THE Cambridge Connection - Episode 29

So Adam was unsure about his mother’s benefits, and he obviously was in a panic about things. So both Adam and Wendy were working, or I should say are working full-time, and they’re just unable to attend to their mother’s needs. So they had life and financial decisions to make. 84, which is $412. That’s a considerable savings.

And just for the listeners, explain why that is. Explain why they’re able to get reduction in their monthly outgo. Okay. Well, actually, as I said, we went through a financial analysis. We go through a budget just to see where they’re spending their income and expenses, their assets and debts to get a better feel of what’s going on, and then determine options to help.

And they fell into the option of a DMP, which is a Debt Management Program. And when qualifying for a Debt Management Program, again, we have relationships with major banks that when an individual does qualify for this plan, they qualify for a lower monthly payment at a reduced interest rate. Clear distinction. Relationships with the banks, not just negotiating every time a customer comes through the ... Correct.

There’s no negotiation. We already know the guidelines, and that’s why we go through the extensive budget analysis. And if there are ways that I can tell you to cut back, or one of our counselors can suggest where you should cut back, we’ll certainly do that, and that’s what we look into. But in these cases, a critical benefit is reducing the monthly outgo because of affordability. Because they’re pretty much at the peak of pretty much falling down because almost the income is not matching the expenses.

Even when you go through that thorough budget looking at groceries and all kinds of costs, they’re at that peak where they’re just about ready to fall down, and in some cases already have. Right. And typically already reaching, as you said, the peak, reaching their credit limits. So finding no other resources as far as monthly expenses are going, because there’s a lot of people, let’s face it, if we’re short on cash, we pull out our credit cards for our groceries, basic necessities. And that’s just something that Cambridge Credit, our representatives and our counselors are able to point out to someone and do our best to help them revise their budget and resort to cash spending in needed items.

And if you’re just joining us, this is the Cambridge Connection. We’re talking about a success story. And Tina, lastly, and obviously I’d love for you to finish the story, the most important part is that Cambridge Credit Counseling, the sponsor of this show, been in business for 25 years, helped hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. So this is not new. Nothing new.

If people need it, it’s nothing new. They need to know what’s available so they can call and talk to a counselor if they’re in this type of situation. So go ahead. Any type of financial situation, if they’re finding a strain on their budget or just finding themselves deep in debt, we certainly encourage you to give one of our counselors a call. So getting back to the couple at hand, the creditors not only reduced their payments, they also reduced the interest rates again on average to 6%.

So this allowed them to pay, right now they’re currently on a repayment term of approximately five years. And again, the key, I want to go back, they were able to find some relief in over $400 in savings. Monthly. Exactly. Monthly.

They were able to work out with their mom’s insurance and social security, they found a reliable, affordable care center for their mother. And to have to choose between your everyday living expenses, gas and groceries, and where you’re going to find reliable care for your mother or your father or anyone elderly or even children, that’s such an obstacle that we shouldn’t have to face, but unfortunately many of us do. Life happens. Absolutely. And it’s just good to have Michelle on today.

I’m excited to hear some things that she has to say. Maybe she can offer our listeners things that, obviously that’s not my expertise, but it was rewarding enough to be able to free up a little bit money and be able to tell you that they did find the affordable, dependable care for their mother. And here’s the great news. We’re not giving legal advice on this show, and there are sometimes attorneys that you need advice from on how to do certain things, so we’re going to follow this up as we promote the show as a podcast on some things that people can look out for when they’re starting to deal with this being a situation that they have to deal with, putting someone in their life that’s elderly into assisted living. Yeah.

I look forward to talking about this. This is something that we all may face one day. We’re going to unpack that with Michelle Altebello. Right when we get back, we’re going to take a quick break. This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection.

Assisted living guest introduction and facility basics

Spring is here, and it’s a great time to clean up your debts with a debt management plan from Cambridge Credit Counseling. Reduce your credit card interest rates and lower your monthly payments. Call Cambridge Credit Counseling today. 1-800-CAMBRIDGE. Welcome back, everyone.

This is The Cambridge Connection. I’m your host, Gordon Oliver, here with my co-pilot, Tina Marie, and it is an honor and a privilege to introduce our special guest on the show this week, Michelle Altebello, who is the Director of Admissions. Michelle, welcome to The Cambridge Connection. Thank you for having me. Hi Michelle, so good having you today.

How is everything? Everything is going well. How about you? Very good, thank you. Yeah, so being the Director of Admissions at CARE 1 Redstone, obviously it’s an assisted living facility.

Before we get into that, can you tell our listeners a little bit about you and a little bit about your experience and how you got to this position? Sure. Well, I started in assisted living working at the Arbors. I started as a receptionist and then I just fell in love with caring for the elderly population and helping them out as they transition into what is like their next step in life, leaving their home, going into an assisted living. And from there, I ended up at CARE 1 at Redstone, which is a skilled nursing facility.

