February 11, 2026
A Big
Change Is Coming
This post has
very little to do about the travels of Val and Dave, but it has very much to do
with our lives and the changes that are coming.
It will probably not be very interesting to read by anyone but us and
way too long, but as I’ve said before, this is my journal, and I wanted to
document what has been going on in our lives that has led us to this point.
Our New
Home
The short
version is we are moving to the Wisteria at Warner Center, a Continuing Care Residential Community in the
Woodland Hills area of Los Angles. From
Google: “A Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC), or Life Plan Community,
is a comprehensive senior living option providing independent living, assisted
living, memory care and skilled nursing on one campus, allowing residents to
"age in place" for life.”. As
the description implies, this is probably the last place you will ever live and
that’s the whole idea. Rather than moving
from facility to facility as you age and need more care you stay on the same
campus, so if your spouse is still able to live independently and you need
memory care, you will remain close by, and they will be able to easily visit
you.
The Wisteria
has what is called a “Type A” contract.
In a Type A contract, the initial deposit is quite high, although 75% is
refunded to you if you leave the facility or to your estate when you are
gone. The monthly fee is also quite
high, but the benefit of that is that monthly fee is the same for the rest of
your life (there are usually small yearly increases) no matter what level of
care you need. With the average monthly
cost of a skilled nursing facility in California running between $10,000 and
$15,000 a month per person, this means a lot. That
means that no matter what level of care you need, the monthly payment stays the
same and is for both of you. Many
facilities offer a “Type B” contract where the deposit and monthly fee are
less, but then when you need more care you pay more for it and it becomes per
person, so despite the higher initial cost, we prefer the “Type A”.
Why Are We
Moving?
So, what led
us to this point? That goes back to the
mid 2000’s and my parents. Back in the
1990’s my dad started to develop dementia.
At first it wasn’t too bad, but as time went on his memory got worse and
worse, but my mother kept everything together.
That changed in 2006 when my mother turned 81 and fell and broke her
hip. My brother and I both took turns
staying with my dad and helping out while she recovered, but we both could see
that things were not quite right. It the
ensuing months we noticed that the house wasn’t being kept clean (my mother was
always a fastidious housekeeper), bills weren’t being paid, and many other
things were not as they should be.
At this time,
we started talking to them about moving to a senior living community, but they
resisted saying everything was OK. We
finally talked them into visiting some places, and while most weren’t very
appealing, we found a brand new CCRC in Thousand Oaks, CA called University Village
(it was right next to Cal Lutheran University) that was very nice; it seemed
like a resort more than a retirement home and my parents both liked it and were
enthusiastic. Unfortunately, that didn’t
last as when it came to actually committing, they just didn’t want to leave
their home. Finally, as things continued
to deteriorate, we made several more visits to University Village and with my
brother and I putting more pressure on them, they reluctantly agreed to move
and in 2008 they became residents. They
lived there until my mother died in 2018 and my dad in 2019. They went through every stage of care there -
independent living, assisted living, memory care and finally skilled nursing.
This whole
process got Val and I thinking. Before
we went through this with my parents, we didn’t give much serious thought to
what we would do for our own retirement years.
One thing we saw was that growing older can be very difficult, you may
be lucky and able to live out your years in your own home, but statistics say
that’s unlikely. The other thing was
that by the time my parents were ready to move, they weren’t really capable of
doing it themselves. My brother, Doug and his
wife Janis and Val and I had to step in and do almost everything, from arranging for
movers, packing their belongings, handling the details of them selling their
house and a host of other things. At the
time my brother lived an hour away from them and we lived almost four hours away,
so it took a lot of missed work and inconvenience for all of us to do this. We were happy to do this, my parents had done
everything for us, and we would do anything for them, but I know the last thing
they would have wanted was for this to happen, but they just didn’t plan for
this. As my mother said, “we thought
we’d just ride off into the sunset”, but the reality is that doesn’t usually
happen.
Anyway, to
make a short story long, this made a big impression on us. We had a first-hand view of what happens when
you don’t plan what you are going to do as you age and we decided this wasn’t
going to happen to us, especially since we don’t have any children to step in
and help. I don’t know what would have
happened to my parents if it weren’t for my brother, his wife, Val and me.
The Villaggio
We love the
California Central Coast where we live, but there are no CCRC’s in our county
and the closest with a Type A contract is University Village where my parents
were, so we would have to move out of the area and that was very disappointing
and sad for us. That changed in 2016
when we saw an article in the newspaper about a new CCRC being planned locally. We immediately found out more details and
attended the first meeting of potential residents. This was evidently something our county
needed as over the next couple of years the list of potential residents who put down a deposit grew to
over 400.
