That would certainly solve almost all of my problems
But how long for?
I'm thinking about when Dad was in a care home and then briefly in a nursing home. I'm trying to remember what it cost and can't but typically round here a care home is £30k - £40k a year. I think some nursing homes may come in at under £40k, but I wouldn't count on it.
Now factor in extra costs. E.g. I used to take him to his psychiatric appointments, but the nursing home rearranged one and took him to it. They charged a ridiculous amount for staff time that wouldn't have been needed anyway had they not done what they did.
And with a shortage of care home staff, firstly from the loss of many EU staff, then from the pandemic. We can argue until the cows come home about how reasonable it is for the government to say care home staff should be vaccinated, but personally, I'd like the choice of being cared for by vaccinated staff. This is on top of investors having, for a number of years, been buying up care homes and nursing homes and asset-stripping. That's already hitting them, but will get worse. I reckon care homes will be coming in at over £60/year soon.
If you get cared for at home, well we know how that can pan out.
Yes, this all sounds negative about the ridiculous costs of it all. Personally, I'm only getting through all this financial nastiness by clinging onto my belief that there is, mediated by the extra networking the internet can provide, a level of community mutual support growing that is fighting back.
Round here, more and more mutual support. That's our hope for making what I'll broadly call extra needs affordable.
I've ranted elsewhere about intergenerational divides and mentioned merged care homes & student halls of residence. Here's when I get personal. My parents were able to buy a house because we had lots of lodgers. Students. It meant one of my grandmothers slept in the living room and I slept in the dining room, which was also my mother's study. But it worked.
I've also been an au pair and would have been as happy looking after an elder as looking after children. Or looking after a disabled working-age person.
So when I read all these expletive gimmicky ways of handling people who need help that, bluntly, various people don't want to provide, whether that's politicians with their policies or frontline staff with variously exhaustion or bias or, sometimes, horribleness, I say if they're not going to provide the help we need, we can at least cling onto hope.
And who knows - maybe at some point we'll have care homes, residential units etc. that are run either by a different sort of government (local or regional) or by community groups.
As I say this, I have a lovely notion of a group of students arranging their digs, looking at renting a house and thinking "If we 'adopted' an oldie, would they chip in a bit more than we do in exchange for us helping them with stuff?" I keep using student + 'oldie' or child + 'oldie' illlustrations, but there are multiple alternatives that aren't about those demographics. What about working parents with children + people with certain sorts of disabilities? Depending on the age, savvy and independence of the child, the adult could actually be quite significantly physically disabled.
I nearly forgot - could you set me up a couple of 'companies' based in tax havens and put the bulk of the funds in their accounts, please? Oh, and to be on the safe side, could you give me £5million in mixed currencies?