We take care of short-term rehab patients as well as long-term care. So with that being said, the CARE 1 at Redstone is located in East Long Meadow and we care for elderly residents who can no longer take care of themselves at home. So if you need an additional helping hand, nursing services, you need help with your medications, meals, toileting, just daily activity of living life skills that you can no longer do for yourself at home anymore, that’s where we fit in. Could you explain the difference between a skilled nursing facility and an assisted living facility? Sure.

A skilled nursing facility, we have 24-hour care in place. They have that at assisted living as well. But at a skilled nursing facility, we have nurses and we have certified nursing assistants on staff at all times. So if, God forbid, something should happen in the middle of the night, you don’t need to call 911. You hit your call bell.

We come and assist you. Whether you fell going to the bathroom and you can’t get up, in a skilled nursing facility, we will come. We will pick you up. We will get you back in bed. If you’re in any pain or anything, we can triage that pain right here in-house.

In an assisted living, if the same scenario were to happen and you fell getting up going to use the bathroom, you would have to be ultimately sent out to the ER. At an assisted living, they’re not able to lift anybody off the floor or help them to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Those are all things that you should be able to do in your apartment on your own in an assisted living. At a skilled nursing facility, we do that for you. So, obviously, this is kind of the case with a lot of things.

In the media, you see a lot of stories about assisted living facility controversies and they never talk about all the great work that’s being done. It’s always the sensational if there’s an issue with an assisted care facility. Your motto is trust in our care. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yes.

We do want families to trust in our care because when you’re making the decision to put your loved one, your mother, your father, whoever it may be in a facility, you need to know that we have their interest 100% at heart. We are going to treat them as if they were our own mother or father or whoever it is who you’re placing with us. Our care that we provide here is exceptional. We want to make sure they feel warm, welcome, cared for, and essentially loved like they’re being cared for by whoever it is that was caring for them at the home. Trust in our care comes from all of our staff here is trained in everything.

Dementia, Alzheimer’s, wound, everything that you would want them to be able to do, all of our staff has that. They have the compassion and the care to care for your loved one. Some of the most insignificant things that people can do prior to an event taking place where their loved one needs to come to a facility starts at home. It starts with something basic as a healthcare proxy. If something were to happen to you and for some reason you’re unconscious or you can’t make a decision for yourself, you have, prior to this happening, you have selected somebody to choose this for you.

If you go into the hospital without a healthcare proxy and you can’t make a decision for yourself, now you have to, a whole other slew of things happen where somebody has to go to court for you and say that, you know, I can make a decision for her. So if you were to have a healthcare proxy in place ahead of time, all of that gets eliminated. It’s a simple piece of paper that you can download right offline. You can say, my name is Gordon Oliver. I want Michelle Altobello to be my healthcare proxy.

Two people witnessed it. It now becomes a legal document. It doesn’t need to be notarized? It does not need to be notarized. Interesting.

Isn’t that, it’s extremely interesting. What gets even more interesting is as people age, healthcare proxies change all the time. So if I’m Gordon’s healthcare proxy and we no longer have communication or contact and he wanted to be Tina Marie, he has to change that ahead of time. So that’s the only thing. You should really keep up with them and know who your healthcare proxies are, know who you have in place so that it makes it so much less of a hassle at the hospital or anywhere that you have to go.

Health care proxies and advance directives

This person can essentially make your healthcare decisions for you. So obviously you want it to be somebody who you know and knows what you want. We’re going to get into the financial side of this because this show is a labor of love from our sponsor, Cambridge Credit Counseling, about giving people financial wisdom and financial empowerment. But before we do that, you sent me some acronyms and I think our listeners could learn from what they are. So can you tell our listeners what a M-O-L-S-T is and an H-C-P?

Sure. An M-O-L-S-T is, it’s called a MOLST and that stands for Medical Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment. So if you were to have a MOLST, you would say, I don’t want to be, if God forbid, this is such a terrible thing to really be talking about, but if God forbid something were to happen to me, I don’t want to be resuscitated, I don’t want to be intubated, and I don’t want to be ventilated. Or you can say, I want to be resuscitated, I want to be intubated, and I want to be ventilated. It’s all about what you want for a life sustaining treatment to be provided on you.

And you kind of hit the nail on the head. Having these conversations are difficult, but it is even more difficult not doing these things when you have to deal with them because you never really planned for it, right? It kind of just comes. Correct. And if you don’t have these conversations as families early and almost annually, it would seem, to continue to update everything on where everything is at, where everyone’s health is at.

