Old age is a subject that most of us don’t like to think about. But it’s an important stage of life — and you might spend far longer in it than you think. As ROBIN POWELL explains, it’s best to plan for life in your later years while you’re still young enough to do something about it.
There was a song made popular by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians in 1949 with a chorus that goes like this:
“The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think”
Herb Magidson, who wrote the lyrics, had it right. We humans like to kid ourselves we’re younger than we are. The truth is, however fresh-faced we like to think we look, most of us over the age of 45 are closer to the end of our lives than we are to the beginning.
That should be all the reason we need to take Magidson’s advice and enjoy life to the full.
Don’t leave it too late
But there’s another lesson to learn here, and it’s this: if we keep pretending we’re still in our mid-30s, the danger is we never confront the reality that one day we’ll be old. As a result, we fail to plan, and by the time we realise what we should have done to prepare, it’s far too late.
How refreshing, then, it was to read Joan Bakewell’s new book, The Tick of Two Clocks. Bakewell, you may recall, was a distinguished BBC television journalist and presenter. A Labour peer, she’s now aged 88.
Her latest book is essentially a sequel to her memoir Stop the Clocks, published in 2016. It’s all about a journey she’s been on — the process of confronting the fact that she’s entered the final stages of her life and that her health is likely to deteriorate in the years ahead.
A home to end her days in
For now, Bakewell is still in full possession of her faculties — physical, mental and emotional. But she’s made the decision to leave the large family house in Primrose Hill that’s been her home for more than half a century to a single-storey house she plans to end her days in.
“Old age is no longer a blip in the calendar,” she explains, “(or) a few declining years before the end. (It) is now a major and important segment of life: it should command as much thought — even anxiety — as teenagers give to exam results and young marrieds to planning their future.
“I am moving on towards the end of my life. In a literal sense I have moved from my home of 50-odd years into another… the home where I will live out my days.”
Not a comfortable read
Emotionally, The Tick of Two Clocks is not a comfortable read. Saying goodbye to a house full of memories, and getting rid of books, pictures and other mementoes, takes resilience and courage. Having spent much of this year emptying my parents’ house — my childhood home — and then closing door on it for the last time, I know the pain she must have felt all too well.
But it’s also a strangely positive book. After all, Bakewell is facing up to something most of us don’t even want to think about it. She’s putting sensible plans in place and taking deliberate steps to make the most of her situation. In doing so, she’s choosing to live life on her own terms, until the very end.
Again, her story chimes with recent experiences of my own. My wife and I are currently caring for my mum, who, at the age of 83, has Alzheimer’s. The decisions that she and the rest of the family have had to make as her health has declined have been all the more difficult because neither she, nor we, had planned for them.
“I’m thinking ahead”
Bakewell, though, has planned for her old age in detail. “I don’t have a live-in carer right now, nor do I expect to need one soon,” she explains.
“But I’m thinking ahead. Realistically, there will come a time when I can’t cope. I have the opportunity to turn a number of the smaller rooms into a self-contained bedsit to accommodate a live-in carer.”
All of us are heading, or at least we hope we are, towards old age, and there’s much we can learn from Bakewell’s book. Most importantly, she reminds us that we need to think about what we want from our later years and, in particular, how we can use the money we have to make that period as fulfilling and comfortable as possible.
Problems around money
As the author says, “getting old confronts us with specific problems around money. They are quite basic: will I have enough? Where will it come from? Will it meet all my needs? More than has ever been necessary before, hard sums must be done.”
So, if you haven’t done already, consider hiring a financial planner. A good planner acts as an objective expert who can ask you searching questions, devise a plan and, perhaps most importantly, challenge you to stick to the plan if you’re ever tempted to stray off course.
And remember, it’s later than we think. So don’t keep putting your old-age planning off. Joan Bakewell did a great job when she finally got round to it, but she actually left it very late. Ideally we should start the process in our 50s, when we still have the time and earning power to shape the later life we want.
ROBIN POWELL is a journalist and author and RockWealth’s Head of Client Education
The Tick of Two Clocks by Joan Bakewell is published by Virago.
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