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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Financial planning for social care in later life
— the 'shadow' of fourth age dependency | | Author(s) | Debora Price, Dinah Bisdee, Tom Daly |
| Journal title | Ageing and Society, vol 34, no 3, March 2014 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press, March 2014 |
| Pages | pp 388-410 |
| Source | journals.cambridge.org/aso |
| Keywords | Preparation [retirement] ; Financial services [older people] ; Income [older people] ; Costs [care] ; Octogenarians ; Qualitative Studies. |
| Annotation | As policy makers in the United Kingdom and many other countries grapple with financing the needs of an ageing population, financial planning for social care in later life is high on political agendas. The authors draw on qualitative research with older couples in the United Kingdom about their intimate money practices to analyse the day-to-day meanings attributed to money, saving and consumption in the context of financial planning for later life and death. The authors find that expenditure on funerals and home adaptations is discussed, negotiated and planned, as is 'downsizing' to release capital from the home for financing day-to-day expenses and leisure expenses. These outcomes are within easy contemplation and are indeed money practice of older couples. In contrast, end-of-life planning for domiciliary or residential care was virtually non-existent across all socio-economic groups; and couples employed a range of techniques to avoid making these discussions 'real'. Costs (while well known) are seen as astronomical, details are scarce, intensive domiciliary care is never discussed, and death is seen as preferable to residential care. The authors theorise antipathy to care planning as a product of social and psychological construction of the 'fourth age' as a period of abjection, and therefore 'wasted' expenditure. Exhortations by policy makers for individuals to consider care costs will be ineffective without recognition of the cultural transformation of later life. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-150514009 A |
| Classmark | GA: J: JF: QDC: BBM: 3DP |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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