How has this changed how you will approach it?

Driving is a key thing you have to consider. If you have to give up your car, how will you get on?

I injured myself a few years ago and due to a cock up at the hospital needed to go back and get it sorted. DH couldn't take me that day so it cost me £25 in taxis each way. It wasn't a very good experience anyway but would have been much worse in my 80s.

Parents and in laws all dead now. Last to go was my mother who did most of it right. She agreed to LPA after dad died, lived in a bungalow and kept fit and active until she couldn't. She died of heart failure, the root of which was a childhood illness.
She left very, very detailed instructions about her funeral.
What she didn't get right was the very end, she left it too late to move into the care home she had chosen.
Also decluttering.

DH is 75 and I am 66 though he is healthierthan me. We did LPA ten years ago once DC were 18. Each other and both DC named.
I am clearing out stuff as an ongoing project.
Financially we should be fine. We already have help with the garden, could install a downstairs bathroom or chair lift.
What we haven't done is move. I want to move to a small town instead of the village we live in but DH does not. We could get by with deliveries and taxis but for me it would be hard socially if I couldn't drive. If he goes first I will move.

My DM is still only mid sixties but more like 82. Amazingly she said she thinks she would cope fine on her own but relies on my DF for everything. From finances, to putting petrol in the car etc. When she is out she needs assistance reading everything and yet she thinks she would be fine...it's a huge concern for me that she is like this at her age and that she is in such denial.

For me it’s keeping fit and active as long as I can. My mother is 85 and can’t walk very far at all now, she’s unsteady on her feet, but she has never really exercised and I think it shows. Even when she was given chair exercises to strengthen her legs after a fall she didn’t do them. It means she’s now very restricted in what she can do and complains a lot about her lack of independence.

It prompted me to join a gym for strength training and take up yoga for mobility. I’m aware that other things can happen to us but we can at least try to keep mobile for as long as we can.

This really resonates with me. She expends so much energy devoted to being angry and resentful, there isn't anything left to be my mother any more

I think we all have to plan for a care home to be honest because the reality is anything else burdens the rest of the family in a huge way.

100%. No one wants to think it will happen to them so we need to be realistic before the decline begins. No one likes the word burden because it’s emotionally charged but if you (as a child or an elderly relative) are reliant on others then strictly speaking you are a burden. There are levels of course, but I didn’t have children to create free carers for my old age.

@LindorDoubleChoc sensible choice and plan. Good luck it sounds really sensible.

DH and I are in our early 60s. We are nowhere near retirement yet and infact DH works easily 50+ hours a week.

However, we will downsize from our large 3 bed Victorian terrace with enormous garden, in around 5 years if all goes to plan. We've been here 21 years and so I am starting on the decluttering right now.

I fancy a 3 bed 2 bath flat with large balcony about 15 minutes away from where we currently live but still within London.

I hope when it comes to care I will have the capacity to remember the worry and arguments my mother put me through when she insisted she "could manage fine" in her late 80s to 90s.

How old is your DGM @Autumnal589? I know a couple of people living independently without carers (just a cleaner) aged 88/89. Maybe your DGM is older than that though.

I don’t think we can anticipate how we will feel or react once we feel more helpless, frail, dependent etc.

Like people who make pronouncements about how they will parent before they have a child…

The thing I will not do to my children is retire to a far flung isolated coastal / rural area that lacks care infrastructure, decent public transport and an easily accessible hospital… miles from where they live or are likely to live.

My observation is that realistically, unless you die of a cardiac arrest or similar, no one is actually capable of living alone in the last part of their life.

even with carers coming in etc it’s just not possible. Mental capacity is actually usually the first thing to go and physical follows. This means even if you think you’ll be able to employ gardeners, cleaners, order taxis etc to deal with physical decline, the reality is you won’t actually have to mental capacity to organise and stay on top of it.

my grandmother thinks she is living independently in her own home. The reality is that my mum and her siblings order her food shop to be delivered, pay the gardener, sort out her bills and doctors appointments, etc etc. They deal with multiple calls a day from my DGM in a panic about one thing or another.

I think we all have to plan for a care home to be honest because the reality is anything else burdens the rest of the family in a huge way.

