Why you now must plan for aged care when you plan for retirement
Planning for home care and aged care isn't the sexiext part of retirement planning that's for sure. But with this insight, you can try to avoid the worst of it.
Happy Sunday again!
This is the short Sunday email, designed to bring you today’s article from The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, WA Today and Brisbane Times. And today I’m digging deep into how to plan for homecare and aged care when you plan for retirement.
I’ve also included the cracker of an interview I did with William Burkitt from Care & Living with Mercer this week on the Prime Time Podcast about “The real cost of care and how it might change with William Burkitt”.
We’re headed into week 2 of the 6 week Epic Retirement Flagship Course this week and the feedback is SUPERB 😊. We have hundreds of people working hard to learn how to make their retirements truly epic. Their signed copies of How to Have an Epic Retirement - the book are all packed and ready to leave first thing Monday! Boy was that a big job!
If you missed this release - we’ll look to do another 6 week course event in May/June. You can express your interest here to be notified of our earlybird release when it happens.
Don’t forget, this week I’m off to the Central Coast of NSW for an event next week for the 2024 Seniors Festival Community Book Talk. It’s on Friday 22nd March 2024 10.30-12 at Brentwood Village. More info here. If you’re in the region, come along. We’ve got Bookface there selling books too - so I can sign them!
And I’ll be in Sydney for a big retirement industry conference too! That should give me lots to write about next week!
Have a lovely Sunday. Make it epic!
Many thanks! Bec Wilson
Author, podcast host, columnist, retirement educator, and guest speaker
Why you now must plan for aged care when you plan for retirement
Aged care and home care used to be something that you could worry about later in life, or, frankly, leave for your kids to worry about for you. But the recommendations delivered in the final report of the Aged Care Taskforce this week leaves us in no doubt: aged care and home care services are about to become something you need to plan for at retirement.
There were three big takeaways for me in the report for everyday people. The first is that people should be planning for their care needs when they plan for their retirement. The second is that we should expect to pay for the standards of accommodation and services that we want to have in our later years of life, and only look to the government to support our care needs.
And third, if we don’t want to pay for aged care accommodation by the day for long periods of time, that we really should look hard at where we are planning to live in our later years in life, and prepare for ageing better.
This will be a big shake-up for the aged care system. Some might see the suggestions as positive, others will feel like they might lose out. And we won’t know which recommendations the government will adopt or how they’ll implement it until the budget leaks start.
There’s no question that the government will continue to help those who cannot afford to pay for care. But for everyone who owns their own home and has a healthy super balance, you need to take this seriously. Here are three things we all should understand.
How home care services work and how to budget for them
The government offers four levels of home care packages, each of which give people a level of in-home clinical care, and access to a range of other more basic care and support services. The consumer can drive how this is spent to suit their needs, within the list of approved services.
We can get angry, shake our fists at change, or we can get on with it and plan for our futures.
There are no obvious plans to change this. In fact, the taskforce supports this continuing, possibly only with a decrease in focus on non-clinical services.
To put this in perspective, the highest level of in-home-care funding available today amounts to around $59,000 of home care funding per year, which equates to 10 to 13 hours of care services in the home per week.
So if you see yourself needing to supplement this, just like you may have in your working life, by paying for carers, cleaners, gardeners or other support, you will need to budget for it, with care priced upward from $100-$120 per hour on weekdays.
This is a much longer article packed with helpful insights. Read the rest of this article, on The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane TImes and WA Today. It is not paywalled.
The real cost of care and how it might change with William Burkitt
Aged care and home care have become a bit of a political football. But here's why you should be paying attention to it. It’s about to impact your retirement plans more directly than ever.
The Federal Government's Taskforce into Aged Care has just handed down its final report, and there's A LOT of noise around it. Two of the biggest takeaways from this report are firstly, the suggestion that people should be planning for their aged care and home care needs when they plan for retirement. And secondly, that we should expect to pay for the standards of accommodation and services that we want in our later years, and only expect the government to support our care needs.
This will be a big shake up for the aged care system. Some might see them as positive, others will feel like they might lose out. And we won’t know which recommendations the government will adopt or how they’ll implement it until the budget leaks start.
So today I chat with William Burkitt the CEO and Founder of Care and Living with Mercer about how we should plan for our aged care, home care and options for ageing in place when we retire. His business provides families with support in navigating the aged care and homecare systems.
We start by diving into the fundamentals on care that we all need to know. Then we dig into the taskforce’s final report and what lies ahead.
Listen now
LISTEN HERE - LATEST EDITION (E16) - OMNY
or listen on APPLE PODCASTS
Interested in joining an upcoming Epic Retirement Education Program?
We’re currently taking expressions of interest for another 6 Week Epic Retirement Education Program in May/June. If you’re curious and want to make sure you get our best earlybird pricing, you can register your interest and find out more here. You can also download a brochure and we’ll send you the list of handpicked Live Q&A guests in coming weeks.
