How to Make Long Term Care Plans For Your Senior

Regardless of how energetic and active your elderly loved one is, it is always wise to have a long-term care plan in place. Planning for long term care allows the family to get organized and make decisions that will allow the elderly individual to live in comfort as they age.

The key components of long term planning

When a family begins to make long term plans for their senior, they should focus on the follow aspects of care:

• Health decisions
• Legal decisions
• Financial decisions

The home care team at Always Best Care of Asheville-Hendersonville encourages families to work with their seniors on creating an advance directive, which spells out a senior’s wishes for medical care in the event of an emergency or the end of their life.

An advance directive allows your elderly loved one to specify who will make medical decisions on their behalf in the event that they are not able to do so for whatever reason. Though the topic may be hard to deal with, it is important to discuss, as it helps to take the burden off the family and ensures that the senior will have their wishes heard. Expertise and guidance from a lawyer can be useful during this process.

Making important financial decisions

Eldercare professionals encourage families to work with their elderly loved ones in order to make financial plans, which are another important part of long-term planning. It is important that you have a plan in place about how your senior’s care will be paid for when it becomes necessary. Some people prefer to split the burden among family members, while some seniors like to use their own savings to provide for this care. This is a personal decision and there is no right answer, but it is important that there are measures established that ensure that there is enough money available to cover the cost of this necessity.

Making appropriate living arrangements

Part of the aging process includes ensuring that your senior understands the value of their assets, and knows how they would like to proceed when they are no longer capable of caring for a home on their own. Though it may be several years before your elderly loved one looks to sell their home and move into a retirement community or with family, it is still important to plan for this date. This type of advance planning helps to relieve stress and make it easier to execute the senior’s wishes accordingly when the time comes.

Regardless of how difficult the conversation may be, long term planning is a necessary part of home care. When you have these discussions early on, you can feel confident that your senior’s wishes will be executed exactly as they would like.