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Pick the Right Senior Care Experts Our goal with this post is to help answer these questions—and many others—that you will surely face as you guide your parents through the closing years of their lives: How do you choose the Right in-home companion care advisors who will help you decide whether it's possible to keep your mother at home? How much medical care will she need and where? Where do you find an elder law attorney who will help you understand matters like health care proxies and living wills, procedures for using your mother's assets to pay for her care, and taxes? What kind of care can your mother, and you, afford? What long-term care insurance, if any, does she have, and will it cover in-home adult care as well as nursing home care? How does the government help? What are the warning signs that an organization or institution you are dealing with is directing you in a manner that is more in its own self-interest than in your mother's best interest? And, of course, as you, your mother, and the rest of your family go through the process of settling your mother into the right support system, you will begin to think of your own future. The odds are high that your mother's current situation will someday be yours. What should you be doing now to prepare yourself for that likelihood? Caring for our seniors has changed almost beyond recognition over the past generation. A few decades ago, there were really only two choices for protecting our parents and other older adults in their declining years: we cared for them ourselves at home, or they went to a nursing home. The choice was clear, but definitely agonizing as well. If parents stayed at home, the children caring for them were often stretched beyond their physical, financial, and emotional capabilities. If the nursing home was chosen, the seniors often felt abandoned, and correspondingly, their children felt gnawing guilt about their parents' anguish.