Consequences

I don’t usually blog about sports, but I can’t resist on this one.

Last week Richard Seymour was traded from arguably the best franchise in all of professional sports to, perhaps, the worst.

Neither Richard, nor the team who traded him, the New England Patriots wanted this to happen. I’m going to speculate that the team went out of its way to get a long term deal signed with the player before the season started, and that the deal they were offering was lower in terms of pure dollars than Richard and his agent believed that they could get elsewhere.

There’s one more wrinkle here, just in case you aren’t familiar with the story. Twice before, Richard refused to report to work because he believed he deserved a raise. He did this in spite of the fact that he was under contract to do so. Both times the Patriot’s acquiesced so that Richard would end his holdout.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me three times, shame on me.

Rather than going into the final year of the contract, and letting Richard walk away at the end of year with no compensation, the Patriot’s opted to trade Richard for a first round draft pick. He was quoted as saying he was “Blindsided” by the trade.

Really?

There are more things to consider when you enter into a salary negotiation than salary. One thing to keep in mind is where the job is located. The other is the team, or company, that you’re going to work for. You also should consider your friendships and relationships with your present team mates or co-workers. All of these things have value, and are worth trading for a lower salary, especially in the NFL. Richard Seymour is already going to the Hall of Fame. He’s already made gobs of money. He could have made a deal that factored the benefits of staying put, and would have been at home with his wife and kids celebrating a victory last night instead of sleeping in a hotel room 3,000 miles away from them after enduring what will in all likelihood be the first of many losses this season.

As far as respect goes, the Patriots have Richard Seymour statues all over their newly built hall of Fame. They have also paid the man millions and millions of dollars. No one in their right mind can question their respect for Richard Seymour. If they had chosen out of fear or sentimentality to overpay for his services, there would have been consequences to the team that were unacceptable to the organization.

There are consequences to the decisions we make. In economics, these are sometimes referred to as opportunity costs, or unintended consequences. The opportunity cost of being the highest paid athlete at your position might be that you get to make that claim on a losing team.

If you don’t want to honor your contract, and you want to be the highest paid person at your position, that’s your prerogative. You just might find yourself blindsided into being traded to the worst team in Football a week before school starts.

Dreams of a middle aged man

This is a post about dreams… Not in the aspirational sense of the word, but the actual dreams that you have at night when you’ve drifted off, and you’re snoring away.

When I was a child, I dreamt that I could fly.

As a young adult, my dreams were filled with what I can most politely characterize as successful romantic conquests.

Now that I have entered middle age, I’d like to share the dream that I had last night, which I think is a good example of a middle aged man’s dreams. Last night I dreamed that I was able to find the squeegee that I’ve been looking for. It was at WalMart, and it only cost $6. I couldn’t have been more happy or satisfied.

You’re beginning to lose you’re grip on the turkey when even your best dreams are mediocre.

Half Full

Just about a year and a half ago, my family’s world got turned upside down when my daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes just a week after her eighth birthday. There’s no warm up for the treatment regimen for diabetes. You need to start pricking your finger 8 to 10 times a day to test your blood sugar, and injecting insulin with every meal. It’s a grind. Two or more of those finger sticks happen in the middle of the night. There is no day off, and it’s a rare day that my daughter doesn’t shed a tear because she has diabetes.

As a dad, it’s enough to make you feel sorry for yourself. I have to admit that in the last year and a half I’ve indulged in too much self pity.

Last night I read a story that changed my world view from half empty to half full. It was a heart breaking story of a girl whose diabetes went undiagnosed until it was too late. She died of acute diabetic ketoacidosis in the emergency room with a blood glucose reading in the 500’s.

We were very lucky. My daughter’s diabetes was diagnosed during her annual physical. She never got sick. Most kids get very sick before the underlying diagnosis is identified. My wife reminded me that just days after her diagnosis was made, we were in the sticks of New Hampshire skiing. If we hadn’t caught this in the physical, it is highly likely that she would have gotten sick on that trip.

As painful and difficult as this diagnosis is, I am just so happy that my daughter can still have a completely full, productive, and happy life.

We all have our crosses to bear. Viewing your glass as half full will help you to hold onto the turkey.

What's worse than a prison sentence?

I found this story linked on my daily email from Senior Housing News.

A serial drunk driving 48 year old woman has been ordered to serve her five year sentence in a Nursing Home.

Talk about bad PR for the nursing home industry.

This reminds me of a joke my Dad used to tell about the location of his employer’s world headquarters.

