How LGBTQ Solo Agers Can Retire Successfully | Queer Money Ep. 438

Once you retire fabulously, of course you do. That's why it's key to diversify not just your investments, but also the options of where you retire. The optimized Portugal Golden Opportunities Fund helps you do both. With an investment from your IRA, you can secure not just investment diversification, but also a visa for residency and Portugal for you, your family, and your fabulous retirement life. Click the link in your podcast player for more info. Does the thought of retirement keep you up at night, not because of finances, but because you won't have children there to care for you and you might not have a partner spouse to be there for you. You're listening to queer money episode 438 and today we're talking about retirement planning for solo and child free ages per a recommendation in the queer money Facebook group. We're joined today by Dr Sarah Zepke Geber, author of essential retirement planning for solo ages. From her years of research and speaking on the topic Sarah shares ideas on housing solutions, both domestic and abroad, how to stay mentally and physically healthy as long as possible, and how to design a rewarding second, third and even fourth act. So remember to hang on to the end to find out how you may enter to win a free copy of Dr Geber's book. Let's get on with the show. You're listening to the queer money podcast personal finance with the rainbow twist. Quirmanee is dedicated to financial independence financial well-being, investing knowledge and the intersection of all things money as an LGBTQ person. Quirmanee is made possible by Capital One. Capital One believes that financial well-being includes your mental, physical, and financial health. Check out capital one dot com today. Thank you for joining us for another episode. Those of you who comment and share on social media or in the Facebook group about different topics on our social media feed, you might think that we're not paying attention. But a couple months ago in the Facebook group, there was a discussion about LGBTQ plus people finding villages around the country where we can retire. And somebody recommended Dr Sarah Zefgeber's book as an essential book for any solo or child freeager to read. So we had our virtual assistant track Dr Geber down and fortunately left she agreed to come on to our podcast. So welcome Dr Sarah Zefgeber to the queer money podcast. Thank you very much. So I'm happy to be here. Thank you. So can you help us set a baseline here? You've been in this industry for a while. You've been helping solo a jurors and child free a jurors for years. And you've written a very dense book about it. What's your definition of a soloager? I'm glad you started with that because it's a it's a confusing term and. And in fact, my own definition of it is kind of morphed over the last few years, but I now define solo a jurors as anyone who is aging alone or without family support. And you may be happily aging alone right now, especially if you're in your 50s or 60s or even 70s, but doesn't remain quite so happy when you need somebody there to help with care. So when you think about do you have family support, that's really the key issue. I'm married, my husband and I, but my husband and I don't have kids and we don't have family in the area. So we folks consider ourselves solo a jurors and we have both planned accordingly for that. If we don't know which one of us is going to be the soloager in the end. Right. Exactly. Well, then that's great information to have. I mean, you probably already know this is from your research seems you're well connected to the statistics, but according to the Williams Institute, only about 20% of LGBTQ plus folks have children. And while having children isn't a guarantee that you're going to have some sort of support system when you're older in retirement, it does increase the likelihood that you'll have that support and many LGBTQ folks, especially today, those who are in retirement 60s, 70s and 80s right now don't have the familial support of nephews and nieces and brothers and sisters to help them in their older age. So I think this is a very essential topic for probably the whole country since we know that individual households, those who are being managed by individuals in a household is increasing, but for LGBTQ plus people, especially. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's, you know, in the boomer generation, which are the people that I'm mostly speaking to now and to which I belong. I think that for the LGBTQ plus population, it wasn't nearly as common to adopt children. So far fewer of baby boomers, I suspect, have children. Then when you look at the Gen X and Gen Y and millennials. Now adoption is much more commonplace and I have a number of friends who have adopted and they're going to have that when they grow older as a support. They may not think so now, but my experience is that, you know, gay or straight wherever the kids came from, they rush in and help when the need is there. Absolutely. But you know, it is an interesting thing. We have seen over the decades that the size of households, even ones where there are parents and children is shrinking. Right. We're now below to the average number of children in a household is below two, which means that there must be a significant number where there aren't any at all. So the population of of couples or individuals who don't have children is on the increase. So it's a, this is an expanding topic and something I think that we in the personal finance space. Those of us in the LGBT personal finance space, especially is just not a topic that we seem to be giving much attention to and we probably need to start doing it a little bit more because as you bring out that just the size of the aging population is growing. So there's more people who would be interested in this. Absolutely. Yeah. We're just not replacing ourselves. Clicking. You know, essentially, that's it. And I was just meeting this morning that it's even more critical in Europe. They have even more one person households. So they're facing a crisis very similar to we are. It's not limited to the US, but it's certainly happening. Yeah. So let's see if we can find some solutions for folks. So from your expertise, what do you find is that are the most forgotten considerations for those who are solar ages and those who don't have children help them out in their retirement years. What I see primarily is people planning when they plan at all, these are people that are actually planning and that's a fairly small percentage. A lot of people would just like to live in what I consider a magical wonderland where they're going to spend their final day on the golf course, have a wonderful meal and then die in their sleep. And that, of course, is not what happens to most people. So the most forgotten thing, even if people are willing to plan for their death and do all the what's called pre-planning, they don't plan for their care. Most people, a huge percentage, or maybe 70% of us is the figure that we that I see all the time are going to