These are difficult realities without Hollywood cliche answers. Caregivers and the costs of caregiving don't get much attention. They're not part of the news flow, and the day-to-day grind of caregiving doesn't lend itself to the self-promotional zeitgeist of social media. Look at me, helping Mom on her walker is not going to score big numbers online. The burdens in human and financial terms are often crushing. These realities are generally obscured by taboos and Hollywood cliches: it's considered bad form to describe the burdens of caregiving, and anyone who dares to do so is quickly chided: "You're lucky your parent is still alive so you can spend quality time together." Meanwhile, back in the real world, 4 in 10 family caregivers rarely or never feel relaxed, according to a 2023 AARP survey, as an integral part of caregiving is being on constant alert for something untoward happening to the elderly person in one's care. The demographics are sobering: we're living longer, often much longer, than previous generations, and in greater numbers. This means 65-year olds are caring for 85-year olds and 70-year olds are caring for 90+-year olds. I've logged 8+ years of caregiving (5+ years here at home) from age 63 to 70 caring for my mom-in-law, so I have personal experience of being old enough to "retire" but retirement is a fantasy for caregivers. Our neighbors are 80+ years of age and they're caring for her 102-year old Mom. What's this retirement thing people talk about so cheerily? All these realities are abstractions until they happen to you. These burdens are seeping down to Gen X and the Millennial generation. 'It's a job, and a tough one': the pain and privilege of being a millennial caregiver. The financial costs of care are staggering. A bed in private assisted living is around $75,000 and up a year, a private room in a nursing home is around $150,000 a year, and round-the-clock care at home costs from $150,000 to $250,000+ annually. The Crushing Financial Burden of Aging at Home (WSJ.com) "Christine Salhany spends about $240,000 a year for 24-hour in-home care for her husband who has Alzheimer's. In Illinois, Carolyn Brugioni's dad exhausted his savings and took out a home-equity line-of-credit to pay for home healthcare." More than 11,000 people in the U.S. are turning 65 every day and the vast majority--77% of Americans age 50 and older according to an AARP survey--want to live as long as possible in their current home. At some point, many will need help. About one-fourth of those 65 and older will eventually require significant support and services for more than three years, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. About one-third of retirees don't have resources to afford even a year of minimal care, according to the Boston College center. "The new inheritance is not having enough money to give to kids but to have enough money to cover long-term care costs, says Liz O'Donnell, the Boston-based founder of Working Daughter, an online community of caregivers. The costs of home care are so high that not just inheritances are exhausted; the home equity is also drained. $350,000 sounds like a lot of money but that might cover two years in a nursing home but not be enough to cover two years of round-the-clock care at home. The cost of maintaining the home doesn't go away: property taxes, insurance and maintenance expenses must be paid, too. Those without monumental financial resources make do by doing everything themselves. Depending on the resources available in the community, there may be some minimal assistance such as weekly visits by a nurse, meals delivered, and adult day-care facilities, but there are no guarantees any of these are available or that the family qualifies. In other words, the idea that the retired generation will leave ample inheritances is increasingly detached from reality. As noted, the new inheritance is to get through the years of caregiving without acquiring debt. The human costs are high, too. In the Hollywood cliche, everyone adapts and makes the best of it, and there's plenty of Hallmark moments that make it all worthwhile. Yes, there are Hallmark moments, but the elderly person misses their independence and may feel resentment that they no longer control how things are done. The caregivers are often exhausted--especially if they're 65 or older--and despite their best efforts may feel resentment at ending their careers early and sacrificing their own last best years caring for a decidedly unstellar parent who doesn't seem to appreciate the immense sacrifices being made on their behalf. The indignities of extreme old age weigh on the elderly, and the 65+ caregivers worry that they can't pick Mom or Dad up now that they're so old that they have their own infirmities. The responsible parent frets at the expense and feels bad they won't be able to pass on much to their grandkids. They may express guilt at being a burden, though that is beyond their control. The responsible adult child is burning out trying to juggle three generations and keep themselves glued together enough to keep functioning. They can't help but want their own life back, but to say this out loud is taboo because if life gives you lemons, make lemonade. In other words, tell us a happy story, repeat an acceptable cliche or say nothing. Nobody wants to hear any of this, and so the caregiver develops a self-contained stoicism. Everyone with no experience of caregiving wants to hear the Hollywood version, and so conversations with other caregivers are the only moments where the truth