how long? There’s no timeline on it.”

After Sampogna died at the end of September 2022, her daughter returned to Colorado and started a furniture redesign business, a craft she taught herself in her mother’s basement. Reid recently had her knee replaced, something she could not do in Maryland because her insurance didn’t cover doctors there.

“It’s amazing how much time went by,” she said. “I’m so grateful to be back in my life again.”

Studies are now calculating the toll of caregiving on children, especially women. The median lost wages for women providing intensive care for their mothers is $24,500 over two years, according to a study led by Norma Coe, an associate professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lewis moved back from England to Nashville to care for her mother, a former nurse who had a stroke that put her in a wheelchair.

“I was thrust back into a caregiving role full time,” she said. She gave up a post as a research director for a nonprofit organization. She is also tending to her 87-year-old grandfather, ill with prostate cancer and kidney disease.

Making up for lost income seems daunting while she continues to support her mother.

But she is regaining hope: She was promoted to assistant dean for student affairs at Vanderbilt School of Nursing and was recently married. She and her husband plan to stay in the same apartment with her mother until they can save enough to move into a larger place.

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Facing Financial Ruin as Costs Soar for Elder Care

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