Again, the amount of trauma of dealing with all of the complications if you don’t do these things ahead of time and you’re already dealing with trauma because a loved one is struggling with their health one way or the other. Absolutely. This seems almost necessary in my eyes, I would imagine. No question. It really is, and it’s funny.

I thought about this until I obviously worked in the business and I have a health care proxy, my husband has a health care proxy, and even my daughter has a health care proxy because, you know, again, if something happens, I want to know that the proper people are in place to make the decisions for me that I can’t make for myself at that time. All right. Listen, we’re going to take a quick break. Can you stick with us and join us on the other side while we unpack the financial side of this? Absolutely.

Financial planning for long term care costs

All right. This is Gordon Oliver. We’ll be right back. This is Cambridge Connection. Hey, all.

It’s Tina Marie and you might know me as Gordon Oliver’s co-pilot for the Cambridge Connection every Saturday morning. What you might not know is that I’ve known Gordie for a really long time and as a certified credit counselor at Cambridge Credit Counseling for over 20 years, I am thrilled to join Gordie every week to share and chat about real people with real financial problems, along with many success stories both myself and all of the counselors at Cambridge Credit have been a part of. We know it takes a village of support and inspiration if someone is struggling financially. So it’s nice to know if that person is you, that you’re not alone out there. m.

right here on WHMP for the Cambridge Connection because Gordie and I, we are here to help you have a better relationship with your money and hopefully make you smile. Right Gordie? I’m trying to better myself, Tina Marie. Welcome back everyone. This is the Cambridge Connection.

I’m your host Gordon Oliver here with my co-pilot Tina Marie and our special guest Michelle Altubello, the director of admissions at Care One Redstone. So Michelle, again, thank you for joining us. Obviously the conversation has been so important so far because people listening to this show should be sharing this because every family should be paying attention to the things we’re discussing today. Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more.

So I kind of, I want to share like personal experience with this. My mother passed away in 2019 and her health had been deteriorating probably for a good 10 years. She had diabetes, COPD, and again, we did wait too long. Like I’ve been in this counseling of consumer finance for a very long time and yet you still go through the normal human emotions like, oh, it will never get there. It’ll never happen.

And we even know we’re watching my mom’s health deteriorate. She went through a couple of, you know, she had a couple of strokes, hysterectomy. So she went through a lot of things that kind of started to really, you know, degenerate the true health that she had. And we finally, it was actually her because she was the matriarch of the family, you know, she was actually her bringing up that we should really look about how to protect the assets of the family. So can you talk about your experience with that?

And I’ll kind of share a little bit about what we did in conjunction with your advice. Sure. So one of the insurances that we do take here is Medicaid. For people that don’t know, that is the state of Massachusetts state funded program. And in order to be eligible for Medicaid, you have to have limited assets, limited income.

I don’t know what the exact breakdown is, but I don’t think that you can have over like $1,500 in assets. So what the state does is they do a five-year look back. So if you were to come into a situation where you need a long-term care or an assisted living and you found one that takes that insurance, but you’re not on the state assisted program, you have to apply for it. It is a daunting process. So we do recommend getting an elder law attorney to help you kind of navigate through that.

If you don’t have one, we can start the process for you. There is a thing called a five-year look back. So what they do is they’ll go through everything with a fine tooth comb and they’ll pull transactions out and they’ll see like, okay, so where did this large sum of money go? And then you’ll have to explain down. And they do have a list for acceptable items on there that are acceptable write-offs.

Do you find these answers to these questions on the state websites? Is this a state-based guidance? So yeah. So what they do is they’ll ask for your bank record. So they want your bank statements for the past five years.

So they’ll start to go through that and then they will start to really just dive right in and say, okay, let’s say you gave $5,000 away to your grandson two years ago. That’s unacceptable because that’s within the five years, you have to either get that money back or pay that down before you can get accepted. Is the state looking at it as though the individual may be trying to hide money? Not really hide it, but, and this is just my opinion, this part, is I feel like they don’t want to be giving access to everybody because you gave away all of your assets. So now the state is going to pick up the bill for that.

Funds are limited. I would gather that once they, once you have to whittle down your assets, once you’re out of that, then the state takes over and takes care of it. But they’re not going to pay if you have means and ways of paying. And some of the things I’m sure are qualified and some of them are not qualified. For example, we put my mom and dad’s house in a trust as we went through the process because the trust after five years is not an asset of my mother’s.

It’s an asset of the trust. So it kind of protects it from that kind of thing. And it’s, again, another tough conversation. You have people working their entire lives to save so they can live comfortably in retirement. And then when an illness comes and you don’t protect those assets, and the law is what it is.

That’s why you need attorneys to be involved to show you how to protect that either through insurances or through different strategies. So obviously you need the advice of legal counsel to be able to make sure you’re setting everything up the way it’s supposed to be set up. Absolutely. And if it’s a married situation where, you know, there’s still a spouse living in the community, the state does make, they do take notice of that. So they don’t want you to have to liquidate everything to pay for the spouse that has to go into a facility.