Guy #1. Hey, I just won first prize in a contest…. a one week trip to Philadelphia.

Guy #2 What was second prize?

Guy #1 A two week trip to Philadelphia.

One sure way to drop the turkey is failing to properly manage our addictions.

What really counts?

What I have found particularly frustrating about this whole “what to do about healthcare” imbroglio is not so much the answers that the politicians are coming up with. Those actually make sense when you consider the questions they’re asking. What has me talking back to the radio and the TV set like a crazy person isn’t their answers, it’s their total failure to ask the right question.

For what it’s worth, here’s what I think the right question is. The personal computer and the MRI machine were invented around the same time. WHY does a Personal Computer cost so little and work so well that it has become completely ubiquitous, and the MRI remains the same rare and expensive commodity it was 30 years ago? Answer that question, and you can solve the health care “crisis” pretty darn quickly and without a lot of pain.

But, I digress. The title of this post is “what really counts.”

In order to lead the best life possible, we should spend more time asking questions than looking to offer answers.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a bold assertion. The most important of all the questions you could ask is this: “What really counts?”

Lately I’ve found that question to be pretty helpful in planning my day and beyond. When I fail to ask it, I usually wind up having a bad day.

Asking what really counts is a good way to keep your turkey off the floor.

We’re all going to die

I’m sorry if you’re reading it hear for the first time, but, yes, it’s true. We’re all going to die.

Of all the thousands of interactions I had with older folks when I worked in the retirement community business, one that sticks out in my mind was between me and a lady who prefaced a question thusly: Now, if I should die, God forbid….

Now, I would never win a prize for being able to keep my attention focused for a long period of time, but I can’t remember what her question was now, and I probably didn’t hear it then.

If I should die, God forbid???? For an easily distracted person like me, that was a real conversation stopper.

Should I have been the one to break the news to her? If???? And, God forbid??? Most rational healthy people don’t spend a lot of time obsessing about their own deaths, but like it or not, it’s coming for all of us.

Just to put this into context, this wasn't a teenager about to embark on rock climbing trip, or a middle aged man about to go in for a heart surgery... This was a woman in her 80's moving to a retirement community.

It seems to me that once we deal with some of the taboos that exist around death than enable us to talk about it without a lot of “God forbid” prefacing, the better.

Denial of our own mortality is not a healthy thing. It leads to bad decision making, unnecessary hurt feelings, and a lot of pointless worry.

Remembering and acknowledging our mortality is a good thing. It reminds us to treat our friends and family better. It gets us making plans that will make it easier for the people who matter most to us. It brings us closer to God or whatever higher power we’re connected to.

Being okay with our mortality helps keep turkeys from hitting the deck.

No such thing as a free lunch

I’m enjoying the mini-revolt being aimed at the AARP by a small percentage of its membership. I read this week that the group has shed 60,000 members this month in protest of the group’s support of the so-called “health insurance reform” bills that are wending their way through Congress.

Without getting political, I just want to state what I have found to be a great truth in life which is that there really is no such thing as a free lunch.

For years, middle class folks who maintain all different kinds of insurance policies haven’t insured against long term care. The most rational reason for not making that purchase is that two federal programs, Medicare and Medicaid, will provide that kind of care for free.

Really….Don’t we all know that someone is paying for this care, and it’s the generation that follows the recipients of this care that picks up the tab? Not so free after all…

The other thing about “free” care of this nature is that in order to qualify on a long term basis, you need to be on Medicaid, the same program that pays for the care of unwed mothers, orphans, and the poor. In a more candid time, we called that welfare. So, there is a social cost to this “free” care.

Finally, there are the practical limitations. Medicaid pays for semi-private accommodations. Before you decide not to purchase private long term care insurance, you might want to pay a visit to a Medicaid nursing home and see just what kind of care “free care” provides.

Even the best of us can drop the turkey. What’s your contingency plan if you do?

Ageism. It's not funny.

Did you ever wonder why it is so socially acceptable to poke fun at older people?

I have, and I have a theory.

We feel okay about teasing old people because it’s rare for even the oldest of the oldest of us to think of ourselves as old. When someone makes a crack about the elderly, even the elderly chuckle because they think we’re talking about someone else.

Still, even though you don’t hear a lot of people complaining about ageism, it’s out there, and I don’t like it one bit.

When you hear it, speak up and challenge the person spewing it. We’re all getting older, and like it or not, if it’s left unchecked, someday that venom will be directed at us.