can be expressed and heard. In the rest of "normal life," the caregiver quickly learns to say what's expected: "We're managing. Life's good." This cultural taboo means the difficult realities that will multiply as 68 million Boomers age will come as an unwelcome surprise. Everyone wants to end their lives at home, we all understand this. While the fortunate elderly die peacefully at home after a brief illness, the less fortunate require levels of care that soon exhaust people and bank accounts. The burdens of caring for the remaining Silent Generation are high, but what about the 60 million retiree tsunami of the Boomer generation? As the general health of the American public declines, how many people will be healthy enough to care for their very elderly parents or grandparents? Who will do the often thankless work of caring for the very elderly at home and in nursing homes? These are difficult realities without Hollywood cliche answers. The fantasy is that 60 million very elderly will be tended by robots, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. But this isn't realistic, despite all the giddy claims. The American zeitgeist rejects problems for which there is no facile technological solution. But reality isn't a narrative, and the elderly person who fell and can't get up wants a bit of caring and sympathy, and the aging child wants to help their parent. That it isn't easy to do so requires a stoicism worthy of Marcus Aurelius. "You have power over your mind--not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." "Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart." "Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present." All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan I like to think (and My recent books: Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site. 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The choice is simple: housing is either shelter for citizens, or it's just another interchangeable speculative asset in the global financialization casino. It can't be both. We tend to think of housing becoming unaffordable as a matter of land prices, zoning and the cost of 2X4s, but it's fundamentally a matter of values. Subscriber John summarized this in an insightful comment on Substack: "For me, this issue is a reflection of the values of our culture. 1. Lack of value placed on community means that a house is primarily a financial asset, not a home. 2. Lack of valuing community, means that we have not supported local business / industry and allowed these to be centralized or outsourced. 3. Lack of valuing self-sufficiency means that the only way we can view a house as an asset is when it increases in value. How much income does your house generate every month? (even if you count that income in tomatoes). Most of the housing being built is nothing more than boxes with a roof no matter how fancy the box. There is no awareness of how that housing is a part of the ecology that it is built in." This boils down to a simple choice: either housing is shelter for the citizenry, or it's just another asset class to be snapped up for private profit / gain by global capital. Choose one. This is one of the many pernicious consequences of glorifying Financialization as the most important dynamic in our economy and society. Once an economy has been financialized, everything becomes a commodity in the global marketplace to be bought and sold as an interchangeable asset. A flat in Bangkok, a flat in Barcelona, a flat in Miami: they're all the same to global capital, which includes trillions of dollars of non-U.S. wealth sloshing around seeking profitable places to park surplus capital, and domestic wealth doing the same thing, moving wealth around interchangeable assets to maximize private gain. This is the iron logic of Financialization and Globalization: housing is just another asset class to exploit. What effect the tsunami of wealth has on the communities being shredded is of zero interest to non-resident owners, corporations and speculators. Buying up houses to rent as short-term vacation rentals (STVRs), or simply left empty is just like buying a corporate bond: you move your capital around to maximize private gains, there's no difference between housing, shares in a mining company, bonds or any other financial commodity. This is how you end up with entire residential buildings having only a few residents, as 90+% of the owners don't live there, they just own the flat or house as a place to safely park surplus capital or visit a few days of the year on vacation. This is a global reality that anyone can observe who cares to open their eyes. Is housing shelter for citizens or is it a commodity asset one buys for profit as a mini-hotel? In popular tourist areas, consequential percentages of the housing has been snapped up by the wealthy as STVRs, short-term rental housing, the vast majority of which are owned not by hosts who live in the house as their sole residence but by absentee hosts who live half a world away and who have zero interest in the locale or community their interchangeable rental happens to be in. Restrictions on new housing serve the self-serving interests profiting from locking down the status quo. Anything that might negatively affect valuations is resisted. This urge to pull the ladder up behind us is natural, but is it fair to the generations behind us? As for all the restrictions, regulations and permitting--has anyone looked at this mass of costs with fresh eyes, asking if it's truly serving the citizenry? Or can much of it be