Welcome to Hey Boomer - a podcast for and about baby boomers. On this episode, Wendy Green speaks with retirement transition coach, Dr. Sara Zeff Geber. Sara specializes in working with people without adult children or close relatives, on how to plan for their future as they age. Dr. Geber has written a book called "Essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers."

In this episode, they covered questions like, "Who will be there to help you if you are unable to help yourself? Who could speak on your behalf if you cannot speak for yourself? Who is capable of making decisions for you if you are unable to make them yourself?"

Sara discusses the importance of financial and legal planning, choosing a proxy, and building a support network of nieces, nephews and other loved ones.

Sarah also talks about the benefits of joining a community as a senior, including cohousing, home sharing, and tiny home communities. She warns against the perils of aging in place without proper social connections and support, and shares some encouragement for baby boomers who are childless by choice.

Wendy and Sara's conversation also touches on important topics such as end-of-life planning, estate planning, social security, and long-term care.

Don't miss this insightful discussion on planning for the future as a solo ager, and more. Tune in to Hey Boomer with Wendy Green and join the conversation.

Thank you to our sponsors:

DJ Benson & Associates LLC: dave@securingsouls.com

ADHD Career Coaching: https://passiontocareer.com 

You can find more information about Solo Aging at https://sarazeffgeber.com 

If you want to support Hey, Boomer: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/HeyBoomer0413 

You. We hear a lot these days about the sandwich

generation, adult children caring for

aging parents. But what if you are aging

and you don't have children to come and. Check on you and

care for you? My guest on Hay Boomer

today is Dr. Sarah south geber,

and she's an expert in aging, and in fact, she's written a

book specifically for solo agers called

essential Retirement Planning for Solo Agers.

In this episode, we ask some really important questions,

things like who will be there to help you if you can't care

for yourself? Who could speak on your

behalf if you are unable to speak for yourself?

And who is capable of making decisions for you that

you may be unable to make for yourself at that point?

These and many other important questions are

discussed in this episode of hey,

Boomer. My name is Wendy Green,

and I will be your host.

You.

Hello, hey Boomer listeners.

It's another Monday. It's another hey Boomer, and I'm so glad that

all of you are here with us. I have some important questions

for you. Do you have a will your power of

attorneys defined? You've got your medical directive in order?

Have you started withdrawing from Social Security or

from your retirement savings account?

Have you made plans for your long

term care? How you'd want to be cared for, where you'd want to be cared

for? And have you had this discussion with your children

or your spouse or your partner or your family?

What if you don't have children or a spouse or a

partner to talk this over with? Who's going to care for

you if and when you need it? These are

really difficult conversations to have in

the best of times and when we have that

family support that we feel we can depend on.

But if you're a solo ager, these questions can become

even trickier. Hi, Anne. So I'm glad

that you all are joining us today for this important conversation.

And the truth is, these questions that we're going to

discuss today, they do apply in some ways

differently for solo agers, but they also apply to all of

us and they are important questions for all of us to think about.

Before we get started today, I did want to thank a

couple of our sponsors for

the Hay Boomer Forest bathing event that's taking place on May the fourth.

I wanted to thank DJ. Benson and Associates.

They are a safety and security consultancy

specializing in threat assessment,

management and mitigation,

workplace violence prevention and intervention training,

organizational and personal security assessments.

And their motto is securing souls

one client at a time.

If you would like to get in touch with my friend

Dave Benson from DJ. Benson and Associates,

you can email him at dave@securingsoles.com.

Our other sponsor for today is Shell Mendelssohn.

And Shell says many people with ADHD struggle

in their careers. But what if the problem wasn't you?

What if you're just in the wrong job.

She says. People with ADHD are some of the brightest,

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And I can tell you that Shell is very passionate about the work that

she does.

Speaking about forest bathing.

Doris, David, Scott, Beth,

Gail, Kathy, Rob, Bunny and Lillian are all

joining me on May 4 for forest bathing.

And they're joining Angie Steagall, who is our forest bathing

guide. That means there are just five spots

left, and I posted the

link to register for forest bathing in the chat

on both Facebook and LinkedIn. So you can go

right now and sign up while there's still a

few spaces left. It's going to be a wonderful

way to ease out of our COVID isolation, make some

new friends, and relax into nature.