need care for some period of time in our life. It might not be those last two months or two years leading up to when we finally leave this planet, but it might be and it's more likely to be at the end. So planning for care is the forgotten element in many cases. And do you find that that's just something that people forget is a technicality they don't think to address or is this the topic so scary that they don't want to broach it. I think it's the latter. I've been doing this now for about 12 years. I changed careers. I was an organizational consultant for many years. And then I switched and when I switched it over, I started talking about older age and planning and I could barely get anyone to sit down and listen. It's different today. People go sit down and listen. I don't have any friends left that won't talk to me about solo aging because if they won't talk to me about it, then they, you know, they're so uncomfortable. They go their way and my friends now are happy to talk about it, but if people avoid it tremendously. Absolutely. So I think come and think that I noticed throughout your book is is some up in a quote that you included from Betty Frieden who says aging is not lost youth, but a new stage of opportunity and strength. I think it's kind of what you're addressing. People oftentimes assuming aging is death, but there are there are lots of phases that happen before that. Can you elaborate on on that theme and and how people can look to that in an advantageous way as opposed to something that's a detraction. So, you know, the old pattern and the old script that we used to live by of people growing up, getting married, having a career that lasted for 40 years and then getting the gold watch and sailing off into the sunset. And honestly, most people didn't live past the age of 60 and died very soon after retirement. That is just out the window. People are living so much longer and they're enjoying lots of different stages. I think that your younger audience will relate to that probably better than the older audience because I don't think people today I don't think millennials ever think about having a career. or a little on a job that would last 40 years. They just go from one thing to the next as it suits them and as their interests fluctuate. And it's the same thing with later life. I mean, I'm probably a good example of someone who just totally changed careers later in life. My previous career was fun and rewarding while it lasted. And then a lot of changes started happening. I wasn't doing as much training and I was having to do coaching and I'm not very suited for coaching. So I just shifted and that's what people need to do. Just pivot. When the world pivots, we need to pivot and it's pivoted more and more often. I mean, I have loads of examples of friends of mine that have left careers and gone on to do something that was meaningful to them. Like work with dogs, I have one friend with a master's degree and is now working three quarters time at the Humane Society. I have a nurse friend who also is a dog lover and has ended up working for canine companions. Another friend who's a retired doctor who is now president of the board of our local food kitchen, soup kitchen or whatever you want to call it, food pantry. People just look around and gravitate to the things that interest them and it's a whole nother phase of life. Capital One strives to inspire a better financial path for everyone, including the LGBTQ+ community, through access to credit, tools to manage debt and product features. Digital products such as credit wise email are designed to take the stress out of money by helping you manage credit a key source of potential stress and stay on top of spending without worrying all the time. Sign up for credit wise for free today. - Absolutely. - I'm gonna throw something a little cheeky in here, but just the data that comes out of the villages and what we know what's going on with STDs, we know that life still is a lot of fun evidently when you get older, right? - So it's not just that we change careers, our sex lives can evolve and be fun and enjoyable for people in our community. It is interesting how many people we see in their boomer years who are coming out now. So life has a lot of advantages if you allow yourself to age and enjoy it, right? - Yeah, age as you are, who you are, and it is a great time to learn more about yourself to be more authentic to whether that means coming out or whatever it might mean, but embracing what's authentic about you and what your true interests are. It's a wonderful time in life to do that. - I think one of the worksheets that you included in your book, I think is that your values, clarification, worksheet. I think that was very thoughtful exercise for people to go through because we've talked a lot about on this podcast about how so often by the time we reach adulthood, we look back and we're like, how did I become the person I became? Who said I was gonna enjoy all this stuff? Who said I was gonna be this person? And so that kind of gives you the opportunity to say, what are my values? What does interest me? How do I want to adapt? I'm wondering if, basically what you said that with millennials being more adept at switching jobs or chasing, should I say chasing, but looking towards what's most interesting to them at that time, do you think that they might then be more adept at being able to make those kind of changes when they are in their 60s and 70s relative? Wait, what baby boomers are doing today? I suspect so. I don't have a crystal ball that, you know, we get used to a way of being in the world and that follows us. So what was, what you were able to do in earlier years becomes the same kind of thing you're able to do in later years and maybe a little different form. So I suspect that's probably true. - Yeah, so there you go, millennials, you got a bone. (laughing) Not always bashing millennials on this Gen X show. (laughing) Another theme, and I would kind of get the impression that it's a critical theme throughout your book is that for people to be able to live their best lives until the very end is creating a sense of community and support, not necessarily providing you physical or medical support, but just people to be around because there's a sense of isolation and loneliness are two of the biggest critical factors in poor health, both physical and mental. Can you elaborate on that a little bit, especially since a lot of LGBTQ people already to a certain degree feel isolated and that can maybe gravitate towards more of that as they age. - Sure. Big, I, to sum it up, I would say, find your tribe and burrow in. We are tribal people. We are social creatures and to isolate ourselves is really not natural to who we are. So it's kind of, it's sort of shocking to me that so many people are choosing to live alone and that's not to say that I don't have a lot of friends that do live alone happily, whether they never married or whether they're divorced, whether they've come out or whatever led them to live alone. I think that we have to re-evaluate that as we get older because