stripped away as bureaucratic clutter or lobbying imposed by self-serving interests? We need to ask cui bono-- to whose benefit? Everyone is for solutions to housing unaffordability that don't diminish the value of their house. But the price is the problem. As I explained in Housing: The Foundations of the Middle Class Are Crumbling, turning housing into just another table in the financialization casino has inflated a bubble of unprecedented proportions that has distorted not just affordability but the fabric of society. Those who bought homes long ago are now wealthy not from genius but simply from timing. Buying in before the bubble inflated has generated generational and regional divides of the haves and the have-nots that are corrosive to the economy and society. Let's start with housing affordability. It's in the basement. The generations who bought homes 25 or more years ago have accumulated most of the wealth. When houses increase in value ten-fold while wages rise by a third, this is the result: Here's the National Case Shiller Housing Index. I've added long-term trendlines to clarify the two housing bubbles inflated by rampant financialization. A return to the upper trendline would require a 40% drop in current valuations, and a return to the lower trendline would require a 50% decline. Since financialization inflated housing to unaffordable heights, the only way to restore affordability is to eliminate the perverse incentives and distortions of financialization by taking these steps to return housing to sheltering the citizenry: 1. Impose a national ban on all short-term vacation rentals except those hosted by full-time owner-occupants. Those caught cheating would be fined $10,000 per violation (i.e. each rental to a new vacationer), with no upper limit. I know all the rationalizations, hut here's the thing: if you want to own and operate a mini-hotel, go build one in a resort / commercial zone. Residential housing is for residents, not a place for global capital to park surplus wealth or stripmine for private gain. Those full-time owner-occupants who want to rent out a room in their house to vacationers, that's fine. 2. Impose national limits on non-resident ownership of housing. An outright total ban on non-resident ownership of housing would be best, but if that's politically impossible, then requirements for residency would be the next best thing: if the owner leaves the home empty for 6 months or longer, a $100,000 fee is imposed annually. Anyone caught cheating would be fined the current value of the home. Once again, the choice is simple: housing is either shelter for citizens, or it's just another interchangeable speculative asset in the global financialization casino. It can't be both. Rationalizing excuses that it can serve both is why the few profiting from the rationalizations are so desperate to obscure this simple, fundamental choice. The third solution is to open the locked doors of zoning, planning and industry standards to new types of housing that would be unconventional but affordable. Every locale will have to wrestle with the forces of keeping the status quo locked down and the need to loosen restrictions and free up experimentation in housing. There isn't one-size-fits-all; every community will have to establish what works best for their economy and populace. One system builds communities, another destroys them. Take your pick, but choose wisely. My recent books: Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site. 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Bottom line: with the loss of predictability, we've also lost any sense of future financial security. Home ownership has been the foundation of middle-class stability and security for so long that it defines middle-class status as much as income. From the end of World War II in 1945 on, the deal was simple: buy a house and you'll build equity that's even better than a savings account because you get the tax break of deducting mortgage interest and you get a roof over your head at a cost that's equal to or even lower than renting a house. Once you've paid off the mortgage, the costs of ownership drop, enabling a secure retirement. Every one of these assumptions has either crumbled or is now in doubt. A recent report in The Guardian sketches out the forces undermining housing as the source of security: 'I feel trapped': how home ownership has become a nightmare for many Americans Scores in the US say they're grappling with raised mortgage and loan interest rates and exploding insurance premiums. "I've come to view home ownership and healthcare as destabilizing forces in my life," said Bernie, a 45-year-old network engineer from Minneapolis. To finance owning his and his wife's $300,000 home and saving for the future, the couple was foregoing medical and dental treatment of any kind and cutting back on expenses everywhere, he said, despite a pre-tax household income of more than $250,000. Let's break down what's changed: 1. The non-mortgage costs of ownership are no longer predictable or affordable. For decades, the cost to insure one's home was modest and predictable, not changing much year to year. Now that insurers are losing billions of dollars as a result of increasingly extreme weather events, rates are rising even in places outside flood, fire and hurricane zones. Insurance rates are doubling or tripling in a few years, and insurers are leaving markets entirely or increasing the deductible that must be paid by the owners before insurance kicks in, and reducing the coverage. Property taxes