What does it cost to age with dignity?

It’s an urgent question as the youngest baby boomers approach 65 and their adult children prepare to take on their care.

I’m one of those adult children – visiting my dad, with advanced dementia, every week in the memory care facility where he has lived for a year, costing $8,500 a month out of pocket. I also live with my mom, who just got a knee replacement and deals with a chronic autoimmune illness.

Like many women of her generation, she had little paid work after my brother and I were born in the early 80s. Women aged 65 and older are roughly 80% more likely to live in poverty than men are, in large part because of the caretaking they provided. My dad, raised in a family that constantly went broke and declared bankruptcy, became a bankruptcy lawyer himself and broke his promises with my mom of equal parenting. Workaholism was his emotional safety blanket after an erratic childhood in which he had to answer the door to debt collectors and lie that his parents weren’t home as they hid in a back room of their Denver bungalow. It’s unlikely my parents’ savings will run out, but savings born of trauma (plus some white male privilege) shouldn’t be a prerequisite for having the care you need in your twilight years.

Unsurprisingly, cultural messages about ageing and savings in the US are riddled with rugged individualism. Our parents should buy long-term care insurance; in reality, only 3-4% of those over 50 have it (my parents don’t). Our parents should save for retirement; the truth is that 46% of Americans have no retirement savings at all, and those who do have an average of $955, a far cry from estimates that say most of us will need $1.5m to retire comfortably. This is not a color-blind consideration: white families accumulate more wealth over time than Black or Hispanic families; in their 70s, the average white family had more than four times the wealth of the average Black family.

Even........

© The Guardian