@EmotionalBlackmail good points. That said the nursing home our family opted for whilst part of a bigger chain feels very much like a family run one. Maybe because there is a Matron and Senior Nursing staff who are very proactive in ensuring the care team work well with residents on activities and making sure they are showered and dressed for breakfast etc it does feel like they are not just left in their rooms, as does seem to happen in others. Maybe we got lucky. In fairness to the emphasis on profit and this maybe a controversial point - we are treating people with medication so much that people who would have died without ’over treatment’ are surviving for a long time. It is Big Pharma pushing this so the savvy investors know that care/nursing facilities are a good bet for good consistent profit. There is nowhere for some elderly people to go. Hospitals are not the right setting unless they have an emergency. Family cannot manage so these facilities are vital.

Care homes are almost entirely now private businesses so can pretty much do what they want in terms of what they offer or who they take. It's a bit like private nurseries vs using a school nursery. Except in the care sector the equivalent of the school nursery barely exists. And a lot of the bigger care home chains have been bought up so the emphasis is on profit for shareholders.

I agree with having a good clear out. When a family friend lost her mum as a young adult, she ended up paying for a storage unit for her mum’s things as she didn’t feel able to get rid of them. If her mum had just left a few keepsakes (plus the essentials), then it surely would have been easier for her.

Personally, I’d be tempted to keep one or two payslips from the 70s though. They’re a tiny bit of social history.

I have learnt a bit about care homes recently. It was a surprise to learn that at some homes, the self-funded residents are charged extra and subsidise the residents funded by the local authority. This doesn’t seem entirely fair! It’s also been sobering to read that some care homes are apparently fussy about who they will accept, “get funny” if a self-funded resident runs out of money and switches to local authority funding and that sometimes, residents are evicted if the care home decides it can no longer meet their needs. I knew care homes were expensive, but I had no idea they were so complicated. On the plus side, I have discovered a few care homes which seem lovely, including ones with lots of activities on offer, beautiful gardens and resident animals. Anyway, it’s made me realise the importance of saving up, even if I would only be able to afford the “top-up fees” that might enable my relatives to have some choice of care home.

My parents downsized a few years ago, when my mum was first diagnosed with a life-limiting illness. She always said she didn’t want to be a burden and to put her in a home.
However, my father is now unwell and it’s suddenly become apparent how reliant she’s been on him and how much my mum has deteriorated recently. She seems completely oblivious to this as she now can’t be left alone for long and can’t manage to take her regular medication.
We are currently in the process of researching what extra help is available. My parents have plenty of money to fund it and my sibling and I would prefer they spent their money on making their old age comfortable rather than saving it for our inheritance. They have been resistant up until now but my father’s illness has made them realise they need a plan.
Having seen my father in law’s experience in a care home though, it really worries me what options are out there and also for my own future. He was in an expensive home and had 3 children advocating for him but the care he received was still unsatisfactory. I have no idea where to start with finding somewhere suitable for my parents and, when the time comes, for me.
My partner and I have a plan to put plenty of money aside to fund our care, but we have no children and I really do worry as to what will happen to us when we’re at that point.

The evidence says that cognitive empathy (the ability to 'put yourself in other's shoes') does, on average, decline with age. What I don't think anyone knows is whether this is a biological decline - that you become literally less capable of it, in the way children are - or whether it's lifestyle changes. I was astonished at how quickly retirement changed my parents, but I've also seen much younger people seem to similarly lose perspective in periods where they were a bit withdrawn from the world for whatever reason. I think I did myself when I was on mat leave - my world felt small and I think I did become self-centred and self-absorbed.

I don't want my children to have to care for me. At least one of them definitely won't because of career choice. Equally I don't want to mind their children FT. When I finally get to retire, that time's for me.

My parents were actually very uncomplicated. Mum diagnosed with terminal cancer at 62, dad died suddenly 9 days later and my mum was gone within 5 months. House is still full of shit in the teens of years later, although we did do a lot of decluttering, because a sibling still lives there.

I'm decluttering our house as I go along. None of the kids is remotely sentimental but I still have things like the 6th form party invitations I received 40 years ago!! I threw out a lot of stuff I found recently, including letters from 35ish years ago from friends when I was living in London. One friend's was very difficult to dispose of, because she took her life 12-15 years ago, and she'd been the life and soul of the party. I could hear her voice reading her letters. I was ruthless though once I'd read them. I kinda regret it but I'd not read them in over 30 years anyway.