are soaring in many locales. Property taxes were another cost that was relatively modest and predictable. Those conditions no longer apply in many locales: local governments are jacking up property taxes, and / or soaring home valuations are pushing taxes up to nosebleed levels. (I just looked up the annual property tax on a friend's house in California: north of $18,000 a year. And no, it's not a mansion in Malibu, and he bought it 20 years ago.) The costs of home repairs and maintenance are also skyrocketing. The average age of homes in the U.S. is around 40 years, but closer to 50 years in slow-growth states. As the quality of materials and construction have slowly declined, even houses that are 25 years old or less may require costly repairs--especially if construction defects were undiscovered until major damage had been done. Routine work such as trimming large trees that pose risks to houses now cost a small fortune. The Guardian article noted estimates for a new roof of $60,000, a sum that equals the construction cost of an entire new house two generations ago. Eye-watering costs of materials are now the norm. Again, the major changes are not just in costs, but in the loss of predictability. What was modest in cost was not just modest, it was predictable. Now the costs are far higher and future costs cannot be assumed to be affordable. 2. Mortgage costs are also higher, and there's no guarantee interest rates will fall back to 3.5% mortgage rates. As this chart illustrates, the cost of servicing today's mortgages is significantly higher than in years past. 3. Those who locked in low mortgage rates are trapped in their current homes, as they can't afford to move and pay interest rates that are 50% to 100% higher than the low rates they secured years ago. The Federal Reserve intervened massively in the private mortgage market in the post 2008 era, effectively socializing the mortgage market as the means to push mortgage rates down to encourage "growth." The Fed's intervention helped inflate Housing Bubble #2, just as the subprime excesses of the early 2000s helped inflate Housing Bubble #1. These distortions were intended to fuel home buying, but they also fueled massive increases in housing valuations. 4. The total costs of ownership--the monthly nut including mortgage and other costs--now exceeds the peak in Housing Bubble #1. Buying a house now is not a guaranteed pathway to financial security, it's a wager that valuations will continue to soar ever higher, generating capital gains that will offset the decades of higher costs of ownership. 5. The triple-whammy of soaring valuations, mortgage rates and other costs of ownership has made housing unaffordable in many locales. By any measure, housing affordability has declined to levels that equal or exceed the trough of Housing Bubble #1. The Case Shiller National Housing Index offers a snapshot of Housing Bubble #2. 6. Land, materials and labor are no longer cheap. In traditional economics, the high costs of housing can be reduced by reducing demand or increasing supply. Increasing supply at affordable prices is far more challenging now than in the postwar decades. The easy-to-build land was built out long ago, and high-rise condominiums come with higher construction costs and the uncertainties of common-area expenses, which in some cases skyrocket to equal or exceed the costs of ownership. Proponents of building more housing in urban / suburban areas--YIMBYs--yes in my back yard--face hurdles of geography, aging infrastructure, parking, and the high costs of insurance, mortgages, materials and labor, along with many restrictive zoning and planning regulations designed to maintain the status quo. As for reducing demand: the population of the U.S. was 265 million in 1995, and it's now 345 million: an increase of 80 million people, roughly the same as the entire population of Germany (83 million). 7. The costs of housing have opened generational and regional divides. Boomers and Gen-Xers who bought homes decades ago in the 1990s or early 2000s locked in much lower purchase prices and had multiple opportunities to refinance mortgages at lower rates as the Fed interventions pushed rates down. Recent buyers have no equivalent set of built-in advantages. Regional divides are increased. A modest home purchased in a middle-class urban area decades ago has increased 10-fold in some areas and not even kept up with inflation in others. The winners are now sitting on a million dollars in equity, a windfall the less fortunate did not reap. As the urban winners cash in their equity and move to desirable towns, they quickly bid up housing to the point local residents can no longer afford to buy a home in their hometown. And since the wealthy also snap up housing as investment properties--short-term vacation rentals--households that would be considered middle-class by income are doomed to being renters. "Middle class" is no longer middle-class, it's a seat in the casino that most exit as losers. 