This first
phase was being financed entirely by future residents, and Val and I decided to join the investors. It was a risky
investment, but we didn’t risk anything we couldn't afford to lose, and we wanted
to help get this built. The thing that
makes San Luis Obispo such a nice place to live is the reason there would be a
problem for the Villaggio; it is very hard to build anything in the city. The city council was all in favor of this
project, but they couldn’t make it any easier for the Villaggio to be built. The EIR took over three years with numerous
things having to be done and redone, the rules were changed and new
restrictions were added. Because of
this, the forty investors were being asked to loan more money to keep things
going, which most of us did because, being future residents, we really wanted
the Villaggio to succeed. Finally, in
the spring of 2020, the EIR was approved by the San Luis Obispo City Council,
but the timing couldn’t have been worse as COVID pandemic was just getting
started.
Once the EIR
was approved, the next step was to find a joint venture partner to take the
Villaggio up to the construction stage, but because of COVID, investment money
had dried up. Before COVID, getting an
investor didn’t seem like a problem, but now it was. The search went on for a couple more years,
but in 2023 the company had run out of money, and a vote was taken by the
investors on whether to continue and put more money in or dissolve the company;
sadly, the vote was to dissolve the company with only a few of us voting to
continue.
This ended
our dream of being able to spend the rest of our lives in the area; we not only
lost our money, but the worst thing was we would have to move out of the
area. Some of our friend said, why don’t
you just stay in the area and see what happens, but we knew that wasn’t the
right thing to do, we knew we couldn’t count on just riding gently “into the
sunset”.
Our Search
for a Home
With the
Villaggio project failing we felt almost a sense of panic; here we were, 75
years old and suddenly our plan for the future had fallen apart. There was always University Village, but we
also wanted to explore what else might be available. We did our research online and found a number
of places and narrowed it down to a few and visited them or talked to them on
the phone. Val has two nieces and a nephew
in Oregon, so we looked at a couple of places up there near Portland, but they
weren’t quite what we were looking for and when it came down to it, neither of
us wanted to leave California. We have
always liked Davis, California and we had friends up there and there was a CCRC
in Davis we really liked, but decided it was just too far away from
our families.
There was a
CCRC in Santa Barbara called Valle Verde that was nearer to us, but we had not
pursued it because it had a Type B contract, but after not finding anything
that met our needs we decided to visit and see what it was like. It was built over 50 years ago, but the
location was great and the tree covered grounds were beautiful. The resident housing was either single or
duplex cottages which was nice. It
didn’t quite fit our needs, but we needed to find some place, so we put down
our deposit and got on the waiting list.
Unfortunately, many of the other future residents of the Villaggio had
the same thought we did, so the waiting list for the units we really liked was
ten years. That was out of the question
for us, so we picked several other places, but even then, the waiting list was
three or four years, which was still pretty long for us, but at least we had an
option now.
After getting
on the waiting list for Valle Verde, we continued our search and decided to
visit University Village where my parents were.
Thousand Oaks where University Village is located is in Ventura County
just west of the Los Angeles area and is still a pretty urban area, but it is a
little better than being in the city and it’s located adjacent to open
land. It was still a very nice place and
was just what we wanted, but after spending ten years visiting my parents and
seeing them slowly fade, there were just too many memories there and we just
couldn’t see ourselves living there no matter how much it was what we were
looking for.
We Find
Our New Home
My brother
Doug lives in Granada Hill, California that is in the San Fernando Valley in
the western part of Los Angeles and is near Woodland Hills where we grew
up. A couple of years ago he heard about
a new CCRC being built by the same company that owned University Village. It was in the Warner Center area of Woodland
hills called the Wisteria and he and his wife Janis had signed up to move there
when it opened. Doug and Janis are three
years younger than Val and I, but they had gone through the same thing we did
with my parents, and had reached the same decision as us – you have to make
your plans when you are young enough to do them on your own and then follow
through before you are unable to make the move on your own.
They had been
encouraging Val and I to check out the Wisteria, but we had both said we
definitely were not moving back to a big city.
After visiting University Village, we decided to pay at least a visit to
the Wisteria sales office and see what they had to offer. It turns out that except for the location, we
really liked the Wisteria. At that point
though, our first choice was still in Santa Barbara based solely on the
location. A few months later after coming
back from our Alaskan Cruise, I called Valle Verde in Santa Barbara and asked
how we were progressing on the waiting list, and we were disappointed to hear
we were still three or four years out.
We were now 76 years old, and we definitely didn’t want to wait until we
were 80 to move so we began to seriously consider the Wisteria.
