Looking after granny

[louisiana]

Newcomer, would that view still hold if the relative concerned lived in another country (different language, different everything).

To me, this makes the situation even tougher, as the elderly person cannot necessarily be brought to the UK (legally), and even if they can, the language barrier and problems of age and memory means a 50-75% dependent person becomes 100% so. Even if they have mobility, they cannot walk down their own street without getting lost - they really are not acquiring any 'routes' or even streets at that age - and they cannot ask anyone the way either. They cannot communicate with health care workers or care assistants. etc. They cannot speak to anyone except you. They cannot go to daycare centres without being incommunicado all day. They cannot understand the TV or the radio.

So do you shut down your business, perhaps make people unemployed, and move to another country, together with your family? A country where available work is next to nil (and wages very low), and where you have no entitlement to benefits? Send your children to a school in a country where they don't speak the language, probably at just the wrong time in their schooling? Where do you all live? And for how long? It could quite literally be decades, indeed until you are retired and beyond retirement yourself.

So, what to do?

[genwilliams]

As some people have articulated, the relationship you have with your parents is an enormous factor in this. Two people of adult age who can't bear each other can't be forced to live with each other for duty's sake; no-one will benefit.

I'm in my 20s and my parents are about retirement age (my dad retired last year and is keen for my mum to do the same soon). They're nowhere near needing assistance from me - their lives are busy and quite separate from mine, and I still see them very much as my mum and dad who brought me up, not my mum and dad who I have to look after - the very idea of them being frail scares me. But if that time comes, I would want to be in a position where they could rely on me, because they've made a home for me for far longer than one expects to (I moved out last year at 26). I couldn't stand the idea of someone they don't know just being paid to look after them. That's my experience, as someone with an excellent relationship with my parents. I know people in alternative scenarios with hellish relationships with their folks, not through their own fault - and in their circusmtances it would be a tall and unfair order.

Encouragement of this idea would be good, but as with many ideas aimed at improving society, enforcement would do more harm than good. It should be something that people are ready and willing to do with warmth, not a financial and personal cross heaved onto their shoulders by the state.

[SteveT]

I guess it boils down to whether you could cope with watching your last remaining parent become a down and out, and maybe

sleeping rough, having been evicted through debt and now begging for living.

[SteveT]

Newcomer wrote:- your post did (probably unintentionally) sound a bit flippant/mercenary when you talked about 'Bye bye inheritence' and Indignitas.

I have known a number of people waiting for granny to die to get their hands on the family fortune and in so doing, ignore the fact of developing their own lives and making their own money and success of life.

In my opinion the only money to have is your own hard earned, it gives you confidence in the obtaining and character building when dealing with the proceeds, and you know where you are with your expenditure through life.