I hope you'll join me. It's really going to be a special event,

and I would love to get you all to join

the email list so that you can get our Monday morning announcements

and you can get access to the blog posts

that I write or the guest blog posts that we have. There are

two ways to get on the email list. You can drop me a quick email

to my account at wendy at heyboomer biz.

Or you can go to the Facebook page and subscribe

to the blog post. It's that simple. And then you'll be

in the know with everything that hey Boomer is doing.

And with that, I'm going to bring on our guest

today, sarah Zeff Gepper.

Hi, Sarah. Hi, Wendy. So nice

to have you. I really appreciate you joining me on the show today.

Oh, I'm happy to be here. Now I just want to know more about forest

bathing. I know, it's so cool.

It's like this little meaningful three hour excursion

into the woods. Mindfulness. Very cool.

Yeah. Sounds very good. Yeah. So let me take

a moment and tell people about you, Sarah.

Dr. Sarah Zekebber. She is a 2018

recipient of the Influencers in Aging designation by PBS

Next Avenue. She's an author,

a certified retirement coach, and a professional speaker on

retirement and aging. Sarah has developed a

niche specialty which we're going to talk about today about

solo agers people who have no children or

who are aging alone.

Sarah is the author of The Essential Retirement

Planning for Solo Agers a Retirement

and Aging Roadmap for Single and Childless Adults.

I read this book. I've marked it up. There's lots of worksheets in

here. I am not a solo ager, but I

found it incredibly useful.

And with her speaking and writing, sarah has

been raising awareness of solo agers for the past ten

years. She believes that solo agers have a unique

need in later life. That warrants greater foresight

and a more robust approach to planning.

And Sarah is married, but she still considers herself a solo ager

because she doesn't have children. She has a puppy,

and she and her husband live in Santa Rosa,

California. Is there anything I left out,

Sarah, that you'd like to add? That's pretty complete. Thank you.

You are welcome. So before we jump right into

all the things that we need to be thinking about, can you tell me kind

of your career trajectory and how you got from

where you started to your emphasis on solo aging?

Sure. Let's get a little bit circuitous.

I was for 25 years a management consultant,

organizational consulting, team building, that kind of thing.

Wonderful career. I enjoyed it a lot. It morphed

into more executive and management coaching than anything

else. And there was a time about,

I don't know, twelve years ago, when I found myself

coaching a lot of baby boomers, which I'm obviously a baby boomer

too. And so I was coaching people who were my contemporaries,

and they started wanting to talk more about their retirement

plans than their strategic plans.

So I found myself doing a lot of coaching

with regard to what they were going to do next in

their own life rather than in their company. And I thought, you know,

I'm seeing a lot of this. I think there's something going

on here. So the more I heard about,

the more I got interested in actually doing retirement

coaching, because that's clearly what many of these people wanted.

Now, at the time it was, I must say, mostly men,

because again, of the baby boom generation, it's mostly men

that hold those top leadership positions. That's changing.

But for our generation, it hadn't moved the needle very far.

Typically, these men had not built any kind

of a life for themselves outside of their work.

So there was definitely a need for some coaching to

get them from one place to the next because they didn't know what they wanted

to do in their retirement. And when we started talking about how are you

going to add meaning and purpose to your life after you leave here,

they were clueless. So I looked into

retirement coaching a little further and

discovered that there was an organization who

actually trained retirement coaches. And even

though I have my doctorate in an organizational behavior, that didn't

help me to understand anything about the retirement transition

and kind of how people mature in their older

years. So I went through the program

and got a certificate in retirement coaching and kind

of hung out my shingle. And I did retirement coaching for quite a long

time. And then I had another Epiphany about three years

into that. I was looking around my

I don't know, the scenario around me, the people

that I knew, the people I worked with, the people I hung out with as

friends. And so many of them were spending a tremendous

amount of time taking care of their aging parents.

We were all in our 60s, early sixty s

at the time. And so those of them doesn't

include me, but those of them that had living parents,

they were getting old, they were getting into their late 80s, early 90s,

mid 90s, getting to a point in their lives where they

weren't quite managing as well as they had been ten

years ago on their own. So in some cases,

my friends and colleagues were flying back and forth to the East Coast.

If parents were local, sometimes they were spending a

tremendous amount of their weekends making sure that there was

food in the house for the week, taking them to doctors appointments,

taking time off work to do these things and in many cases,

getting them moved into a safer environment.