We liked the
Wisteria, it would be brand new, we would be neighbors with my brother, and his
two daughters had graciously said that they planned to help us out as we aged
just as they would their own parents. We
were very grateful and touched by that and realized that with
no children of our own, this was a big deal and very important. After much discussion, late in the summer of
2024, we made another trip to the Wisteria and put down our deposit; we were
now future residents of the Wisteria.
The next step
was to pick out what apartment unit we wanted for our home. There is a complete facility map that shows
all the apartment units plus a list of the deposit amount and monthly fees and
from that we filled out a priority list with our top 20 choice of units. The problem for us was that we were getting
into this late in the process and would be way down on the priority list and
sure enough, just before we left on our New Mexico road trip in the fall, we
were assigned a unit that wasn’t even on our list, all of those on our list had
already been taken. They told us not to
worry, the priority list we had filled out would remain active and sure enough,
while we were in Santa Fe, one of the units on our priority list became
available. Unfortunately, it was near
the bottom of our list, but at least it was on our list. This was better, but we still weren’t very
happy and had a few reservations about this unit, but then a miracle
happened. Just before we left on our
Tales of the South Pacific Cruise, we were offered a unit that was at the top
of our list and we immediately said yes, we wanted it. We never expected this to happen and now we
have exactly what we wanted.
All that was
happening was great, but we were still only reluctantly happy as we still
weren’t / aren’t happy about moving back to an urban area, but our outlook has
changed a bit. As I have gotten older, I
have accepted that I can’t do a lot of the things I used to do, but in many
ways, I was in denial about accepting some of the hard facts about aging and
thought despite the limitations of age, I could just keep doing the same
things. I got a glimpse of reality on
our recent cruise though, as getting pneumonia scared me. When I was first diagnosed I thought of all
the stories of how dangerous it is for old people to get pneumonia and then
when the doctor started talking about the possibility of having to be evacuated
off the ship if it got too bad and warning me that they probably couldn’t do
that because of the remote area we were in it scared me and I got a real dose
of reality and felt pretty vulnerable.
Luckily, I never got very sick and recovered pretty quickly, but it was
a wake-up call for me that as I now approach 80 years old, I am definitely not
the same person I was even ten years ago.
Also, while
we were gone, the pump failed for our pond, and I had to work on that when we
got home, and I realized I was just tired of having to do the constant work
that’s required to keep up a house. We
love where we live and one of our favorite things to do is to sit out by our
pond on a warm summer afternoon or evening and relax to the sound of our
waterfall, but as I said, I am very tired of having to maintain all of
that. So, what this is leading to is
that we are ready to move on to the next (and final) stage in our lives. We are not very excited about moving back to
the Los Angeles area, but we are looking forward to moving and starting this
new adventure.
This has
turned into a much longer post than I had ever imagined, but as I wrote it I
wanted to get our whole journey to reach this point written down. If anyone is still reading at this point, I
don’t know whether to congratulate you or feel sorry for you, but I’m almost
done.
The Wisteria
is now almost completed with the first move-ins scheduled for late June or
early July. We are scheduled to move
sometime in August, but with construction, inspections and certifications, you
never know what delays might occur, but the Wisteria is certain that everyone
will be moved in by October. For us that
means this year will be dedicated to preparing for our move. Val had her hip replacement three weeks ago
and is recovering nicely but still has a way to go. We met with our realtor last week to get
things moving on selling the house, and yesterday we met with a company that
the Wisteria hired to provide services to facilitate downsizing, planning,
packing, moving and anything else that we may need. This service comes with a fee depending on
what you need, but I think Val and I can take care of most things. We have started downsizing already, but we
have a long way to go on that, so as you can see, we have a very busy year
ahead of us.
We are not
done traveling and hope to continue. Val
and I turn 78 this year and are creeping towards 80 (it feels like we are
rushing towards 80), so we do have to recognize that we can’t do a lot of
things we used to do, but we still do love to travel. We do have our 70-day Grand South America
Cruise coming up next January, but I’m beginning to wonder if that will work
out for us. If we move when we think we
are we should have plenty of time to settle in, but I’m beginning to realize
that we are going to be so busy this year, we won’t have much time to plan and
decide what we want to do. We could get
away with that on our last cruise, but this upcoming cruise will definitely
require more planning. Our final payment
isn’t due until August so, we have until then to decide what to do, but we
really want to do this cruise, so we’ll hope for the best.
I’ve finally
come to the end of this treatise and if anyone has read it this far and is in a
similar situation to what we are in, maybe it’ll be food for thought, but in
any case, we will definitely see you on down the road.