loneliness and isolation really are very detrimental to our health and you can find so much research on that and yet a lot, the pandemic prompted a lot of research on isolation and loneliness and there already was research. So it's just not a, it's not kind of up for debate. It's not healthy to live alone as you get older and you can think about it. You live your life in your world of work to some extent and you're a lot of your friends, people around you. That's your social context when you are in early life, middle age and even toward the end of your career. But people, again, people find new careers or new social circles, but it has to be a deliberate activity for many people. And it should be. I think that we are the need to form community. The need to be part of a community and feel like we are a log in a wheel of some sort that people care about us and we care about them is so, so important. - Yeah, I thought it was very interesting in your book on page 110, you said, "Child-free individuals with a solid support system support network are mentally healthier than parents with a modest to weak social network." So even necessarily having kids doesn't guarantee that that level of hell, if you don't have a close tie to those children, whereas if you are a solo, a major or you don't have children, but you have a strong support network, you can still maintain that positive mental and physical health. Well, that was very interesting dichotomy. - Yeah, I think it's certainly not a, not a strict dividing line because a lot of people are very involved in their community and they don't have kids. And there are younger people in their community that will, they can literally contract with and talk about what they want as they get older. I always encourage people to use their nieces and nephews if they're close to them, if they're the kind of people that they would trust as sort of the first line of defense on that. But barring having nieces and nephews that you even want to engage like that, then you're gonna have to look to your community and to find the younger people within your community to help you with that. - Yeah, it's a very intentional exercise. There's an article published, I don't remember what publication it was, but it was during the pandemic that talked about this husband and wife couple who moved to a different city and found it very, very hard to make new friends, especially when you're in your midlife and other people have children because they've already got their lives, right? They've got their careers, they're working on their balancing their own personal and spousal relationships. Then if they have their children, well, that's like a whole life that takes your whole life, right, running them around to all different events. And so unless you can really sync up with people who are kind of at a point in their life where they actually interested in putting forth the effort to make friends, it's kind of hard to do so. And I did think, you know, you touched on it here, but you mentioned in your book the importance of George Valleance study and how he found that a critical component is not only necessarily trying to connect with those who are your own age, but trying to connect with those who are younger than you. Would you mind elaborating on why that's so critical? - Well, really, it just follows along with what we were talking about, what we've been talking about really, this intergenerational relationships are gonna be critical because as we get older, our contemporaries are getting old with us. And I love people that I encounter from time to time which tell me, oh yes, my friends and I all have this path that we're gonna help one another. And I said, oh, that sounds intriguing and how old are your friends? Oh, we're all about 75. What part of the conversation? this doesn't ring. It doesn't quite make sense to you. Right. You've got to make some connections with younger people. Yeah, absolutely. In the book, you elaborate, like, not only are they able to provide this type of support that your peers in their 70s can't necessarily provide, but they also can infuse a level of energy into your life and provide some new perspective that you might not necessarily be considered. That will keep you physically and mentally engaged more so than otherwise. Absolutely. Yeah. That's a kind of an added benefit. I think of the storylines that oftentimes are in books and movies and TV shows of the older person who lives on the block whose house is scary and nobody knows that. They're the creepy old person or the old witch or whatever. Right. And then you find out that there's just this humble older person living in this home that has all these amazing stories and experience and the community finds out about that and can celebrate and rejoice that. And I think that's the more isolated we get because of technology. I think that that just is to me seems like it's a it's a barrier that maybe this is even going to happen more as people age. We become more isolated. And we have to like you said, do it intentionally. We have to figure out intentionally. How do we get out of the house? How do we communicate with our neighbors and how do we be a part of our community? Yeah. The amount of online connecting these days. I find this a little scary. I hope it isn't going to go away. We're always going to have to live with it in some form. Most people I know have now had it. They've survived. It was kind of like a bad cold or sometimes not even a very bad cold. We've got to get out of our homes again. I just I've been beating that drum now for about a year. And in fact, when I get asked to speak, I will no longer do zoom presentations unless the group is on the other side of the country and they just and I really love what they're doing and they can't afford to fly me out. But for local groups, I won't do it anymore. They get that group together and I'll be happy to be your guest. They're being social. So what suggestions do you have for folks to not only connect with other people outside of their current friends group, but maybe specifically with those who might be younger than them? Any thoughts? Yeah. There's a number of ways of doing that. I mean, people find all kinds of interesting ways to build community. Probably the most traditional way is to join a church or a synagogue or some place of worship. Even if you don't believe in God, you know, just join for the social aspects. My husband and I moved to Santa Rosa, California, where we live now in 2015. We were both at that point in our mid 60s. And what I call kind of a starter kit of friends up here, but we didn't know a lot of people. And so we joined us in a God and started to get friendly with other people, both younger and older. And then that was kind of our own trade of doing it. We have also become friendly with some of our friends, kids, their adult children. And those are candidates too, by the way, on my estate documents, where I have listed people that I want to make decisions for me if I cannot. And essentially my healthcare directive on, I think the third line below my husband and some