Hang on or let go?

When I logged onto my brokerage account website this morning, there was an article that I had to read. It was written by Peter Keating from SmartMoney, and entitled, “Hanging on at home.”

It’s a very well written piece, and talks about the steps one ought to consider taking in order to stay put in a house as opposed to moving to a new space as one ages.

What I found most interesting was that at the end, the author concedes that sometimes, the house just isn’t going to be a good fit. For example, since it makes a lot of sense to avoid stairs, a two story house may simply not be worth keeping as we age.

A shortcoming of the article for me was the author’s failure to talk about the other big and largely unacknowledged peril of the house: social isolation, a topic I seem to get back to all the time.

The title says it all: Hanging on. When you think about it, that’s what the effort to stay in the house is, an exercise in hanging on. Think of what this image conjures up… For me, it’s the rock climber holding on for dear life to avoid falling to a sudden and painful death.

Rather than advocating for hanging on, I think that retirement brings about great opportunities for letting go. Not letting go to crash on the rocks below, but a careful, thoughtful, and planned letting go that lets you come to a soft landing in a place where you’re biggest concern isn’t holding on for dear life, but less existential concerns, like who to enjoy dinner with, or what charity you’d like to volunteer to support.

The irony is that we hang on because we value our independence, and it's that hanging on the poses the greatest threat to our independence. It's the letting go that sets us free.

It’s hard to keep both hands on that turkey platter if you're already using them to hang on for dear life.

Long Term Care Insurance… Inspiration from a modern day Don Quixote

When I worked in the retirement community business, I became aware of a fellow by the name of Steve Moses who founded an entity with the highly forgettable name of “The Center for Long Term Care Reform, Inc.” He showed up at our community one day with an RV that he was driving across the country trying to get his message out about the need for reforming how we pay for long term care in the United Sates. He’s a wonderful speaker with a wonderful message that absolutely no one is paying attention to. If the world were fair, he would have been on 60 Minutes last Sunday, and not Michael Vick.


Here’s my paraphrase of Steve’s message. We buy insurance for all kinds of things in this country. One thing that we ought to be buying insurance for is our long term care needs. Like most things we buy insurance for, like premature death or severe car crashes, there is very low risk that the thing we’re insuring against will happen to us, but a very high cost if it does. In the case of long term care, less than 10% of us will ever need it long enough to ruin us financially. However, if you do need it, ruin you it can and rather rapidly unless you can pay $10,000 a month without dipping into your savings.


This sounds like a good formula for entrepreneurially minded insurance company to make a lot of money. However, the few who have tried are not doing very well at all. They’ve done a bad job on the actuarial side (they underestimated how much they would actually have to pay out), and on the sales side. Turns out, this isn’t such an easy sale after all.


Why not? As Steve puts it on a recent blog post, “LTC insurers struggle to sell a product profitably that the government has given away (through Medicaid and Medicare) for forty-four years.”


The purpose of my blog is to prevent the crisis. If you are one of the many of us who has a hard time justifying paying for insurance that “the government” is already providing for free, I don’t blame you one bit. In all honesty, I don’t have one of those private policies either. However, my belief is that the handwriting is on the wall here, and the days of middle class and even wealthy people rearranging their assets to qualify for free care are numbered. Eventually common sense and an impending financial tipping point are going to prevail, and this entitlement will end or be greatly curtailed.


There’s a silver lining to this. Once the third party payer is out of the picture, I predict that the cost of getting long term care will go down, and the quality will go up as people start making these purchases on their own. More importantly, reforming this system will also be extremely good for our states which are already drowning in their long term care Medicaid obligations.


In the mean time, talk to a good financial planner, and consider buying private long term care insurance. Its time is coming soon, and the younger you are when you buy, the cheaper the premium will be, and the more control you will have about how and where you live should you ever require long term care.

The trend of living longer continues world wide.... Take this quiz!

The Wall Street Journal reported today on the US Census Report on Global Aging.

Click here to read the post, and take the quiz.

Interesting stuff, and no big surprises here.

You better shop around.... true life assisted living horror stories

I found this article on the Wall Street Journal website that I thought was well worth sharing. It’s an oldie but a goodie (published back in 2001.)

It talks about assisted living nightmare stories.

Here’s my take on the industry, which hasn’t changed much since the article was written. Most people move into assisted living for one reason: It is a more affordable and appealing alternative to a nursing home. That is decidedly not what the industry was set up to do. Assisted living communities were intended to be safe alternatives to toughing it out at home for folks who needed a little extra help with meal preparation, housekeeping, and, for some, remembering to take their medication.