And so I've watched a lot of this going on with people in

my life. And I sat down to have a glass of wine

with a friend of mine who also doesn't have children. And I

said, Sandy, who's going to do that for us?

Big question. Big question. Yeah. And when we

looked at each other and went, oh,

I don't know, I got

very curious. And I started doing some research to uncover what

the incidence of I'd like to call it child

free rather than childless. At least

among the people I knew. Most of us were childless by choice.

We had made a decision somewhere back in the 70s that

we were going to pursue a career. We were going to go it on our

own, we were going to make our own path.

If you remember, baby boomers were the first ones to have the pill.

They were the recipients of all of the noise

that the era folks were making.

I marched in some of those protests

about unequal opportunities for women, and it changed.

We made that change. So doors

were opening not only to universities and colleges for

women, but they were also opening to careers that women had never really

been invited into before. So the

world was our oyster, so to speak. We could control our reproductive

processes however we wanted, and we could get out there and make

a living for ourselves such that we didn't need to get married

and we could buck the tide

and not have children and just pursue a

career that was meaningful and important to us.

So that's what I and many of my colleagues did.

But here we are in our sixty s and seventy s,

looking ahead and going, this is the choice

we made. And now we have to do some planning,

some really serious planning about how we're going to be

taken care of or how we will take care

of ourselves, which we may or may not be able to do

for the entire length of our life without

the help of adult children. Right? So you must have done

an incredible amount of research then to try

to answer some of these tough questions.

And I think even if we have children, it may be a situation

where your children are not in a position to help and take care

of. So let's start down the path

about some of the things that you need to think about.

Sure. Well, one of the ways that I

approached this kind of answer to so what,

what do we need to think about? Is to really look around me

and observe what adult

children were doing for their parents

who were in their eighty s and ninety s. And so I

came up with kind of several buckets of things.

First of all, we certainly need to be very robust

in our financial planning and our legal

planning. So you mentioned early on

something about have you done your advanced directive, have you

written your will? All of those kinds of things.

This is where people who have been negligent and

not do that well. It kind of falls to their kids and their kids grumble

and grouse. But usually when push comes to shove,

adult children come in and do what's necessary when their parents

run into a crisis. In our case,

those of us who don't have kids, there is

no safety net. So we really have to think long and

hard about who we want to

be our proxy, who we want making decisions for us if we

are unable. At some point,

things happen. People have strokes, people have heart

attacks, people get into accidents, people fall, people break hips and

all kinds of things and end up in rehabilitation

units of nursing homes that they never,

ever planned to be in. So the

more we can get around our

resistance to looking at that potential future and make

some plans for it and understand what our options are

going to be at that time, find people that will be proxies

for us. That's the way that we need

to plan as we get older. Yeah. And Sarah,

you talk about that some in the book. These conversations are

difficult at best. Right. So finding a proxy,

somebody who is not a blood relative,

just to build on this question. My other question is maybe they're our

same age. They could be in trouble before

us. Right. So maybe you need more than one. And how

do you build that trust and build that conversation?

Well, first of all, let me address a couple of things that you said.

Just because we don't have adult children doesn't mean that we

don't have blood relatives that might fill that gap.

Okay, good point. Those of us that are close emotionally,

hopefully and or physically to

our brothers and sisters who do have children,

those nieces and nephews to me are kind of the first line

of defense. That's who you would go to first.

But they need to know you. You need

to have been close to them as they were growing

up, ideally been in their life somehow,

or at this point in your life, can find a way to help

them because in a way, enlisting the aid of nieces

and nephews. We need to kind of pay it forward.

I'll give you a couple of examples out of my life. I have

helped two of my nieces get through college.

Their parents, my brother and his wife, did not do as

well financially, and so I stepped in and helped

at many junctures. Even though I didn't live very close, I tried to

visit as often as I could. So my nieces will

be involved, but the person I'm closest to

and who I know will be the

closest physically, geographically, to me, is actually a

cousin who's 15 years younger than me.

Okay, so those kinds of possibilities

work. Now, there are even

technical solo agers that I don't even think of as solo

agers. One woman I know is the

fifth of five sisters, and the sisters are all

fairly close in age within a couple of years of each other.

