Off to My NEW Second Job

A personal note from Victoria — your advisor (or SOFA presenter), and this season, a daughter
 

I’ve helped clients plan for long-term care for years. I’m a little embarrassed to admit I didn’t fully understand it until it was my own mother; two weeks into dialysis, moving into assisted living, and leaning on a plan that some mornings still came up short. You’re my clients, and some lessons are too important to keep to myself.

The caregiver who drives my mother to dialysis got two flat tires on the same morning she was due for treatment. Dialysis is not optional, and it does not reschedule politely. I did what the family members always ended up doing and I dropped what I was holding and jumped in.

I am a financial advisor with a full-time job. I am not, by training or temperament, the person who sits in a waiting room for ninety minutes or helps with a shower. If hands-on care were my strength, I’d have gone into nursing. And yet there I was, rearranging my day around a flat tire, because when the plan breaks, someone must be close enough to catch it.

This is an ongoing story and a raw one. Her health began slipping about a year ago, but the last 60 days are the ones that turned critical, a blur of hospital, rehab, and hard decisions about where she goes next. Through all of it, she is still very much herself. I don’t have a tidy ending to offer. What I have, this early in, is a set of lessons I already find myself wanting to share with my clients because so much of this is, at its heart, planning.

Right now, we’re in the in-between. She did try to go back to independent living, but we quickly saw it wasn’t wise. Not safely, not now. So, Mom and I made the decision together: assisted living would be her next permanent step, not where any of us imagined she’d land, but where she needs to be. For these interim two weeks, until the paperwork is in order and the move into her beautiful new assisted living apartment is finalized, I go straight from my day job and stay overnight with her on the sleeper couch. It isn’t the role I imagined, and it isn’t the one any of the planning was supposed to require of me, but sometimes you do what you have to do for safety, and for the people you love.

My mother is 78, and she’s made me a promise: she’s going to live her best life until at least 90. I intend to hold her to it. The couch is the exception, not the rule; once she’s settled in her own apartment, my part is simpler than you’d think- I head over after work, have a glass of wine with her, and go home. I’m not the one doing hands-on care, but simpler doesn’t mean hands-off. I’m still overseeing her care, staying on top of her team, and there to catch anything that falls through the cracks. And her best life? Just last Sunday it looked like the two of us at Longhorn Steakhouse. Mom walked in with her walker and both of us settled in at the bar for dinner, because that’s what we’ve always done. The goal is simple: feel normal, stay safe, and hold on to a quality of life as close as possible to the one she had before. Illness doesn’t get a vote on that.

It helped me to realize there are really two roles hiding inside the word “caregiver.”

The micro caregiver is the one we all picture: in the room, hands-on, doing the physical work of the day, including the long waits in clinics, the driving to and from appointments, the bathing and dressing. Both roles matter, and neither works without the other. I have deep admiration for the nurses and aides who do this work and love it; my own daughter is a nurse, so I’ve seen up-close the patience and heart it takes. It’s a calling, and a remarkable one. It’s just not mine. Knowing that about myself isn’t a failing, it’s part of planning well- making sure the right person is doing each job.

The macro caregiver is the role I didn’t know I’d signed up for, and the one that turns out to matter just as much. It’s not being in the room; it’s making sure the right people are in the room, with the right resources, at the right time. Protecting her dignity, her quality of life, and her safety from a fall by orchestrating everyone who touches her day. The quiet irony is that this is exactly what I do for a living: assess what’s needed, assemble the resources, manage them over time, and advocate when something’s off. I’m not a nurse. I’m the one making sure the nurse shows up. Don’t get me wrong, even this role takes a lot of time to manage.

And I want to say plainly: the team we’ve assembled is extraordinary. From her concierge doctor to her aides and her therapists, they respond with timely communication, a genuine desire to help, and care that is kind and empathetic and all aimed at the same goal: letting Mom hold on to as much of her pre-illness quality of life as possible. They are everything you’d hope for. Even with a team this good, it still takes a macro caregiver serving as health advocate to keep it all moving in the same direction. The best people in the world still need someone connecting with them.

