Jodi Tolman Stopped by Sharon TV’s “The Law, Your Money and You”
Whitney Place Assisted Living and Memory Care at Sharon Community Sales Director Jodi Tolman recently appeared on the Sharon Community Television program The Law, Your Money, and You to discuss navigating various aspects of the senior living world and some of the important ideas people should consider as they advance in age.
While sitting with hosts Roberta Saphire, an attorney in Sharon and Camille Barron, a healthcare advisor and financial coordinator in Sharon, Tolman explained the difference between various types of senior living services, such as independent living, assisted living, memory care and skilled nursing, and how to navigate that continuum — from making decisions about where to move, to exploring the various options for funding those communities.
She also highlighted how senior living has evolved significantly in recent years, and the archaic misconceptions about senior living communities that scare many people away when they could actually benefit from living there.
“Many people of our parents’ generation, for example, have a tremendous misconception of what senior living is about,” Tolman said.
For many, she said, their only frame of reference about senior living is institutional nursing homes, and many older adults tell their children “Whatever you do, promise me you’ll never put me in a nursing home.”
However, she said, “baby boomers are becoming much better educated and aware of the fact that senior living can be an absolutely fabulous lifestyle – it’s almost more like resort living than anything else you might compare it to.”
With the addition of other types of senior living communities such as independent living and assisted living, the industry is trending in a way that people are moving in at younger ages, which Tolman says is a wise decision.
“What I really try to impress upon people of any age is the profound wisdom in not waiting for a crisis to make a move like this,” she said.
Because senior living offers so many services on site, people living there no longer have to rely on relatives or other services to help them out, so, she said, senior living “does not mean the end of independence, the end of autonomy, the end of control – it can actually mean the opposite.”