other person is the son of a woman that I have known all my life. You know, I know that his values or her values, I know him well enough that I that I know he would do right by me. So these people that you are going to trust and put your, put your life in their hands later, it's not too early. Just start thinking about who's going to do that for you. And by the way, you think you're, if you think, Oh, I can't put that on someone. You know what somebody who's 20 years younger is soon going to be 20 years older and they're going to need the same thing. So it's approaching mentally as a what goes around comes around kind of phenomena. My fantasy is I think about creating groups of people who believe their, who don't have kids or believe they're going to be really aging solo in from their 50s to their 80s or 90s and have them work almost in a kind of a circular looping pattern so that those in their 50s and 60s do sign up to help those who are older now and then expecting that the group will then be infused with people younger than them who will then be able to be in a position to take care of them. So that's a fantasy that I don't know is going to, it's fine to come true, but good. What you're describing is very reminiscent of what we do see in tribes, nomadic tribes, the tribes, you know, the tribes of Native Americans. It was a very common for even people living in Northern Canada and Alaska, the native people there. It's very common for those people to be taken care of a family member, intergenerational households, which is not so common down here in the, not here. Yeah. And you know, in the US and I think it's a little bit more common in Europe, but not as common as we know in some other tribal communities. Yeah, not Western Europe evidently, but the less developed the culture is, the more likely they are to still live close to one another, be interdependent, take care of their, of their older and their younger members kind of tribally. Now, I certainly saw that I haven't visited any tribes in Canada, but I certainly saw that in Africa when I visited and met some of them, aside people, absolutely. They don't think about things like this. They don't have to. This is natural. It's interesting turn of events. I have a lot of thoughts on it, but they don't apply to this episode. So let's get a little bit more holistic here. You talk about an early part of your book, page 61 and 62. You list the six elements of fulfilling life in later decades of your life. What are those that can you give us a little bit of a brief description of each? Sure. I wrote them down again for myself, so I didn't have to pace through my own book. Don't have a memorize. It's five years old this year. Past its fifth birthday in April. And I find more and more that I'm having a look back myself. But of course, I plan to do an update at some point. But anyway, the first one of those is financial security, which I know is what you guys are essentially all about. And I'm sure in talking to the two of you, I'm preaching to the choir, but maybe some of your listeners need to hear this again. Just make sure you're not living beyond your means, modify your lifestyle. If your rate of spending will render you penniless by the age of 85, or even 95. Yeah, that's just that's kind of the long in the short of it. The second one is commitment to good health and physical wellbeing. You know, I think that speaks for itself, eating right, working out, keeping your body at the right weight, making sure that you, even for very healthy people, there are hereditary things that happen to us, making sure that we see a medical professional regularly and tested for things like diabetes and whatnot. Some awareness, that's kind of a less obvious one. For me, it has to do with really understanding yourself, as well as you possibly can, understanding your preferences, things like, are you an extrovert or an introvert? Are you a morning person or a night owl? What is your communication style? And how does it affect others? Those are just just a few. Some people learn more about themselves through therapy, whether it's one-on-one talk therapy or in a group. It's a great way to learn about yourself is to listen to yourself, answer some questions that get thrown out in a group context like that. And what is the value of that exactly? The value of that seems pretty intrinsic. I mean, I, I certainly feel like I know more about myself today than I did 30 years ago, and I'm a happier person for it. So, yeah, I'd be hard pressed to answer that in any concrete way. It's just an internal thing that should feel good when you get to know yourself a little better, make some cross corrections from it. Absolutely. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So the fourth one is adaptability and flexibility. That is, you know, how well do you adapt to change? Change is all around us. And it's, it kind of feels like it's coming in a more rapid pace than it used to. On my website, I have an assessment adapted, it's kind of little quiz on adaptability and flexibility. And it's probably the most popular one on the website. I think it's the only one that is not in the book. The others listed on the website are in the book, but I think I made this one. I created this one after the book came out, but it's, it's very popular. [BLANK_AUDIO] The fifth one is having a strong social network. We've kind of pretty much covered that already. And then the fifth one is religion and spirituality. The common wisdom that people have written about for years is that as you approach your final days, that your own spirituality, your own relationship with God or whatever, you know, whatever you call your maybe your relationship with yourself gets more and more critical and more and more important. You've been getting to pull inward. So I am not the best person really to talk about about that. I'm sort of reporting the news because I'm not a particularly religious person myself. And it's different than when I said one way to create a community is to join a church or synagogue. I think most places of worship recognize that older adults have already figured out what their relationship is to their own spirituality, whether they believe in God or not or what kind of a God. What they're there for is is a social life. And smart people who run places of worship understand that and they create groups for older adults. They create groups for adults with different preferences, adults with different lifestyles. But again, this religion and spirituality one is a very personal thing, but it's something to think about. So those are the six. Yeah, I think that the last one's a timely one because we're talking a lot more about mindfulness and simply being aware of something that's just, you know, something that's larger than yourself, right? There's something more important than just me. I'm part of whether you want to call it universe or God or, you know, Yahweh, whatever. I don't know. There's something bigger than myself that that can provide some more value to my life and that of others, right? Yeah, it's out of an energy. