Pay Dirt is Slate’s money advice column. Have a question? Send it to Kristin and Ilyce here. (It’s anonymous!)
Dear Pay Dirt,
My husband and I turned 80 this year. He is in remission from a cancer that has no cure, so we fully expect that our future will hold more debilitating treatments. He is also in the beginning stages of mild cognitive impairment, and his symptoms have been increasing. But he has a plan for the future that I can’t get behind.
Recently, we took some expensive trips that we had deferred during the pandemic and his cancer treatment. Now my husband wants to continue with this level of vacation spending on trips to faraway countries for once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
I feel this will put our future financial security at risk and that we should be scaling back on our expenditures in order to be prepared for the possibility of his needing expensive nursing home or in-home care in the future.
We do not have long-term care insurance, and our pension, Social Security, and IRA distributions make our income too high to qualify for Medicaid. Because we married late in life and both have children from previous marriages, we have kept our finances separate, but if one of us were to require expensive elder care, it isn’t likely that either of us would have sufficient funds to cover that expense without substantial help from the other.
I am in good health, but know that at my age, a fall or other accident could make it difficult for me to provide all the home care he might need in the future.
I understand that he wants to enjoy his life as much as possible before his condition makes that impossible. But I worry about becoming impoverished in the sense that, though I would still have enough income to meet my basic living expenses, I would be unable to afford nursing home or at-home care for myself if the need were to arise.
How can I find a way to balance his desire for checking things off his bucket list with my desire to preserve my financial stability?
—My Husband’s Dreams Are Giving Me Nightmares
Dear Nightmares,
This is tough. It’s not like you and your husband have radically different values, but you’re both living in slightly different realities right now. For him, there seems to be a short window of time where he can still travel and enjoy it, while you’re dealing with the very real financial issues of long-term care and health treatments. You’re both being reasonable, but it’s time to look at some hard numbers.
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In other words, you need a detailed financial plan that lets you see what’s possible. A financial planner or elder‑law attorney can help with this. They can model how long your assets might last under different scenarios, and whether programs like Medicaid could ever become part of the picture—even if your income from pensions, IRAs, and Social Security currently seems too high. The rules for couples are complicated, but you might be surprised by what’s possible.
Once you have a plan, the conversation isn’t about whether or not you should travel but about what kind of travel you can reasonably afford with this plan. Maybe that means shorter trips, or prioritizing one major trip instead of several of them, or maybe it just means setting up a specific travel budget where you save a certain amount of money over the next two to three years. The point is, with a plan, you’re no longer debating over abstractions or hypotheticals—you can actually make informed decisions together. Decisions that let you enjoy your time now, but not at the expense of your future.
—Kristin
More Money Advice From Slate
My fiancé and I (both early 30s) have lived together for several years. He is smart, funny, and a generally gregarious guy. He is in an industry where he has been making over six figures for at least six years. I, on the other hand, finally finished a doctoral program and worked a few side jobs to barely make 34K each year. Rent is high in NYC and I’ve gone into a fair bit of debt living with him and keeping up with his lifestyle. I moved to his state so he could be closer to work even though I had to commute over three hours a day for years. Now that I have a job that pays much more (but still a third of what he makes). Here is the issue: He insists we split rent evenly.
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