Hey reddit, I probably don't have all the info I'd need to really figure out this situation, but mom is really upset and I'm hoping to at least give her advice and some place to start.
My grandma is very old and has vision loss, memory and balance issues and can do very little for herself (as of the last few months, my mom has been helping her bathe, dress, feeding her, basically everything).
My grandma's house, from my understanding, is paid off. It is set up to be held in some sort of trust for my mom to live in for as long as she is able, after my grandma's death. After my mom's death it will be sold and divided as inheritance among her siblings. My mom has been living there for many years now, since she moved in at the first sign of my grandma's increasing need for care.
Well, my mom is really struggling now to keep up with my grandma's needs. She wants to help, but things are sounding unsafe to me (i.e., grandma will wander downstairs in the wee hours of the morning to start cooking). A home health nurse visits on weekdays for a few hours and during that time my mom works from home, but Medicare isn't covering that and the family can't afford to give my mom any more of a break.
I'm told that not only will they need to sell the house in order to get more services covered by Medicare, but that they will need to have already sold the house a long time ago due to a waiting period. Mom is really, really scared of losing that house. She is 70 and she doesn't have much savings, I don't know her numbers but she makes it sound as though she won't be able to make ends meet if she has to pay rent.
Has anyone been in this situation before and have any advice? I wonder if I might buy their house. It's worth ~$180k. I have very good credit. I make ~$50k a year and I live on just over half of that. But, I got this job recently and I've been paying down a whole lotta debt, so I do not have savings for a down payment, and once student loan payments start back up my budget will tighten a lot. I used to live nearby and help, I'd stay with my grandma when she wanted to travel and help them shop, etc, but I moved for this job and now I'm hundreds of miles away. I could pay for more nurses to give my mom more of a break, because that seems really simple, but I feel like that would just be putting a bandaid on a hemorrhage and what they need to do ASAP is get this house out of my grandma's name so she can qualify for more medicare benefits at some point, even if she won't qualify for them right after selling the house (and my mom could continue to live there as my renter and pay what she can - I have often thought of buying a rental property in that area as an investment, and theirs is a nice neighborhood in which a lot of properties are rental properties and always full - but that was something I thought vaguely about doing 10 years from now, I don't feel ready.)
It may be coming to some sort of breaking point, grandma had a bad fall today and is in the hospital overnight. She didn't break any bones but she can't even sit up in bed, let alone stand and get to the bathroom with a walker (their house would need a lot of modifications for a wheelchair to even get into the front door). And my mom said the doctor at the ER was asking if she was going to bring her home tonight. Sorry if this is a rambling mess, but it's been a stressful evening over here.
Submitted March 26, 2021 at 12:10AM by Jabberhakke https://ift.tt/2P647y0