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think it's more more common that we're we're contemporary of a topic for people these days, maybe since COVID. Yeah. And I think that as you list these out here, it really does strike a chord with me that that a lot of times when we see younger folks who are very involved with consumerism and their careers and they're very aggressive with their their lifestyle. Oftentimes we see these are the kinds of things that kind of fault the wayside, right? People are not engaged with doing what's right for their body and their mind. They're not engaged in some sort of spiritual practice. They are maybe they have a friend's group, but it's not a strong friend's group. It's more of a party friend's group, right? But as we age, we're probably not going to be as involved in those kinds of activities we do need to definitely migrate to what is really the importance of who we are as human beings. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And sometimes those party groups more often become like change and become a more a deeper group, something people that get below the surface concerns. And sometimes they people spin off and other people come in. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that list. Yeah. The reason I like that list is because I very often I think especially as we age, we get very myopic in the things that we focus on. And I don't I think we oftentimes forget maybe even not necessarily when we're older, because you know, as you said, sometimes we're so focused on our career and acquisition that we other things fall on the wayside. But we are, you know, whole creatures, right? There's a whole lot to us as opposed to rather than just trying to acquire money or trying to acquire friends or trying to acquire status. We have sort of this 360 experience that we need to sort of address. And if we don't sometimes that can cause some sort of problems down the road. If you don't address all the areas adequately, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. To speaking of finance, we were not going to dive too much into it because I know you're not a financial advisor or a planner certified anyway. But I did you did have to dedicate a couple chapters to money because it's a very important topic to help get through retirement. That said, what do you find from your your clients and people that you've worked with and interviewed to be some of the biggest challenges for solo-agers and child-free-agers that those of us who are younger can maybe start to address at a more amenable age. So this is one area where I don't find any differences between solo-agers and people who have family and who have the support of grown kids or other family members. The interesting thing that I find when I talk to people is they're different approaches. And our approach to saving, to spending, to investing, often to all of the time comes from what we grew up with. The messages that we got those money messages that we got early in life is money, a scarce commodity, is money a readily available commodity. Did your family have to scrimp and save when you were young or did they was there plenty of money and mom or dad didn't ever lose their job or maybe they did and then money got really tight. And so those things imprint themselves on our psyche very early in life. I find it one of the most fascinating things about money is the psychological connection to it. So in that one I'm going to have to beg off and say nothing special for solo-agers here. That's I think that's very interesting that you say that. I just assume there were going to be all sorts of differences in every other topic that we talked about relative to those with children and who are coupled and vice versa. But it's interesting that when it comes to finances, like the challenges are just all the same for everybody. Regardless of your self-orientation, your relationship status. Absolutely. I think so. And of course, you know, I talk, there's a lot of talk these these days about the extent of great divorce. And I expect that applies also to the LGBTQ+ community. There's also great divorce. And when you talk about people who have been building a nested for 20, 30, 40, 50 years and then all of a sudden it's halved. That's a challenge. Right. And so that's a consideration that it certainly isn't limited to solo-agers. I mean, solo-agers, to some extent, if we're talking about people who are not partnered, they've been building their whole lives. Hopefully they've been building. And nothing changes. But that's a different dynamic. And that can happen to solo-agers too, if we're talking about solo-agers, maybe like my husband and me who just simply don't have kids. So, but it doesn't change a lot. Have you experienced or talked with anybody? I think maybe one dynamic that might be different is, how you work with anybody who's aging, have children and seem to be sacrificing their retirement future to take care of their children. And so the retirement money, money that should be for their retirement, is being used to fund the daily lifestyle of their children. Is that maybe one dynamic that you see that's different? Well, not with solo-agers. It's not a dynamic with solo-agers, but I read about that. And I just you know, not having kids. Like, you did what? You know, I don't have to put my dog through college. I don't have to buy my dog a house. But yeah, I see that in some of my friends. They're just, you know, it's a constant opening the checkbook colloquially speaking and and doling out cash for their kids' needs. But yeah, it's kind of a different topic. Yeah. Yeah. And on the flip side, John, you may have recently, because it's been a topic we've been discussing online with folks. This whole idea that on average, 50% of parents who have adult children are helping to pay for some aspect of their kids' daily lives. And on average, our doling out $1,442 a month to these kids, which is a significant amount of money. But then we are kind of wondering this kind of reciprocal, I'm taking care of you today. You need to take care of me tomorrow. And I think that's one of the big concerns that a lot of solo-agers have is we didn't invest in or we're not investing in our children. And so who is going to invest in us? And we've touched on this already at the outset. I guess it is important. Do we do we then go out and find somebody to start investing in? Very honestly, I paid for my niece's college education. My brother couldn't be the provider that I had hoped he would be and what not they really kind of live hand to mouth. And I knew that my nieces were going to need some help. So I did that. And yes, I will be counting on my nieces to help me. So yeah, it's a good point. Yeah, every time we help our nieces or David steps on and they always say thank you, we say just remember we need going to need somebody to care of us. I do the same thing. You're going to come visit me. - I am. - To earth and times a year, we have to remind them that we're gonna be old someday. - You're in the world for now. We're getting to that age, right? I don't wanna speak ill will