The High Costs of Caregiving

Caring for aging parents can exact a financial and emotional toll on adult children.

- ELLA VINCENT

FAMILY FINANCES 

MORE than 38 million Americans provide unpaid caregiving to seniors and other loved ones, spending an average of more than $7,000 a year on out-of-pocket costs, according to AARP. In 2021, the value of that care topped $600 billion, an increase of $130 billion from 2019. But because caregiving is often physically and mentally exhausting— particularly when you’re caring for elderly parents—many caregivers fail to focus on their own finances.

Amy Goyer, caregiving expert for AARP, had to quit her full-time job to care for her mother, who died in 2013, and her father, who died in 2018. Goyer eventually had to file for bankruptcy to pay off the debts she incurred while caring for her parents, whose income made them ineligible for the Medicaid public health-insurance program. That’s not unusual. Many middle-class families make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, which means they have to pay for expenses Medicare doesn’t cover. Those include everything from home health care to incontinence products. In Goyer’s case, while Medicare covered some expenses, they weren’t up to her standards. “I had to buy my mom a new wheelchair cushion because the one Medicare sent was not soft enough,” she says.

Nicole Jorwic, chief of advocacy and campaigns at Caring Across Generations, a caregiving advocacy organization, is caring for her grandparents, who also earn too much to qualify for government assistance. She’s a long-distance caregiver—she lives in Virginia, and her grandparents live in Florida— which adds to her out-of-pocket costs. Because her grandparents