Great idea, great model. The problem with it was that it wasn’t worth giving up your home and paying $4,000 a month for that, at least not for enough people to keep the places full. So what’s a poor entrepreneur to do? I guess there are two choices. The first would be to tighten up your operation, and get that monthly price low enough to make it a good deal for people (I didn’t observe a lot of that happening). The second, and more frequently taken tactic was to admit customers who had more needs than you were intended to serve, and to figure out a way to meet those needs.

Paying $4,000 a month for a small room in a place that looks like a Victorian Mansion is most appealing when it is compared to paying $10,000 a month for a semi-private room that looks more like a hospital (your local nursing home.) And so, the compromises began, and assisted living communities walked the tightrope of meeting the regulatory requirements of the industry, and scooping up folks that previously would have moved into a long term care facility.

This had the consequence of making the resident profile of both types of facilities, long term care and assisted living, more acutely needy than they were set up to serve.

And so, that’s the situation we find ourselves in. Assisted living communities that look like they’re serving a nursing home population, and getting lousy reviews from many in the process. Nursing Homes without the higher functioning residents they used to have, with an ever more acute and helpless group of residents, many of whom are no longer paying privately, but relying on Medicaid to pay for their costly care. And, as any nursing home administrator will happily tell you, Medicaid reimbursement barely covers the cost of the care these folks require, further exacerbating the problem.

I don’t mean to paint all assisted living communities or nursing homes with the same broad brush. There are some good ones out there, but sadly, not as many as there appear to be bad ones.

I remain convinced that the best way to avoid both of these bad choices is moving to a service enhanced independent living retirement community that has resources in place to enable you to age in place even if you do drop the turkey.

Hold onto that turkey.

The Tea and Toast Syndrome

Have you heard of this? It refers to the decline that some people, especially older people, experience when they don’t eat properly. Preparing a well balanced, complete meal day after day doesn’t work for everyone. Instead, whether it’s because of fatigue, lack of skill, failure to get to the store, or just personal preference, some will skip that full meal, and settle for tea and toast.

Too much of that kind of a diet is one of the things that can bring about a decline in our health.

The other part of the syndrome is the psycho-social component… the idea of eating that “meal” in solitude, or with the droning of the TV.

We aren’t made to live in isolation.

If you’re not eating wholesome meals in the company of friends, you will drop the turkey.

Your stuff

Of all the excuses I heard people give for delaying a move to a retirement community, the hands-down winner was, “I need to figure out what I’m going to do with all my STUFF.”

I’m going to refrain from trying to channel my inner George Carlin, who did a brilliant stand up routine on the “stuff topic.”

Instead, I’d just like to pose this question: Will the “stuff” be any easier to deal with a year or two years from now than it is today?

I’m going to go out on a limb and answer that question for you. No, it won’t.

There is a whole industry that is thriving that can help you deal with this topic, but my experience tells me that it has a lot more to do with memories and emotions than it does with the simple disposition of excess belongings.

It’s not easy, but it’s not going to get any easier.

You’ve dropped the turkey when you find yourself literally tripping over your stuff.

The house is going to kill you

The house is going to kill you.

There, I said it again.

When I worked in the retirement community industry, the owner of our company would tell the sales department in no uncertain terms what we needed to tell our customer to motivate her to move: “The house is going to kill you.”

The boss is the boss, and we actually ran ad copy with that contention running across the top.

Here’s what I learned from that exercise: Undeniably true statements don’t necessarily make good ad copy. The campaign flopped, and we just alienated our customers.

The sad part is, as he usually was, John was right. Here’s why that two story tall, single family house that was big enough to raise a family in becomes a death trap as we get older:

Finance drainer: take it from someone who owns one, houses can bleed your pocketbook dry. It’s not just the predictable stuff like the taxes and insurance, it’s those unpredictable maintenance costs that kill you… furnaces, roofs, dry rot, termites, water damage, worn out carpets, paint…. Every year it’s something big. Worrying about money causes stress, and stress causes illness. Does it make sense to keep paying for all that space you need just because you can’t figure out what to do with all of your stuff if you move to a more comfortably sized home?

Hip fracturer: I know “fracturer” isn’t a word, but that’s what the old house will do to us. Between the stairs, the ladders, the icy steps, and countless other hazards, big old houses land people in emergency rooms every single day. In addition to those tripping and slipping hazards, there is also the lack of exercise that comes with stay at home complacency that further weakens us physically. The other well publicized hazard is crashing your car if you’ve held onto your driver’s license too long, a topic I’ve blogged about before.