of my grandmother, but I do remember my grandmother at times would call and would say, I'm writing him out of the will. I'm taking him out of the will. And oftentimes she was speaking about one of my uncles. But we're kind of now getting to the point where we're tuned to writing that with our nieces and my steps on. (laughing) - So we didn't know you're joking. - Yeah, yeah. Well, there's always a little bit of truth in every joke, right? (laughing) So I'd like to tackle the reason that why you came up in our private Facebook group, and that is various ways that we can housing situations, various ways that we can find either if we're a solo agent especially when we join a village, a community, there are intention, intention, focus communities. I'd like to touch a little bit on that. So could you share some of those, especially co-housing, home sharing, and cultural special communities that might be appealing to our demographic of folks, especially as they age? - Sure. Well, let me start with shared housing. And that is happily becoming more common. It partially is a reaction to the difficulty of living in today's very expensive world. Some people are pairing up, or maybe two or three people to a household, one person has a large home that they are rambling around in and don't need the bedrooms anymore. They can easily vent them out to either a contemporary or maybe a younger person. So it can be a way of building some intergenerational contacts. There are now some good websites that help pair people up for that and match people for that. That the most popular one is called Silver Nest. And they're operating, they're totally virtual, but they operate in every geographic area, every major geographic area for sure. And I know they thought, "I probably haven't looked at what they're doing now for several years, but I'm sure they're in most major and even minor markets now for people to find like-minded people to live with." We're talking about all our golden girls. I know that for those of you who didn't grow up with the golden girls, but they have caught some reruns from time to time. It's just a group of women that live together in Miami or somewhere in Florida. They all shared a lovely home. And two of them were a mother and daughter combo and the other two were just renting rooms there in the home, but they all, they had their moments, they thought, they complained, they argued, but they also loved one another and they helped one another and were each other's confinance. So it was what you call a dromity. And it's set of great, I'm so glad that show was on and she has set a great example. It painted a great picture for what co-living or having homemates can be. Some people absolutely shudder and back away at the thought. And I think that's, I'm sorry about that. I think that's a shame because again, isolation and loneliness simply lead to early death literally. I mean, you can find a lot of young studies that bear that out. Okay, so I'll get off my soapbox about community again. - That's okay, we can talk about Golden Girls. - Yeah, all that. - We've learned a lot since the '06 Tynis Thru. - Oh, good. - Oh, good. I am a huge fan of co-housing. My husband and I almost moved into a co-housing community in Silicon Valley that it was being built and we were rejoined and we had our unit all picked out and then it came down to, we adopted a dog that we didn't realize at the time was gonna be so completely unsuited for living in a condominium style home. For a lot of reasons that I won't go into, but we finally very reluctantly had to back out. We're still great friends with almost all the people that lived there, although they've had some turnover because it is elder co-housing in this case and elder co-housing lasts as long as people live. So they have lost a few members and the units have turned over. Most co-housing is intergenerational, which is a wonderful way to make intergenerational contacts. And by the way, I don't wanna forget to mention that there is a new community, new co-housing community, and this falls into the category of cultural specialty. That is called Village Heart Community. It's a Durham North Carolina and it's LGBTQ-focused. - That was the one that was on social media. - First one, yeah. - That's the first one that I know of, you know, LGBTQ and supporters and friends. But there are also other intentional communities that you alluded to. And most of those intentional communities are more along the lines of the old communes. And people really pitch in together and devote their whole lives to maybe it's a sustainable farm, maybe it's a religious practice. There are a number of communities like that still operating in this country. And one of them interestingly enough in the Northeast and the Southeast. I don't know about a lot of, and not too many in California, but again, I don't know a lot of about that. So there is, for anybody who's interested in home sharing, the home sharing guru in this country is a woman by the name of Anna Marie Plouhaar, PLU-HAR. And she has written a book on how to set up a co-living situation. So she's a good resource. - Nice. - It's also a great time for me to mention that the last year, much of my energies were devoted to creating the current issue of the American society on aging's generations journal. It's a journal that comes out quarterly a couple of years ago. They did away with the print version, which had been going for 40 something years. And now it's all online. But I was asked to be the guest editor for the summer edition because it is entirely on solo aging. So if you want a resource that is, has 16 articles all on some aspect of solo aging, it's just a go-to resource. - Nice. - Yeah, just came out a week and a half ago. I'm thrilled about it. We had some little glitches to work out about paywalls and things, but I think I got those removed. The thing that I didn't mention in terms of living choices are there are expensive ones for those of your listeners who have money and want to live in a retirement community. The life plan communities can be fabulous places for people. They're changing quickly. They're no longer the like docked cruise ships that people used to call them 10 years ago. They really get it that this generation of older adults wants meaning and purpose in their lives. If they've had a garden all their lives, they don't want to dig in in the dirt. And so they're creating everything from raised beds to dog parks and opportunities for people to volunteer their time nearby shelters. And I get together with younger people and do some mentoring. It's all kinds of, they like to call it opportunities now rather than programming. They're just changing. And even if you're, if you had a parent or a grandparent that lived in one of these communities, this is as they say, not your grandmother's retirement community. So there's one in my town actually that was designed, built and marketed to the LGBTQ community. And I've known a number of people, I've interviewed a number of people there before I wrote the book. And I go over there a lot for meetings and things. It's called