Intergenerational Living- Should a Parent Pay Room and Board?

A pivotal financial detail to work out before deciding if an aging parent moves in is whether you are going to charge room and board. Another person at the dinner table can be expensive. It can get even more costly if you need to do major renovations or hire a home health care worker.

 If so, are your siblings going to contribute, if your parent cannot afford to pay? No problem, when all the adult siblings are in agreement. If this is an issue that is thorny, it can be tackled in a family meeting with a geriatric care manager  as an objective facilitator.

Even if there are no siblings, there is still the question of how much the parents can or should contribute to the household. There is also the problem of whether the aging parent resents this. That bitterness can affect the entire intergenerational living situation for years. By meeting individually and separately with your parents and yourself the geriatric care manager can hold mediate this roadblock.

There are issues in moving an aging parent in that can have tax or other consequences. Should the parents have a contract in which they pay the children for caring for them? If the parents contribute to remodeling the house, do they gift their portion of the house to the children, retain an interest, or put it in a trust? These and other decisions can affect the parents’ eligibility for Medicaid if it becomes necessary for the parents to enter a nursing home at some point.

To avoid fostering resentment and guilt among family members, you should try to work out as many of these issues as you can before the big move. An elder law attorney can help your family create a plan that takes all the various contingencies into account, so that everyone is on the same page and knows what to expect.