My mum is 88…..lives alone ……still drives…..fit and active….no health issues…..we encouraged her to downsize at 80 into a bungalow where she is very settled…..me and my DD have POA for health and finances…..im trustee of her trust ( her house) ……I’ve sorted a gardener to come in and do ‘one off’ jobs…..,I have the telephone numbers of 3 of her neighbours in case I can’t get hold of her ( I live 1.5 hrs away) …..Mums fine with WhatsApp and YouTube and bbc layer……but has never taken an interest in the internet……hence I sort all her online bills now …….since she moved and we got rid of years of clutter ( she had been in her home 47 years), I encourage her to have regular clear outs when I visit and do tip and charity shop trips for her……I encourage her to make a running to do list of jobs for me and my partner when we visit…..I phone her every other evening……sometimes just a very quick, are you ok? …..and on the nights I don’t phone I check her WhatsApp, when she was last on…..I take her away 2 or 3 times a year because I’m mindful that many of her friends have died or not mobile enough to go on holiday anymore ……if the time comes when she is not as mobile and struggling to live alone, she can come live with if she wants ……we have the front lounge that we rarely use that would make into a bedroom and we have a downstairs bathroom…..mum has made a will and I am executor

Move into town (from a village), get paperwork in order, Swedish death cleaning, and an advance directive should they become legal, or a one way trip to Belgium. I will not do this to my own children.

My father kept all the important stuff in one drawer and let us know about it - thank God he did. My mother on the other hand was a complete nightmare, not really her fault but as the dementia progressed she tended to 'relocate' things. I'm not sure if there's a solution to that as people live for a long time in denial of the condition. But if the house hadn't been stuffed to the rafters with crap it wouldn't have been quite so bad.

My DPs are very elderly and in a big 4 bed house that is completely beyond them (ex council house in deprived area). We made them out in a stairlift and re did their bathroom to have a walk in shower two years ago, both of which have been a success. But my mother hoards and Dad enables so the house is full of crap. It’s a mess.

Our plan is to get DS off to Uni then declutter, move and downsize. We have a town by the sea in mind that’s not remote, it has all amenities and transport connections and DS could get there easily.

Then looking further ahead, if/ when he has children, we’ll move again to be close to grandchildren. 10 mins walk would be ideal, close enough to pop round but far enough away to give him privacy.

We’ve done wills and will give him POA as soon as he’s old enough.

Our main resolution is all the crap though - we’re not going to make him clear a house, it’s just too much. DH has already done his parents’ house and I will have to do mine.

There was some research reported on this, I seem to remember reading earlier this year. But I also think it's related generally to ageing, having constant aches and pains, not being able to do the things they used to do, and the world getting smaller as they go out less and harder to see friends so everything becoming focussed on their own needs.

But I too think they also forget, or never knew, what it's like working now. Mine hasn't worked in 25 years, never had a computer at work and never commuted. She cannot comprehend my working life in the slightest and isn't interested in finding out. In her day they still had a staff room and everyone got a lunch hour and tea breaks. Refusal to accept the different role of women now. Mine earned a bit of extra money for the household whereas I'm the breadwinner and responsible for paying the mortgage. She can't see that mine and my DH's set up is very different to hers - I suspect she sees him as a bit of a failure for not "providing" for me so I was then free to run around after her!

Previously more generous attitudes at work - eg people seemed to be granted time off for the funerals of all sorts of random people. Now I'm entitled to one day for a select list of relatives. She was shocked when I refused to go to her friend's funeral (not someone I even knew) and couldn't comprehend that I'd have had to use up a day of annual leave to do that.

I am in my late 50s and have had to pick up the pieces and shoulder the burden of many of my parents' poor life choices, so I am already doing things to avoid repeating their mistakes.

I am in the middle of downsizing and massively decluttering.

I will continue to live in an area where I can do everything on foot within a 5-10 minute walk.

I am staying active, not becoming car-dependent, and actually taking deliberate exercise.

I have never smoked.

If I end up needing a knee or hip replacement, I will get one, rather than sticking my head in the sand and becoming completely disabled.

I will simplify my finances, keep my records in good order and make sure my partner/children know where to find things.

I already have a will, and sorting out POA is on my list for next year.

My in laws moved in their 70s from a house that was in a town to one more rural and further away from shops/transport/facilities. They had their full faculties but seemed unwilling to consider what would happen as they reached very old age.

Now my FIL is unable to drive and neither can walk far so they are completely reliant on others, mainly paid carers but also family to do everything for them. They were selfish people when younger and still are completely self absorbed. We see a lot of self pity from them and zero reflection that they have made poor choices that have negatively impacted them and others, especially my SIL who is in the unfortunate position of living closest to them so being the primary carer.

So they have shown us what not to do. We will be moving in our 70s too but into a house that is within better walking distance of everything we will need so that we can access shops/doctors/chemist etc even if we are no longer able to drive.