If you’re a caregiver for a family member who is ill or has special needs, money is always in the background.
It’s unavoidable. When people are sick or need special attention, it costs money; money you may not have. In fact, a new annual AARP Research Report, which surveyed 1,864 family caregivers between July 18 and Aug. 28, 2016, indicates that family caregivers spend an average of $6,954 in out-of-pocket expenses related to caregiving.
And if you have money problems while caring for a family member, your lack of funds only makes it harder to help them. The good news: there are things you can try.
[See: 10 Money Tips for Family Caregivers.]
Hire a professional to give you advice. To make money, you have to spend money, the old saying goes, and the same principle often applies if you want to save money.
Joan Wright is a certified dementia practitioner at Norwell VNA and Hospice, a Boston-based nonprofit home health care agency. She also spent most of a decade taking care of her parents: her father had heart disease and cancer, which he died from in 1997, seven weeks after his diagnosis, and her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s for nine years, passed away in 2005.
If your bank account can take it, and assuming you’re taking care of a parent, Wright suggests hiring a geriatric care manager and an elder law attorney to help you learn about where you can save money. A geriatric care manager might run between $50 or $200 an hour, according to the website Caregivers.com. An attorney, naturally, will be closer to that $200-an-hour number.
“Make sure that the lawyer is certified in elder law because the rules of Medicare and Medicaid change rapidly and that lawyer needs to be well-versed in what’s available and what isn’t,” Wright says.
A good geriatric care manager, she says, will be “well-versed in the financial resources system and can plug folks into where they qualify.”
But if your family member has, say, special needs, such as a severe physical disability, as you probably already know, you can hire a special needs caregiver. The Special Needs Alliance is a nonprofit with a lot of information on special needs caregivers. Disability.gov is another website worth checking out.
The point is, whatever your family member’s health issue, there’s probably some type of organization or care manager who can direct you to resources that will help you pay for care.
[See: 25 Fast Financial Fixes.]
Talk to your utility company. While it might not be the first place you’d consider tapping as a caregiver, Jill Johnson-Young suggests remembering that your utility company may be able to help you if, say, you’re running any special equipment necessary for a loved one to live at home.
Since the early 1990s, Johnson-Young has been a licensed clinical social worker in Riverside, California, and runs a support group for dementia caregivers. She also has firsthand experience taking care of ill loved ones. Her first and second wives died, respectively, of pulmonary fibrosis in 2010, and Lewy body dementia in 2013. She also helped her mother care for her father for 10 years.
Johnson-Young says that if you have medical equipment running in your home, and it’s impacting your bill, call your electric company, which may be able to lower it.
“Most utilities have a program for that, and it also means [that] if there’s an outage, your home goes on a priority list for getting back online,” she says.
[See: 11 Expenses Destroying Your Budget.]
Check out thrift stores. Say your insurance company refuses to pay for equipment your loved one needs; you may have luck finding it at a thrift store that’s connected to a church, Johnson-Young says.
“We have a large Seventh-day Adventist presence in our area, and their church often had DME — durable medical equipment — available at no or low cost,” she says.
Utilize social media. These platforms offer great ways to reach out for help or to link up with groups of folks who are grappling with similar caregiving issues, Johnson-Young adds.
“They have ideas from practical experience, and [these groups are] also a great place to vent without being seen by family,” she says. “The Lewy group I still belong to frequently links families together for mutual assistance and for care packages to lighten the caregiver’s load for a moment.”
Take your time making financial decisions. If a family member has just started having trouble, and you’re in the beginning stages of becoming a caregiver, resist the urge to get everything perfect right away, says Pat Simasko, an elder law attorney at Simasko Law in Mount Clemens, Michigan.
“It’s OK to take things slow at first,” Simasko says. He has seen plenty of people “jump in with both feet first, hiring full-time caregivers, scheduling round-the-clock family vigils,” before it’s really necessary, and of course, that just ensures that your finances dwindle faster, possibly leaving you with fewer funds when you really do need them.
After all, you’re going to make some mistakes, and you know what they say: Haste makes waste. By moving too fast, you might make less-informed decisions. A common error, Wright says: hiring a caregiver who may be cheap but has little to no training.
And while you may feel like now isn’t the time to think about saving for retirement or your kid’s college education, you shouldn’t ignore your long-term financial goals if your caregiving is going to be long-term situation. But that isn’t easy to do. “When you’re in the throes of it,” Wright says, “you don’t really think about that as long as you can pay your bills.”
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