Aging and Choice with Juli Anne Gibson

*The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

This is a special presentation of Answers for Elders with Real Estate Fifty Five Plus. What a great day and welcome to answers for elders radio everyone. Today I have a very special guest and the lady by the name of Juli Ann Gibson from Real Estate Fifty Five Plus, who is also our sponsors of today’s program. Juli Ann, welcome to the program. Oh thanks, Suzanne. I’m happy to be here again. I’m so glad you here, Juli Ann, because Real Estate Fifty Five Plus, I know, is a very unique kind of a niche program for seniors that they may not really understand totally about what you do and one of the things that really intrigues me as you do classes besides the answers for elders academy, which were really excited to have you be a part of, but you also do classes. It’s called aging with choice. Could you give me a little bit of an overview of what those are about? Great, more than happy to do that. We provide two different community organizations, different vendors. We get asked to come and speak quite often about the real estate industry, especially in regards to seniors and housing and we came up with the program we wanted seniors and their adult children to be able to walk away with a plan in place. And what we found were really three topics that kept coming up over and over and over again. They had to do with being proactive about aging and housing and and the first one is what’s the right size home for my life? The second one is what do I do with my stuff? And the third one is embracing the change once you’ve made that decision and that first you know when I’m seeing you’re doing this and what we’re finding, which is really interesting, what you’re doing. We’re finding, I know with my mom’s generation didn’t want to talk about it. Yep, seniors today in their s are absolutely wanting to have these kind of discussions. They’ve been through it, often times with their own parents, and they realize, I’m not going to do this to my kids, I’m going to be in charge of my aging. So these workshops are so important. They are they are critical and our goal is to share all of the options with seniors, because they vary dramatically, whether someone’s deciding to stay in their current home and age in place or moving to a continuing care retirement community which offers from very independent living to twenty four hour skilled nursing. So, though, in between those two are probably about eighteen different options for seniors, and what we do on our workshop what’s the right size home? From my life is look at the financial, the emotional, the physical and the spiritual life cycles, or what you call life categories right that are going to impact how a senior ages in regards to their housing, and for a lot of people, staying in their current home isn’t going to be an option for them. But what happens is a conversations don’t happen until there’s a crisis, and so that we created the workshop so that people aren’t waiting for that to happen, because what happens if you wait for a crisis is that someone’s going to make a decision for what you need and not necessarily for what you want. And if you can’t communicate in a crisis what you want, it’s going to have an impact on how you’re going to age and your housing options. You just made a very profound statement. Thank you. Focusing, you always do, but focusing on what you need as opposed to what you want. That is huge for seniors today and it all many of us that are getting older. You know, we have a lot of decisions to make as far as who is going to be that person that’s going to help me in later life, and we may think about things in like for legal points of view, like who’s going to be my power of attorney, things like that, but when you really look at it, it’s much bigger focus and really is about what do you want in your life so that, as you know, I can just imagine if your kids already know or your family already knows what the path is, what an amazing amount of stress that is off of their shoulders may after the absolutely we met with a family yesterday, a gentleman who lost his spouse and they’d been in their home for about forty five years, old farm style home, it multiple stairs and it’s really not an option for him to live on his own, mainly because he is somebody who is social. And what happens really past the age of eighty when we start losing peers, if you’re going to age in place in your own home and you’re no longer able to drive and a lot of your peers aren’t driving, you become isolated in your home and we’re humans and that social experience is extremely important to us. Whether you’re someone who wants to be in a large community with, you know, hundreds of people, or you choose to be an adult family home with people a similar interests, sure that you can share your life with or even a senior over fifty five condo absolutely could give you the ability of a social outlet but still absolutely living independently. Correct. Yeah, it’s you know, people always say at what age, and I say, you know, it’s really not the age of the person, because we have clients that are ninety five that are still out walking five miles a day. Then we have clients that are sixty five, for health reasons, you know, are limited to their ability to walk. So everybody’s needs are going to be very, very different. So let’s talk about what’s the right size home for your life. What kind of exercises are, what kind of, I guess, parameters do you talk about so that seniors can really zero in on great what we look at his lifestyle. So we give each person that’s attending the workshop, and ideally we like to have thirty people are less, and we can also do this online. So if someone’s interested, we can