And when my friend got out of

college, she went on to get further education. She became

a scientist, she traveled all over the world, but she never got married

and had kids. However, 20 years ago,

when she came home to California to

stop all the traveling and whatnot, she resumed her

relationship with all of her she must have ten or twelve nieces and

nephews from those other sisters. She's very close to them.

So my guidance to her was just, Linda, talk to them,

talk to them. And that's the key that most of us have to use,

is we need to not only kind

of pay it forward with those nieces and nephews and mentor where we can

help them understand from a different perspective than their

parents, maybe what they're going through. Because people

go through things at every stage of life. And if you have nieces and

nephews in their thirty s and forty s, they're still needing help.

They're probably raising kids now or trying to build a career.

So be in their life. Yeah. And I can tell you, as mom,

they'd rather talk to their aunt than to their mom.

They want my advice. Yeah, that's right.

But these are difficult conversations. Sarah, do you have

guidance or tools that you use to be able to start

these conversations? You won't find a

lot of that specific thing in my book. I do mention it,

but there are some wonderful resources out there. Ellen Goodman,

a journalist that has also written a lot

of books, has headed up

something that I think started about ten years ago called The Conversation Project.

I've heard of that. Yes. So check that

out. That's great guidance. There's an

organization called Compassion and Choices.

They have some good guidance. Remember,

all of these things are leading up to the topic that nobody wants to

discuss, which is death and one

of my crusades is to get people to talk more

about death. It's not like anybody's going to

avoid it. We're all going to get there one of these days.

And so how much better a

life we could lead, how much more peaceful a life we

could lead if we just understand that death is part of life and help people

to talk about it. There's something that's been going

around the world, actually for about the past twelve or 15 years

called Death Cafe, where people get together and just

talk about death, any aspect of death. But the

more you can talk about it, the more you can incorporate

it into your thinking about what this life is all about and

what is some people are terming a good death.

What is that? So talk to

your proxies, your nieces, your nephews,

your younger friends. By the way, I don't mean to say that you

always have to choose a blood relative. Some people really have no blood relatives

to choose from. And then my

next suggestion is look to the organizations you belong to.

And if you don't belong to any organizations, start thinking about joining

some.

Everything from book clubs to hiking

clubs, running groups,

organizations, service organizations, the people you volunteer

with, the places of worship.

Every place of worship I've ever seen, whether it's a synagogue,

a mosque, a church, they all have

groups that cater to people's special

interests. They have new mothers groups, and they

have singles groups, and they have bereavement

groups. That their job is to help people through the stages

of life. So if you

belong to a religious organization, that's a great way

to find people that share your interests

that you might strike up new friendships with that are a little bit younger than

you. A colleague of mine

recently approached a woman that she's been

somehow putting it off for years and years and years,

talking to a friend that was 15 years younger than she,

that they had been very close at one point. Then they worked together and

they kind of lost touch. But she made a point of getting

back together and finally got up the courage to say,

can I put you on my advanced directive?

I just really have nobody else in this area. And she

was absolutely honored. Yeah, and most people

will be they'll be honored that you would trust them like that.

Yeah, that's a good point. It can be frightening, but you can be surprised

at the response.

I want to switch a little bit from talking about the death, although that

is important, and we do need to be able to have those conversations to

talking about the living. So one of the things that you spend a lot

of time with in this book is where to live.

So aging at home or retirement communities,

active adult communities, villages, all these different options which

we all have to consider. But what makes

that a different consideration if you're a solo ager.

It'S a matter of degree.

I've had people say to me things like,

well, I'm going into my 70s now. I live 10

miles out in the woods. I've always liked it that way. I like

my animals more than people.

Why should I move into town?

Why should I develop these friendships you're talking about? I don't

even really like people.

And they'll say, so what's a solution for me? And I have

to look and I'm going to say, it's your choice.

You can live however you want to live and know that

you are actually, by default, making choices about what might

happen in an emergency. So it

is my belief that we are social creatures and I

encourage living in community, whatever that

means to you. And we can define community in so

many different ways, but it doesn't necessarily

mean moving into a senior living facility,

continuing care. Senior living facilities

are very expensive. They're kind of the creme

de la creme. About 6% of the population can afford those

elite living situations. But there's everything

and anything beyond

that. I'm a big fan of home

sharing. I'm a big fan of cohousing.