Social isolator: The world has changed. If your neighborhood hasn’t changed from the one you grew up in, congratulations. For most of us, we don’t have a lot of interaction with our neighbors. As we grow older, we don’t enjoy the companionship of others, we endure and numb ourselves with the companionship of the TV or internet. This is especially true for people who have lost a spouse and now live alone. Human beings aren’t built to live in isolation. There’s a reason the worst punishment you can be given in prison is to be sent to solitary confinement. Social isolation wears us out, depresses us, and brings about death and decline faster than anything else.

These three house-dwelling scenarios are completely preventable if you just have the strength to part with the house, and move to a place that’s predictably affordable, safe, and has great opportunity for social interaction, like a well run retirement community. Sadly, hardly anyone does. Most of us tough it out in the house until that house-induced hip fracture lands us in a nursing home, or something even worse happens.

You’ve dropped the turkey if you stayed in your house too long. Sounds great, but not ready for “that” yet? What’s ready? When you’ve crashed the car? Fell down the stairs? Dropped the Thanksgiving turkey on the floor in front of your whole family?

Preserve your independence. Get out of the house before you’re ready. You’ll be so glad you did, and so will your family.

The haves and the have nots... feelings of jealousy about Social Security

We were in Boston today to check out the tall ships. When the kids tired of ship-gawking, we decided to wander from the Seaport area over to Faneuil Hall to poke around there for a while. The sun was beating down on us as we made our way through the crowds along the waterfront. We passed this great little oasis of green behind a black iron fence adjacent to the chichi Boston Harbor Hotel. Behind the fence, lounging on comfortable chairs and chaises, dangling their feet in what appeared to be just the clearest and most refreshing pool one could imagine, were about a hundred or so people. Being the curious and serially distractible person that I am, I surveyed the scene and made a quick assessment of those assembled, and reached a quick conclusion: There did not appear to be a single person behind that iron fence that was less than sixty years old.

And it occurred to me… who else but someone in that age bracket could afford to be dropping $500 a night for a hotel room with everything that’s going wrong with the economy right now?

And I could feel it rising up in me… just the slightest feelings of resentment and jealousy. At 45 years old, I’m on the wrong end of the Social Security Ponzi scheme. Everyone who has done the least amount of research understands that there is no Social Security trust fund. The 16% of my wages that come off the top (half paid by me, half by my employer, which these days is me) don’t go into any fund at all. They are mailed over to those people who are collecting Social Security, like my own parents, and the well heeled people behind the iron fence.

Calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme is not an exaggeration. It really is no better than what Bernie Madoff was just sent to prison for doing. A system that was set up to start paying at 65 when the average life expectancy was less than that is not sustainable in a world in which that life expectancy is now well north of 80.

In spite of the recent hit to their stock portfolios and real estate holdings, as a whole, older folks are in the best shape of all of us. This is not meant to imply that all old people are rich. They aren’t. However, despite the great reliability our elected officials have demonstrated in pandering to retirees, those feelings of resentment I referenced above are bound to become more common, especially when what is now 16% needs to creep higher to meet the needs of an ever expanding number of Social Security recipients.

GM just went belly up because of its failure to deal with its pension costs. If the US government goes the same route, we all will have dropped turkey all over our feet. The time for real Social Security reform is upon us, and thoughtful older people will understand that they need to support that reform lest that system go the way of GM.

The big turkey drop: What are the biggest threats to your independence?

There are two things that pose the greatest threats to our independence as we age: Our finances and our health.

Fortunately, there are lots of things we can do protect our finances and our health, and many of these will be topics for droptheturkey.com.

Just to tick off a few of the steps you can take to ensure your independence:

Take care of yourself. Eat right, exercise, get to the doctors for preventative maintenance, be safe, and keep yourself busy. Plan for the contingencies… Make your wishes known with a health care proxy. Make sure where you’re living makes sense for you now, and promotes good health.

Take care of your pocketbook. Invest prudently, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket, protect what you’ve got with the right insurance products, get the help you need to make sure you’re not paying more in taxes than you need to. Make your wishes known. Have an estate plan, and a trusted person assigned as your power of attorney. Make sure where you’re living makes sense for you now, and makes good financial sense.

Failure to pay attention to your health and finances puts you in a spot that no one wants to be in: Dependent on others for your next meal, your care, and the even the very roof over your head.