they can connect with us when we can send them the link to actually participate in the workshop online. Oh wonder. And they’re given thirty two cards and on the cards are just pictures and what they do is they have two piles I want and I don’t want. So, for example, there’s a photograph of a woman cleaning a window and most people don’t want to clean right, so they’re going to put that in the don’t want section. And then there’s swimming or exercisers, traveling, there’s companionship, there’s pets. Do you want healthcare? We just really talking more about lifestyle because in our lives the most important thing to us are the relationships we have with other people. So we want to put that first, because people are going to be more happy in the choices that they make about housing if it’s surrounded by what their passion and enjoy is. So we really kind of hone down. What’s your lifestyle look like? What do you want a still out doing, because your energy dissipates as you get older. Sure now, how often do you find that seniors? I mean I can imagine their answers are all over them out. They are. Absolutely it’s surprising how many people still have old concepts about what currently is available for senior housing. For examples, we call it skilled nursing now, which used to be a nursing home. Well, now we have a gap between independent living and skilled nursing, which is called assisted living. And depending on how you’re going to get assisted living, it’s going to dictate where you’re going to live. Sure, so we have a lot more options today than we used to. Sure, and when we start exploring those, people are amazed at what. You know, communities are, what programs are available to them for what’s going to best suit their lifestyle. Well, and not only that, but all the services available for its seniors that age in place. They may can have live at home much longer than they used to. Even when my mom went into retirement living in two thousand and five, there wasn’t the there’s certainly wasn’t the degree of services available that there are today. Absolutely, and I think for many people they don’t realize the benefits are maybe out there for them in regards to like a better veterans benefit or other benefits that a community could offer them until they start doing some exploratory research on communities that are out there and although we specialize in the real estate portion of it, which is huge, and people deciding how they’re going to age and housing, not necessarily if they’re going to stay in their home, but the value of their home is what’s going to drive a lot of their decisions, sure ’cause they really they’re going to rely on the net proceeds from the cell of their house to help fund. You know, what we call gradually the winter years of your life? I actually want to call it the summer years of your life because if you do it well and preplan it can be a great time. Absolutely. So, once you get down to that, where do I want to be? Then then what happens? Then we take a look at the financial aspect and oftentimes people think and they decide they want to stay in their own home because I think it’s going to be less expensive. And so we have a financial sheet that breaks down apples to apples, because in a community there’s some that provide meal, some that provide transportation utilities, and so we want to break it down. It’s not just about whether you have a mortgage still or you’re paying taxes. It’s also when your home is, how old is your furnace and how many more years does that furnace have to live? How old is your water heater? How many more years? So we bring much down? Property Tax, absolutely. So we break it down for an annual five year, ten year, fifteen years, you can actually see what those costs look like, you know, spread out over time. Amazing, amazing, and I suppose in today’s real estate market that is really you know, the value of your home. It has to go into play and that is it a good time to sell APP to his. Obviously that would in factor in, wouldn’t it? Absolutely you know, the market changes and currently in the Seattle markets, you’re Puget Sound area, it’s a very, very strong seller’s market, which means that we basically have less than three months of inventory. So if all homes sold today, in three months we would have no other homes on the market. I was hurt I heard that the other day. That actually is it true right now that houses only stay in the market like less than four days? And it depends on the area. So some areas, location, price range and the type of property are going to dictate if it’s a seller’s market, because even within the Puget Sound area there are types of properties that aren’t selling as quickly as people think they are. In the media is always going to showcase the very best in the very worst a real estate and those are the stories that are talked about around the water cooler. It’s the ninety percent in between that when you hire a great real estate professional who has the experience and can guide you through that process, they’re going to tell you how long it’s going to take to sell your home and what you need to do to prepare it for market. Wow. So, Juli Ann, how do we reach you? Give us an overview of how you know own? Does somebody contact you? You can reach us on our one eight hundred line, which is one eight hundred, nine, six four, one, five five three, or you can visit our website, which is realestatefiveplus.net. Juli Ann, thank you so much for sharing with us a little bit about aging and choice. We look forward to learning more. Great thanks, Suzanne. This has been a special presentation of Answers for Eders with Real Estate Fifty Five Plus. For more information for Real Estate Fifty Five Plus, go to agewithchoice.com. That’s agewithchoice.com.