There are options when it comes to affording assisted living care for seniors.

Discovering the perfect assisted living facility is meaningless, of course, unless you can actually afford to use its services. One of the reasons why it took so long for assisted living to catch on with the public is because private pay was the only way to finance such care until very recently. No Medicare. No Medicaid. Only long-term care insurance, an expensive commodity itself, became available as a hoped-for alternative to the prospect of spending a lifetime of savings for care. The problem with insurance, however, was that many seniors didn’t think about applying for it until they were unable to pass an insurance exam.

Fortunately, the situation has changed drastically for the better in the last few years. Now there are not only Medicaid options, but also ones that involve the Veterans Administration, Social Security, Medicare and even Tax Credit programs. It is now truly a new era in affordability for assisted living.

Rather than go into detail about each of these programs, I will instead direct you to a superb article, written by Richard Peck, that explains thoroughly all of them as well as many other financing alternatives. This article refers to a website named PayingForSeniorCare.com, and is the best of its kind on the Internet that I have been able to find. Like so many other innovations in this field, it grew out of the frustrations of an adult child and his spouse in finding a suitable facility for his grandfather that they could afford. Luckily for the rest of us, he was a website developer and she was an estate planning attorney. After going through a painful learning curve, they decided to create a comprehensive tool that would explain all pertinent information on the subject for the uninitiated. Best of all, they included a “resource locator tool” in their website, that uses a questionnaire to create a listing of sources that answer your particular needs in your own community!

Although the developers of this website, Alex and Carol Guerrero, continue to improve the website on a regular basis, it is already an extremely useful resource for those who find understanding this subject to be a daunting challenge. That is to say, I recommend it highly for all of us that want or need to upgrade their knowledge of the many new options now available to us.