I'm a big fan of tiny home communities. I'm a really

big fan. Now, you have to understand, I live in California where

the weather is conducive to this, but all over the Southwest

we have thousands of mobile home parks.

And I'm a huge fan of mobile home parks for people that

are downsizing and want to live in a

one level unit where they have

only to walk out their door to find somebody

to talk to. Now, that's true, and that can be true in a condominium

or an apartment building. Sometimes we

have these sort of I call them default retirement

communities of people that have just been living in the same complex for

30, 40 years and they've gotten to know each other and they support one

another, and that's good. But what I don't

like to see, what I think is very dangerous is

this whole concept of aging in place.

If aging in place means to you that you're going to

stay in your two or three story suburban home

out on a cul de sac somewhere where there's no public transportation,

you don't know your neighbors because they're at different stages of

their life or whatever, and there you are.

You've been in that house for 30, 40 years. Maybe if you

have raised kids, maybe you've even raised kids in that house, and your

kids maybe are saying, oh, don't sell the family home, mom. We love

coming home for Thanksgiving. Well, you know,

it's probably time to get rid of that family home. Are you

going to be able to do those stairs safely

when you're in your late seventy s? Eighty s. Ninety s.

And yes, I included know people who

have done that. However,

most of the people that I see doing that successfully do

have kids that come over and kind of fill

in the blanks. They live close by so they help with transportation,

they help with groceries, they help with

the chores around the house. Because one

of the biggest reasons that people do move into some kind of

senior living environment is that they just don't

have the energy and the strength to

take care of that home anymore.

Yeah. And the scary thing is you hear these stories about

someone that has fallen in their home and they

don't live with anybody and they're lying there for days

before somebody happens to come in and check on them.

The repercussions of doing that, the downside

of staying like that is they're pretty dire,

I think. But again,

it's a matter of figuring out what kind of community

you would be happy in. And a community can be too,

however, not your spouse.

I'd like to also encourage people who are married to get

out beyond your spouse and find relationships.

Find friendships, join a book club, join a

walking group, join a golf group, do something

that gets you communicating

and hanging out with people other than your spouse. That's why

I include married people in my definition of solo

ager. Which by the way, has expanded tremendously.

I really used to think of solo agers as just people who

didn't have kids, period. But I had so many people come up to

me and say, well I'm a solo ager, I have kids but they live 6000

miles away. Or I have kids but we're estranged. Or they kind of

failed to launch or in any kinds of any

kind of situation. Right. And you never know

what can happen. Even if you're married, you could still end up

being a solo agent. And the thing about it is,

especially if you don't have kids unless you get hit by the same

bus on the same day, you and your spouse

both need to plan to be solo agers because one of you is going to

be a true solo age or someday.

So you list a bunch of categories.

I think there are six that you say are super important

to be thinking about as you're aging and in

our seventy s. Eighty s. But what would you say are like the top two

or three that we all need to focus on and

really start spending time thinking about?

Yeah, I liken it to that old

three legged stool. It seems like everybody has a three legged stool for something.

And my three legged stool is legal,

financial and social.

Okay? We all need to have our legal act together.

You need to get that will done, get the

advanced directives, choose your proxies,

get those signed, talk to the people that you're

naming as proxies, do all of that.

Set up a trust if your attorney thinks

you need to. The second is financial.

Make sure that you can maintain the lifestyle

that you are enjoying now until you're

100 or however long you think you'll live. I know a

lot of financial planners now are running their

spreadsheets for people out to 103 because it's not unusual for

people to live to 100 anymore. So take

a look at how you're living right now and get

the help of a financial planner. Even if you just pay for an hour or

two of his or her time, say, am I going to be able to sustain

this with the income I have? Whatever that income is

from however long you're going to work, factor some

of those things in, because even if you're still happily

working now, the day may come and

like many people, you're saying, I'm just going to work till I drop.

Well, drop can be defined in a lot of different ways.

Yeah, true. Everybody thinks that they're going to

just have a fatal heart attack one day at their desk or out on

the golf course. But that's not how most people spend their

eighty s and ninety s.

That's a scary question. Too, though, because if you don't

have a big source of income and you're in your 70s,

then you have some other really important decisions, like downsizing.