Hold onto that turkey.

Elderly Drivers, Ageism, and Social Epidemics

An author I admire greatly, Malcolm Gladwell, wrote in his classic business book, The Tipping Point, about the phenomenon of social epidemics. Much like a flu epidemic, a social epidemic can spread throughout society at an alarming rate. Gladwell uses examples of commerce, such as the popularity of a certain type of shoes, as well as more disturbing trends such as school shootings or teen suicides.

With that as a backdrop, it seems to me that one of these social epidemics seems to be in full swing here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. That is, the seemingly alarming rates at which elderly drivers are driving full speed into all varieties of storefronts and unsuspecting groups of pedestrians.

This has brought about a predictable and even understandable cacophony of cries for rigorous road testing of everyone who is old. Interestingly, “old” in this case is defined as something more than twenty years older than whoever is making the testing demand. I can’t wait to see how those who are calling for this mandatory testing at 80 feel about that rule when they turn 80.

The only group of people that it is still socially acceptable to berate in our society (besides white heterosexual males, of course) is the elderly. Imagine if there were an unfortunate stretch of six such car crashes in which African Americans were all at the wheel. Would politicians be calling for special driving tests for black people? Not if they wanted to keep their jobs, they wouldn’t.

Many will argue that that is a false comparison because there is nothing about someone’s race that would impair driving, and everyone fails as they get older. I disagree. Lumping all older people into one bucket that is defined by cruel negative stereotypes is no better than making negative stereotypes based on race, religion, or sexual orientation.

Clearly, we all start to break down at some point because of aging, but the timing of that breakdown is impossible to predict. Loss of hearing, sight, judgment, motor skills, and other faculties starts to happen as early as forty in some, but others have the good fortune to die before it ever happens to them.

Lots of things can impair driving. Text messaging, cell phone use, drinking, prescription medication, eating, road rage, screaming kids in the back seat, fog, snow, rain, darkness, lack of experience, speeding, exhaustion, mechanical failure, stupidity, and all sorts of other things contribute to car crashes every day. The fact that a small group of frail, blind, deaf, and demented older people (with the help of their complicit families and physicians) choose to get behind the wheel and crash into things does not justify testing everyone who gets to age “X”.

How many times do we hear about the drunk driver who kills someone is a serial offender who is driving on a suspended license? A lot. The reality is, there are a lot of selfish jerks out there, including older jerks. They are not jerks because they are old. They were jerks when they were young, too, and now they happen to be older jerks. They drive when they know they shouldn't for the same reason a drunk driver gets behind the wheel. They do it because they are selfish jerks. If you could administer a test to determine if someone were a selfish jerk, that would be a test I could get behind. Guess what? If you suspend the driver’s license of an older selfish jerk, I’m guessing that jerk will figure out a way to get behind the wheel of a car again, anyway, just like the serial drunk driver does.

Even if there were mandatory testing, many of the older people who recently made the newspaper because of their car accidents would pass anyway. Of all the people who I fear on the road, when I see the white hairdo that barely goes over the steering wheel cruising along 10 miles an hour slower than the posted speed limit, I’m much more at ease than I am watching the angry guy in the BMW weaving in and out of traffic at 100 miles an hour while he’s on his cell phone. That doesn’t mean that the first lady should be on the road. She shouldn’t. But, testing probably won’t weed her out anyway.

With luck, we’re all going to get old. The ageist sanctimony that we all approvingly nod our heads about now will someday be aimed squarely at us. Of course, for most of us, we’ll still be thinking it’s meant for those few that are still older than we are.

You've dropped the turkey if you find yourself sitting in your beauty parlor or barbershop and you're still sitting in your car's front seat.

Know when to say when, and hold onto that turkey.

First Post.... What does "Drop the turkey" mean?

In the retirement community business, like a lot of businesses, you can lump your customers into two big categories: People who want to be your customer, and people who need to be your customer.

When I worked in the industry, we often would refer to that latter group as the people who had “dropped the turkey.”

Our phones would light up the day after Thanksgiving with concerned adult children who had come in from out of town and would be surprised to find a parent in a state of decline. It could be that the house that had always been meticulously maintained was in disarray, or that the parent was having difficulty managing medication, or, quite literally, the parent had dropped the Thanksgiving turkey on the floor.

The purpose of this website is to encourage people to make good decisions as they age, to prevent crisis, and to keep those thanksgiving turkey’s from hitting the deck.