Costs and trade-offs

One-time versus ongoing costs

Families often focus on one-time numbers: a big home modification, a move-in fee, a deposit. These matter, but a plan can fall apart just as easily under ongoing pressure:

• Monthly rent or facility fees.
• Regular caregiver hours at home.
• Transportation, meals, and errands.
• Lost work hours for family members.

When comparing options, it helps to translate them into “what does this roughly cost per month, and for how long might we need to do that?”

Money and time are both real costs

A plan can look affordable on paper but fail because it demands too much unpaid time and emotional labor. For each option, ask:

• “Who is doing the driving, paperwork, logistics, and emotional work?”
• “What gets dropped or stressed in their own life to make this possible?”
• “What would it look like for this to be sustainable for a year, not just a month?”

A simple way to compare two or three paths

You don’t need a perfect spreadsheet to learn something useful. For each path (for example, stay home, move to assisted living, move in with family), sketch:

• Approximate monthly cash cost (housing, care, transportation, medications).
• Who is doing what (driving, coordination, night checks, hands-on care).
• Biggest risk or pressure point for that plan (“we burn savings fast,” “one person is on duty constantly,” etc.).

The Tools page includes planning tools to help structure this, but even a basic sketch can make trade-offs easier to see and discuss.

Questions to guide decisions

When money and workload feel overwhelming, questions like these can help reframe the conversation:

• “If we choose this option, what are we trading away in terms of savings, time, or health?”
• “If we hold off on this change, what’s the risk or cost of waiting?”
• “What could make this option more sustainable — or what would make it clearly unsustainable?”