Downsizing. Living here

in the outskirts of the Bay Area of California,

I often say to people not tongue

in cheek, there is life outside of California,

and life is a lot less expensive outside of

California. Now, lots of younger people

are very much discovering that we've had a huge exodus of

people to Texas and Oklahoma and Arkansas

and places that our generation would just never have

considered. But young people are going, they're going for the jobs, they're going

for the to be able to afford their lifestyle.

So think about where you're living. I even encourage some people,

especially people who

are looking at really low income

levels and saying, I just can't afford to get old. What am I going to

do? And of course, if you've seen nomad land,

you know what can happen. And you

want to join the brigade of people who live out of their RVs

and vans and whatnot. Think about living outside

the confines of the US. There are lovely places

to retire. There's a great organization called International

Living, which their whole business. They have a magazine,

they have a big online presence.

They have people that live in all kinds of countries all over the world that

write about and talk about what it's like to retire there and what it cost

to retire there. So if that's something that really

pushes a button for you, check out International.

Living and they talk about the health. Care options

out there, but they cover it all.

They choose the ten best countries to retire to or

ten best locations to retire to. Every year,

I always write an article for my I write a regular

column for Forbes.com, and I always

cover that every year. What are the top ten this year?

And you'd be surprised. And they cover everything

from what's the health care like? How welcoming is it

for expats?

Can you get a work visa if you want to work down there?

What is the health care situation like?

You name it, they have researched it.

So that could be an interesting option. It's an option.

And then finally the social. What a

lot of people let slide as they get older is they they

lose their their friendships. They lose their relationships with people.

And and I think we after we're out of the workplace,

we have to work a little harder, a little differently to

make sure that we do continue to be social, that we

have people in our lives, whether they come from our

volunteer work or some civic organization or

maybe from our place of worship,

our neighborhood. It can be anywhere. But be careful

of not cocooning too far. We've all

had a taste of cocooning this last year in the pandemic.

Fortunately most boomers now have

had vaccine so at least that's pretty

true in California and other states where friends of

ours live. And we're getting out and resuming those

relationships which I think is really important.

Yeah, I think it's really important too. And I

think we have had that cocooning thing but

I think there are limitations.

Like if you're not really mobile,

if you don't drive after dark,

just reaching out and making new friends.

Those are all great reasons for getting out of that suburban

home and into some

kind of community where you'll be near people,

some of whom do drive. I know a

lot of the mobile home parks.

They have community rooms and they use those community

rooms for potlucks and they usually have a swimming pool and people gather around

there. It's like a club.

Anytime you have a club like atmosphere you're going

to form relationships if you get out there and

at least have the intent of doing so. So here's where it gets

tricky though, right? So we have this mindset. We've been working,

we've been living in this nice house. We have this nice yard and flowers and

all this little stuff and then to think about

giving all that up and it's

my bias, I know that. But to think about moving

into a mobile home park I'm like oh what a step down.

That would feel bad. But maybe somehow

coach me on how would I shift that mindset. You know

what the biggest thing I tell people? And you know what?

It might not be a mobile home park. It might be a really lovely condominium

complex somewhere closer to a downtown center.

I have a number of colleagues who have kind of decamped

out of the suburbs into a more urban environment where there's

transportation and again where there are people right next door.

Go visit some of these places. Just go

walk around. If it's

somewhere that you have to get special permission to enter, especially now with

COVID Get that permission. I tell people to

do that. With regard to senior living communities too,

go look at what an active adult community

looks like. Active adult communities are the old

del web of the kind

of revamped for a more

modern day. Some of the latest ones that I get a kick

out of were built in Florida on Jimmy

Buffett's model.

It's for parrot heads. It's for people that are Jimmy Buffett fans

called Latitude Margaritaville. Those are active

adult communities. You have to be 55 to move in

there, and boy, people can't move into them fast enough.

That's great. So there are those kind of communities

all over the country, predominantly in the Southwest,

but you'll find those kinds of communities that look more

like a condominium structure than a cluster of a

couple of thousand homes around a lake or something. But they're

just urban home. They'll have to pull you out of their feet first. I've had

that enough times. And Daras

mentions tiny homes. You also mentioned cohousing. What is

that? Cohousing is a grassroots

effort by usually one

person or a small group of people who want

to develop what usually looks like

a condominium set up, where they and their friends

and people that they that also are interested and

that they invite in live together. It's not a commune.