Fountain Grove Lodge. And at this point, I think there are 70% gay or lesbian and 30% straight supporters. - Well, yeah. - Yeah. - Nice. So co-housing, is that, would that like the villages fall under that where there's a community of people who live in their own houses? No. - No, the villages are the entirely different phenomenon. Villages happen in different communities, different municipalities. It was started in Boston in Beacon Hill, that area of Boston. And people just simply knew that they were, you know, there were a lot of people who were kind of friendly with one another, they were all growing old together and they wanted to combine their resources to have some support. And so they created the Beacon Hill village and most villages require you to pay something like anything from 500 to 2000 a year for the privilege of having a concierge that you call up and say, "I need a vetted rougher or I need someone to clean my gutters or I need someone to walk my dog. I'm gonna go have knee surgery and I'll be down for a month." A lot of these are, are done free by volunteers and most of the villages run on a table of volunteers for rides and dog walks and all kinds of things. There's probably 300 or 400 of them around the country now. Now co-housing is an intentional community. When you join a co-housing community, by the way, a village can be several hundred households. Depending. A co-housing community was designed and built for a group of people that want to make their lives together. Now, everyone in the community has bought their unit. It's very much to the outside world. It looks very much like a condominium complex or a collection of little cottages. But everyone owns their own unit. Everyone has their own kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms. It just looks like a home. But it's usually smaller than a home because in the common areas, you have a large dining hall, meeting rooms, a workout studio, a crafts room, a woodworking, and whatever the community wants to build into what they're developing. So very different than a village. And it's usually about 30, 30 units. Okay, so much smaller scale, but more intentional. In terms of the type of lifestyle that you want to create for yourself in the few people that you'll be living with or around. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And most most co-housing communities have communal meals two or three times a week rotating people who want to volunteer to cook or volunteer to clean up. It's just, you know, they participate almost every co-housing community I've ever seen has a community garden. They grow as much of their own food as they can, depending on, you know, where they're located. But they just get involved in projects together and they become in many cases, each other's best friends. Nice. Yeah, I kind of that for being it possibly also feel like that's kind of appealing. Yeah. And I think that we've on our Defre Guys website, we do have that have an article that lists 22 gay retirement communities. And I kind of when we talk about gay retirement communities, I think we lump a number of these different types together. And I know that there are some co-housing. Yeah, complexes on that list. And so a lot of times when we have the retirement conversation, people will oftentimes say specifically for our LGBTQ audience is that anywhere that's typically supportive and accepting of LGBTQ plus people is also very expensive. And unless you have the financial means to gravitate to those places, such as California, then it's kind of hard to find that kind this kind of sort of ideal retirement living situation. So we oftentimes are asked about what the conditions are about living abroad. So with that, can you share you did a whole chapter on living abroad? Can you share the pros and cons of living abroad for a general population? Yeah, you know, again, everything keeps changing. Let me start by saying, if you can't afford as far as you can tell, you can't afford to retire in in the United States. I always start by saying to people, you know, there's life outside of California, or there's life outside in New York, or whatever expense in locale, you have. What do New Yorkers tell you about that? Because every time I talk to New Yorker, they're always like, when are you going to come visit us? Like there's a whole other world out there. Yeah, you could visit us. There's life beyond your vertical world. Yeah, you know, I did a one of my rare Zoom presentations for a group of New Yorkers the other day, over 100, and all soloagers are at least interested in what I had to say about solo aging. And it's just so hard to get people in New York to think about any other way of living. And I talked about, I mean, I gave some example of what I did during the pandemic and how we got together with our neighbors and that kind of thing. This woman says to me, but during the Q&A period, just, you know, well, you got together with people in your cul-de-sac. Well, we don't have a cul-de-sac. And I said, correct me if I'm wrong. But isn't your nearest neighbor right across the hall? No, I don't think you even have to bridge a cul-de-sac. My friends lost on anyway, I won't get. Sorry, David, sorry, John. It's okay, it's okay. I just tried to do. So, okay, so we're talking about living in front of New York, which does seem like a foreign country sometimes. I usually tell people do look outside the confines of the United States. And some people will, some people won't. There are huge expatriate communities in Mexico, in Central America. Those are the two places that come to mind the quickest to me. They, depending on what you read and what you believe, they have good medical systems. I still like to believe that they do. A lot of their doctors were trained in the US. And very honestly, the medical system here is not so hot anymore. So, you know, it's a whole different system that you have to get used to if you're not good with change. If you don't score very high on the adaptability and flexibility index, you're probably not a good candidate for retiring abroad. It's boy, there are some things that are going to be really different. But it is cheaper. You can live on social security. I don't care what you're getting in the way of social security. If you're getting anything at all, you can find a way to live on it. Thailand is another place that's very popular now with expats from Canada and the US. Other places in Asia as well. Get known. Sometimes the Philippines. And again, the case at Thailand, their medical system is just first rate. And being part of that doesn't take a lot. So, yeah, now there are places in Europe. I understand very recently, because a friend of mine got caught up in it. If you had an accident or got sick in Europe while you were traveling, they just take care of you. You know, and you didn't owe many money. They just take care of you. Put you in a hospital or whatever it takes. And, you know, maybe you pay 10 or 20 bucks on your way out. If it only that's not the case anymore, because their medical systems were so stressed during COVID that they just can't