Taking care of your parent in assisted living should make life a little easier for both of you. There are several keys to ensuring, as much as possible, that after the transition to assisted living, the day-to-day living is easy. One key is choosing a facility wisely.

When choosing a facility, include your parent as much as possible. Your mother or father (or both) are going to be living there, not you. Let them ask questions; ‘kick the tires’ so to speak.

You also want to consider location. More than one court case has been fought because a parent was moved from one location to another without the full cooperation of the entire family. How far away from family is the new facility? How long will it take for you to drive there to see mom?

In our case, mom is living 15 minutes from me and about 1 hour and 45 minutes from one of my brothers. My other brother is 4 hours away. Before the move, she was 15 minutes from one brother and 3 1/2 to 4 hours away from the other two. So this made things a little better and all three of us make the trip to see mom.

There are other factors to consider, such as cost and medical care available. For this writing, I want you to be keenly aware of location – be sure you are choosing a facility that keeps your loved one in the loop, like my brothers and I have done for our mom. She appreciates being able to see us as often as possible. Location helped make that happen.

Please contact Mateya Law Firm to assist you with estate planning and estate administration when the need arises.