8. Renting is no longer a cheaper option. Rents have soared along with home prices, and once again, the predictability of future costs has vanished: rents can increase 30% overnight, just as insurance and property taxes can leap up far beyond anyone's projections. Bottom line: with the loss of predictability, we've also lost any sense of future financial security. Buying a house is now a wager: a wager that the costs of ownership won't stair-step up to eat us alive, and a wager that valuations will continue to rise, offsetting the high costs of ownership with future capital gains. Should Housing Bubble #2 pop--and all bubbles eventually pop--then homeowners will be dealt a future of ever-higher costs of ownership even as their equity diminishes. Those sitting on a wealth of equity now may find the assumption that this equity is predictably permanent is itself a wager. The middle class was fundamentally defined by predictable financial security and social stability. Now everything is a wager with unknowable odds. Rather than being a source of stability, housing is now a source of instability for many--and potentially for every homeowner, should costs of ownership continue increasing as Housing Bubble #2 pops. My recent books: Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site. 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Markets misbehave, sometimes when we least expect it. How badly they misbehave depends on the soundness of the hull and the level of self-reinforcing hubris. When Benoit Mandelbrot's book The (Mis)behavior of Markets was published in 2004, it was a revelation for many of us. I remember sitting in my car in a parking lot, unwilling to tear myself away from reading it. Here's the super-short summary: from time to time markets crash for no visible reason. The internal dynamics of market structures are fractal, and one feature of this structure is that markets break down unpredictably. After the fact, we seek an external trigger--a Federal Reserve "policy error," inflation fears, etc.--but these post-mortem explanations gloss over the cause, which is the inherent instability of market structures. Markets can trundle along for years appearing to be stable and controllable. Any spot of bother can be corrected with a reduction in interest rates or quantitative easing. Everything is known and controllable. But this control is illusory. Out of the blue, markets stop behaving. They misbehave, and possibly quite badly. Nature offers many examples. The seas are relatively calm, and suddenly an enormous rogue wave appears. At that point, the condition of the ship matters. A sound craft will survive the rogue wave, the leaky, rotten hulk won't. Human hubris also matters. If the passengers and crew of the hulk have been persuaded by each other's happy talk that the ship is rock-solid, then its breaking apart will come as a nasty shock. In the current zeitgeist, the consensus is the mighty ship of the stock market is a superliner. No matter how big the rogue wave, the ship will handle it easily. But what if the consensus is wrong, and we're all passengers on a rotting hulk gussied up with new paint? What if the consensus isn't based on the soundness of the hull, but on the self-reinforcing happy-talk around the dessert cart and bar? The consensus is convinced the ship is unsinkable, and so the guaranteed path to profit is to "buy the dip" after the rogue wave has passed. This guarantee is not actually causal; it's recency bias, as "buy the dip" has worked like magic for 15 years. Nobody's interested in leaving the first class casino to get in a lifeboat when guaranteed profits beckon. The question is: how sound is the hull? Who's actually checking, and who's just parroting happy-talk? Can we even tell the difference? In a euphoric speculative bubble, the answer is "no." In a speculative bubble, "buy the dip" is all you need to know to win big, and continue winning big. So who cares about rogue waves and rotten hulls? I often refer to this chart of the dot-com bubble because this happened not in some pre-technology era but in the technology-obsessed present. I attended Comdex in Las Vegas in the peak euphoria, and attendees were busy trading stocks online amidst the crowd. Every bubble is forever until it is no more. Notice the numerous sharp spikes higher as the crowd "bought the dip." The initial crash was bought with all four feet, which was followed by a secondary crash to a new low, which was immediately bought, generating a euphoric spike that signaled "all clear, buy buy buy!" until it too rolled over. This was followed by one last manic "buy the dip" which resulted in a double-top. Once that petered out, a multi-year stair-step down began. The index eventually bottomed after losing about 80% of its peak valuation. Markets misbehave, sometimes when we least expect it. How badly they misbehave depends on the soundness of the hull and the level of self-reinforcing hubris. My recent books: Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site. The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF) Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF) The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF) When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF) Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF). A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF). Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World (Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF). The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF) Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Subscribe to my Substack for free NOTE: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received. Your name and email remain confidential and will not be given to any other individual, company or agency. Thank you, Reynold W. ($70), for your marvelously generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.   Thank you, Bob F. ($70), for your superbly generous subscription to this site -- I am greatly honored by your support and readership. Thank you, Farouk B. 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