afford to treat every, you know, every visitor that decides they want to travel through Spain on a motorcycle. So, but Portugal is still a popular place to retire. Spain, France. I just, if it were me, I think I'd head south. It's a little closer to the mainland US. You know, most people do have some family or friends that they want to stay in communication with. However, I don't want to leave that topic without saying that the best information I've ever found on living abroad is called is a publication and an organization called International Living, you know, put it into a search engine or international living.com, I think is there URL. Excellent. It's just it's so chock full of good information. It's wonderful. Yeah, absolutely. I want to take a look at that ourselves because we're at that age or we're trying to figure out where we want to be in 10 years. Yeah, you're in a good age to do it because when you move midlife, it's a lot easier than when you try and move in your 65 or 70s. So yeah, no doubt, no doubt. Another topic I want to discuss before we wrap things up because this has been on our mind ever pretty much ever since we started the podcast, it was brought to our attention. And you mentioned it in your book is the need for long term care insurance. And I think you kind of were alluding to that very early on in the episode, which mine covering the need and what long term care insurance is and the need that it addresses. And also that Medicaid, how Medicaid does not cover long term care insurance. Yeah, and not an expert on Medicaid, but on Medicare. Most people are under the very mistaken notion that if they fall and break a hip, that Medicare is going to take care of them. Well, Medicare is going to cover repairing that hip, but it's not going to cover the care you need to recover from that injury. In other words, all of what's known as the activities of daily living, everything from bathing, dressing, transferring from the bed to a wheelchair or the bed to a toilet, all the functions that go on with toileting, it doesn't cover that. Nothing covers that except for long term care insurance or private pay. So long term care insurance is a tricky subject and because it's an ever changing thing. I've had it for almost 20 years now. God knows how much money I've paid into it, but I have. And it's going to pay for all of those kinds of things for me when I need them. I could get hit by a bus or have a hard attack and I will never need it. And I pay thousands of dollars into it for, you know, for nothing, but that's insure. I mean, that's what insurance is, right? Your house may never burn down either, but you pay that every year. Right. So long term care insurance used to be a good standalone product. No, I think it is mostly bundled with a life insurance plan. I think that's what you'll find if you try and seek it out. The best thing to do if you're, if you are interested in it, and obviously, I mean, I'm a fan because I have it. And yes, some of the companies that enrolled people have gone under. So, but the big ones have not, and they're still hanging in there. The problem that they had was that people started living longer, and they were spending a lot more than their actuaries told them they were going to have to spend. So, the actuarial data on long-term care insurance was just bogus. It just, it made it, not by anybody's fault. It's just that we judged how long people are going to live and how much care they'd need by a previous generation. And this generation is just living a long time. Now, medical sciences come a long way, so we're keeping people alive with conditions that used to kill us. So, all this contributed to long-term care insurance companies being on very, very thin ice. And if you look at their Moody's rating or Spend it in Pores, whatever those ratings are, they're not high. You know, they've got like a C+ rating, because they're balance sheet, and they're always trying to get people like me who have these really excellent policies to downgrade our policies, which will put them in a position of less liability. Right. So, they're working it out, but slowly. See an independent broker who deals with long-term care insurance. Not somebody who represents a particular company, but someone who can write a policy for you in a number of different companies, and find out what they have to offer and what you can afford. It's not for everyone. Not everybody can afford it. And when you get it up into the higher income ranges, not everybody needs it. Some people can simply self-insure, but we're talking a lot of money. So, yeah. So, that's all I really can say about it at this point. Perfect. Well, I think we've covered quite the gamut on this episode. So, thank you very much for all that wealth of information. And we highly recommend to our audience that they get a copy of your book. We'll talk about it at the end of the outro here. How our audience can get it entered to win a free copy of your book. But for those of us who don't win the contest, where can they find a copy? They think you buy. Well, it's the easiest thing. Obviously, you can get it on Amazon. But if you don't want to support Amazon, your local bookstore can order it very easily. You can get it from other online booksellers. It's available as an e-book. It's available on Audible. So, there are a lot of ways that you can acquire it. Awesome. And then, where and how can our audience connect with you otherwise when your website, social media, or whatever? Yeah, my website is probably my website will linked in. Again, my name, SarahZefGever.com will lead to my website. My company name, Life Encore, will also lead to my website. Same place, two different ways of getting there. But I have a pretty big presence on LinkedIn too, so you can find me there. Nice. Very much appreciate all that. We will definitely connect with you and provide all those links to everything in our show notes for those who weren't able to write as fast as they would like. Thank you very much for coming on the show today. We appreciate it. It was a great information. You're quite welcome, and it was a lot of fun. Thank you. Make sure to check out more ways that Capital One can help you achieve financial well-being at capitalone.com. That's capitalone.com. Thank you, Dr. Geber, for an amazing and comprehensive interview. Thank you, our listeners and viewers, for joining us for another episode. Here's your Quirmini takeaway from this one. Get a copy of Dr. Geber's book, Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agres. For a chance to win a free copy, subscribe to the Quirmini podcast email list at Quirminipodcast.com/subscribe. Then join us this Thursday when we talk about the most affordable LGBTQ+ friendly city in the state of Michigan. And next Tuesday when we talk about sustainable value-based investing. Thanks and have a great week. Feeling box-in by borders and politics? Break free with the Optimized Portugal Golden Opportunities Fund, diversify your portfolio, and your future while unlocking Portugal's Golden Visa. 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