1. Be proactive — plan before you need it. My mother set up her long-term care insurance and chose her independent living community while she was still well. That single head start is the reason this hard season is merely hard and not impossible. The worst time to shop for care is from a hospital bed, in a panic, when every option is a compromise. And let me be honest about one thing: the costs will shock you — and they don’t hold still. Her independent living rates went up 12% in 2025 alone. So, before we committed to assisted living, I asked the facility point-blank what to expect: they had taken a 10% increase the year before and told me to budget for another 4–6% every year going forward. Compounded over the years she intends to keep living the best life, the number you start with is not the number you’ll end up paying. But when cost is no longer the deciding factor, you can move quickly, like saying yes to the extra help the same day you need it, sometimes fast enough to prevent a fall before it happens. Plan from a position of choice, not crisis.

2. Think through the plan, not just that you have one. Having coverage is not the same as understanding it. I assumed Medicare would carry us further than it did; a lot of families do. Medicare can cover up to 100 days, but that benefit is for skilled nursing and rehab, not the everyday personal care that fills a day in assisted living. For us, it came down to two deal-killers. First, the Medicare-covered rehab wasn’t available where she already was and accepting it would have meant leaving the community attached to her own independent living home. Staying near her home and the place and people she knew was a higher priority for us than the covered care, so we chose her community. Second, the schedule wasn’t hers to set; my mother couldn’t dictate when she’d get a shower. For someone whose whole goal is keeping her dignity and her daily routine, that wasn’t going to work. What actually met the need was Mom’s long-term care plan, which pays $160 a day toward exactly the help Medicare doesn’t, like showering, dressing, the ordinary acts of living. And here’s the part I underestimated: having those LTC dollars is a huge bonus. When a need arises, we can buy the resource immediately without agonizing over the bill, no weighing whether we can afford the better aide or the extra hours. The only questions left are the ones that should matter, quality of care, safety, and comfort. Again, what we’re protecting is her dignity, her quality of life, and a routine as close as possible to the one she had before she got sick. Thanks to those LTC resources, we had choices. Know what each piece does and where the gaps are before you’re standing in one.

3. Expect that one child becomes the advocate — and that’s a different job than caregiver. My mother never wanted me to be her caregiver. That’s why she bought the insurance, so she’d never have to lean on me to bathe and dress her. But no policy eliminates the need for a human being to run the plan. One child almost always becomes the healthcare advocate — the architect. That has meant, for me, completing the endless paperwork, coordinating her care across the assisted living team and her aides, securing the right level of help so she gets her daily shower and stays dressed to the nines, arranging her drivers, staying on top of physical therapy so they actually come as promised, and working with the LTC insurer for approval and reimbursement. None of it is hands-on. All of it is real work. Decide, as a family, who that person will be and don’t pretend the role won’t exist.

4. There is real value in living close. Resources fail. Aides call out. Drivers get two flat tires on a dialysis morning. When the plan breaks, and it will, proximity is what lets you catch it before it becomes a crisis. You can’t outsource being twenty minutes away. If you have any say in geography, factor it in early.

I’m not writing to complain, and I’m not writing because I’ve figured it all out, I clearly haven’t, because I’m still living it. I’m writing because my mother’s plan is a kind of love letter I only learned to read this year. The community she chose. The coverage she bought. The foresight to set it all up before she needed any of it. Every one of those decisions was a future kindness to me.

So let me say this plainly to you. Your family loves you. The day something goes wrong, they will be filled with worry and a fierce instinct to protect you. A clear plan and the resources to fund it take the panic out of that moment. It spares them the impossible decisions made under pressure and frees them to spend their energy on the only thing that matters being with you. Planning isn’t a cold financial exercise; it’s how you love them back, in advance.

So, if you take one practical thing from a story still in progress: even with every resource in place, supporting a parent is a second job. You can’t make it easy, but you can make it easier  by planning early, understanding what your plan actually covers, naming your advocate, and staying close.

And then, when the morning comes with two flat tires and a dialysis appointment that won’t wait, you’ll do what I did. You’ll jump in and be grateful for every decision your mother made to keep that moment from being so much worse.

Because here’s the truth underneath all of it: my second job is a labor of love. The paperwork, the coordinating, the jumping in; it’s tiring, and I’d do every bit of it again. Good planning doesn’t take love out of caregiving, it just clears away enough of the weight that love is what’s left.