Everybody has their own unit, like their own condominium unit,

but it's

for people who want to build community. So they always eat

at least two or three meals together every week.

They have meetings about what

they need to do in the community. They take care of the community.

They usually have elaborate gardens,

and it's driven by the residents,

the people who live there, the homeowners. And it's a homeowner

homeownership model, generally not a rental

model, although I know some cohousing communities

have a couple of units that are rented out.

But it comes under the umbrella of

intentional community. The old intentional communities

used to be mostly religious or guided

by some lifestyle choice. Now many

of them are just simply cohousing. There are several architects in

the country that do nothing but build cohousing developments.

Easy. To find more information online, go to cohousing.org

or cohousing.com.

You'll find just everything you ever want to know.

You'll see a map of where they all are in the country. There's several hundred

of them and what stage of development they're in.

To me, it's a wonderful concept now, by the way.

They are multigenerational, most of them. There are some that are being

built to be elder cohousing, but the vast

majority of cohousing communities are multigenerational.

People raise kids there. Nice.

So we are getting close to time, Sarah, and there's so much

to still talk about. So could you give us like two or three

what you would say are the most important things people should do

today, right now, to start planning for Aging

and Solo Aging. Well, I would think about that three legged

stool. How far

along are you in your planning? Have you done your

legal planning, your estate planning?

Set up a dance directive? Set up powers of attorney?

Written a will? If you're thinking, oh, I don't want to do

that. Those attorneys are so expensive.

You can find legal advice in

a less expensive way. One way of doing that is

going through your county office

on aging. They usually have attorneys, not on staff, but attorneys

that they know work at a lesser rate for

people that really can't afford their services any other way.

So there's that, and there's seeing

a financial planner, getting that person to run that spreadsheet for

you to see how you're going to do financially for the rest of your life

and then assessing your

social situation.

Do I have a handful, at least of friends, people I can

call? You have two or three people you

could call at 02:00 a.m. In the morning if you somehow needed them.

Yeah. Hopefully my sister will answer

the phone if I call her. I hope so.

I know I wanted to share how people can get in

touch with you. Sarah has a website.

Sarahzepgeber.com and you also have

other things that you are involved

with. I've seen you post on some of them. So if people are

interested in some of those, will they find the links on your website?

Yes, you'll certainly find links for how to buy the book.

You can also find me and a lot of contact information

and a lot of videos

of me speaking. I do a lot of speaking engagements. So if

you have an organization that you think could you

find this information useful, call on me to do that. Look me up on

LinkedIn. That's a really good source of information on me and on what

I do. So I think both the website and LinkedIn are

the two best places. Okay. I highly recommend your

book. It's one

thing to get it, it's another thing to really do some of the

things that Sarah recommends. And like you said, visit those

places. That's my hardest one. I've got to do

that. All right. So I wanted to

also remind people that hey Boomer is

supported by you and occasionally

by sponsors, but mostly by you and your participation

in events and also by your support

by buying me a cup of coffee. So this is a

website where you can go, you can contribute anywhere from ten dollars to seventy

five dollars. And it just helps keep Hay Boomer going.

So please go in and buymeacoffee.com

at Hayboomer four one three.

And now I would like to tell you all about our guests

for next week. And I say guests because we're actually having two.

It's Eva Houseman and Kim

Athen, and they are a mother daughter duo

who started something called the Mother's Day Movement.

They read a book called Half the sky by

Nicholas Christophe and Cheryl Wudon.

You're shaking your head. You've read it? I haven't read it. I've heard about

it, though. Good things about it. It is a powerful book about

the oppression and exploitation of women around the world.

Not comfortable to read at all,

but opened your eyes, and as they read it,

they thought we spend so much money,

billions every year on cards and flowers and

chocolates for our mothers. That what if

we took some of that money to help these women?

Not just around the world, but the charity they're working with?

This year is in our country, in Navajo Nation. Who doesn't have

any clean running water? So it's going to be a fascinating

conversation. They are very passionate

about what they're doing and how they're doing it.

So join us for that. And I always

like to end with a quote from C. S.

Lewis where he says, you are never too old to

set another goal or dream a new dream.

Thank you, Sarah, for joining us today. This has really been informative

and important conversation. Thank you so much for having me,

Wendy. My pleasure. And thank you all for

joining us. You are the reason that hey Boomer

is here. I love you. I hope to see you all next