They do have, you know, a community-based program where the spouse who is still living in the community still can keep assets. So I don’t want people to think that, oh no, if my husband or wife gets sick and have to go into a nursing home and live there, I’m going to lose my house and lose everything. That’s not how it, that’s not the way that it goes. No, but the very purpose of this show is awareness, right? So now we’re talking about there are pitfalls, pros and cons.

Care One locations and contact information

We’re not experts. You only deal with what you deal with to help people get into the facility, obviously through admissions. So through our experiences and our ignorance, it’s just raising that flag for people listening to do some homework and find out what they need to do to protect their assets and to find a good channel for a family member that may eventually need services like CARE One of Redstone. Correct. So, before we let you go, is CARE One a national organization with multiple locations or is it just local in Massachusetts?

So CARE One is family owned and we are based out of New Jersey. That is where our headquarters is. They are in New Jersey. We do have 15 locations through Massachusetts, three being in Western Mass and the rest of them being out in Eastern Mass. Awesome.

So for our listeners, how can they find you if they have a family member that may need the services that CARE One provides? Well, they can call us. Our phone number is 413-833-4113. 525-3336 or they can go online and submit an online request if something should happen in the late hours. We do have people who monitor our phones 24 hours a day.

So our website is care, C-A-R-E dash O-N-E dot com and our address is 135 Benton Drive in the East Longmeadow. A couple things I’m going to do taking away this conversation. Number one, can you join us again in the future because we can’t, I don’t think we can have this conversation enough. I would love to. And number two, I’d love to collaborate with you and the director of education at Cambridge Credit Counseling to put a list of things together for people to check off what they should be doing to research how to deal with this, if and when it has to happen.

I think that would be great. I would be honored to do that. I don’t think that enough people talk about what could happen or what will happen if a tragedy does happen. You are looking for a skilled nursing facility or even if you have to go into the hospital. So many people go in blind, not knowing what the next step is.

So the more information we can get out there, I just feel like would be so much better for the entire community, not just the elderly population. Hence the purpose of the Cambridge Connection and amazing guests like you that join us to help educate our listeners. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Michelle.

Care One sponsor message

Thank you. All right, we’re going to take a quick break. I’m going to wrap up the show. We’ll be right back. This is the Cambridge Connection.

We all hear the ads for nursing facilities, but when you really need one for yourself or a loved one, how do you know where to turn? At CareOne, their motto is trust in our care. And here’s why. Seven days a week, every week, CareOne specializes in physical occupational speech therapies, a pulmonary program with a certified pulmonologist and respiratory therapists. They take care of tracheectomies, BiPAP and CPAP machines, offer wound care, cardiac care, and a stroke recovery program.

Seven days a week. CareOne can also handle multiple IV medications, IV antibiotics, and IV fluids. Seven days a week. So whether it is their short or long-term units, CareOne’s nurturing and skilled staff will ensure that you or your loved one can trust in the CareOne care. CareOne has 15 facilities from East Longmeadow to Boston, as well as other Northeast states.

Show wrap up and closing quote

com, because you can trust in their care. Welcome back, everyone. To the Cambridge Connection, Tina Marie. What an incredible show, as usual. We bring on experts every week to try and educate our listeners on important topics.

And this one, getting people that need assisted living care, again, can crush families financially. 28 minutes just isn’t enough. There’s so much that needs to be learned. I mean, myself included, I’m going to go to that website and check it out and see what I can learn. And I’m going to, when we post the show as the podcast, I’m going to add facts and things for people to look into and resources, et cetera.

Good idea. This is just incredibly important, and we have to keep this conversation going. Agreed. As you know, I bring a quote almost every week. Oh, good.

You got one this week. I got a real special one. Perfect. When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I wrote down happy. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life. John Lennon, right? Life when people get to an assisted facility, a living facility, and they’re on their way out. What is the focus in life?

Happiness. Right? Happiness. Couldn’t have a better quote in my humble opinion talking about this. Perfect today, Gordon.

You too, Tina. Perfect. You’re on point today, Gordon. Kansas was perfect too, right? All right.

So folks, we got to wrap the show up. A huge thank you to Leah and Lisa, our producers. As we say, we have great experts on the horizons. And next week, our scheduled guest is Republican gubernatorial candidate, Chris Doughty. That’s going to be an amazing show.

Hopefully, his schedule will keep him on track to be on the show. com, click on podcasts. You can listen to the show live at that same address. You can find us where you find your favorite podcasts, and once again, we want you to be part of this conversation. So please email any content, discussions, topics that you’d like us to discuss in the show, and if you need help with your finances, feel free to call 1-800-CAMBRIDGE.