EPISODE 1 - Meet Team Senior. Discover who we are, how we can help, and what sets us apart.

Society grooms us to prepare for retirement, but what about life beyond retirement – when our health begins to decline, and aging becomes more difficult. We are the experts in navigating resources and long term care options.

Transcript

Hi, this is Jamie Callahan with the Team Senior Podcast. Our goal is to simplify aging society, grooms us to plan for retirement, but what about life beyond retirement, where the rubber meets the road? Perhaps you've had a stroke or you've been diagnosed with cancer, or maybe you're forgetting things and now you have dementia.

That's our area of expertise, and we are here to share our insight. And now the Team Senior podcast. Hello everyone. I wanna welcome you to the first podcast for Team Senior. My name is Jamie Callahan, and I wanna share what led me to being passionate about life beyond retirement. Many folks inquire about what set me down this journey, so I wanna share some things with you.

When I was in my twenties. My grandparents were both very ill. They had unique diseases, each of them, and helping them to navigate the long-term care spectrum, the medical industry, the healthcare industry. Just trying to figure out what their insurance would and would not pay for, took hours, in fact, months of coming alongside them to figure out what was gonna work and what wasn't going to work.

At the time, I didn't have all of the answers, and it really caused me to pause and ask myself, what are families doing that don't have someone in my role advocating for them? Someone that has the time to make all of those phone calls, do all of the research, ensure that, that their family or their loved ones are getting the absolute best of everything.

The reality of it is there isn't really anyone. I've been doing this for the last 10 years and I am still learning something new every single day. That causes me to stop and ask myself how I was doing my job in the days prior without knowing what I just learned. It is taken literally 10 years of building the knowledge and the foundation to be able to guide seniors through what is available to them in southern Oregon.

I started Team Senior in 2016 because I recognized that I had all of this information and at this point I wasn't doing anything with it. I wanted this to be a free service to folks so that they never had to ask themselves in the time of crisis or working under duress if this was something that they were gonna have to pay for.

Could they afford this in addition to all of the other money that they're spending right now in the hospital or foreign assisted living and. It took a while, but I developed a business that receives compensation through marketing budgets from all of the different organizations that we work with, and it allows us to provide services to seniors and their families in southern Oregon.

Totally free of charge. There is never a charge to a senior or family when we're working with them, and that was really important to me. I want to be. A resource that people can come to and not feel like they are bearing the burden of an additional expense. For them. Navigating life beyond retirement is really complicated.

I have said over the last couple of years, society grooms us to. Spend our entire life saving money for retirement, but nobody really talks about life beyond retirement. And because that's the area that I work in and I see people facing these challenges every single day, it's something I've become really passionate about.

There are many challenges that people never consider just simply living in the gap, for example, where you get enough money in social security, but you don't have the care needs that warrant qualifying for Medicaid to move into assisted living. I. There are all kinds of things that are never really taken into consideration or married couples, for example.

Most married couples don't know that the spouse that requires care can actually, can, I want you to hear that can qualify for Medicaid. Even though the system, like the Department of Human Services might groom you to believe that you cannot, and there are loopholes to all of these things, and we have spent years uncovering and investigating.

Coming alongside families to get them every little thing that they deserve in the process of not just aging, but looking at needing to move into assisted living or memory care or discharging from the hospital. That's another big pain point for us. We work with people every day that are discharging from the hospital and.

The priority from the hospital's perspective, and it's not really their fault, but because Medicare will only pay for a certain amount of time in the hospital, they are faced with having to expedite your discharge. And what that means is that their job is to get you out. They're not always looking at what is best case scenario for you.

They're looking at how they can get you out of the hospital in the fastest possible manner. Part of the reason why we come to you in your living room, or we come to you in the hospital is because it is so important to meet with you in person. Oftentimes, you are very stressed out about what is the next step, what do you need to do in consideration of you or your loved ones or your spouse, and you don't wanna be separated from them.

When we share information on the phone, we have found. And over again that you might write it down, but now your adult daughter has come over and you're trying to explain it to them and it's confusing. It is very confusing because not any two cases are the same. Everybody's case is unique and different and specific to what you need.

So when we come to you most often, we will ask that all of the important parties are there to engage in the conversation. So that would be your power of attorney or your adult children, or maybe it is just you, but we are there working with you face to face, helping you through the process, supporting you, holding your hand.

Physically taking you an hour car to go and look at assisted living communities so that you are not alone when you need to ask those very complicated questions like, can you accommodate a vegetarian diet? A lot of communities might immediately say yes, but the reality of it is all they're going to do is omit the meat.

We know already because we've done all of that research where to take you if you're a vegetarian. Certain communities really can accommodate a vegetarian diet, but it's so important for us to. Support you through the process in person because there are so many things to consider and it's going to change every day.

You, you may not be able to anticipate that right now, but when we meet with you the first time, you might feel like you need certain things and in two or three days because now you have a new diagnosis from your doctor, or now you've discovered that you have long-term care health insurance and you didn't know that those are all things that we're gonna sit down with you and help you make those difficult.

Phone calls to your insurance company or to your doctor or to the assisted living community to ask them to take some measurements of the room because you wanna know if you can take your bed and your dresser. Those are all things that we help you navigate. We are so excited to be able to share with you that we plan to continue this podcast over the next few months and years.

We'll be leaning on you to help us discover what do you wanna know about, what can we help you with? We will eventually get to the point where we're taking phone calls, where you can call in and we can answer your questions. On the spot. We also hope to have some professionals come in, people that can help you explore veterans' benefits that you might not know exist.

Doctors that can help you understand diagnoses and medications and maybe some drug interactions that you're not familiar with. All kinds of things. How to navigate Medicaid, that's a huge one. I hear all the time from people that they were denied Medicaid, but when they're talking to me, I cannot.

Understand why. So it'll literally our pleasure to have somebody come in from the Department of Human Services and help explain why those denials happen. And the reality is that most of the time if you let us help you file an appeal, you're going to win you. You likely will get Medicaid if we feel that your situation warrants it.

It's not difficult, it's just that the general population, they don't know how to do all of these things, and we are here to share with you, we know these things. It's easy for us. Let us support you through that. So I'm gonna close with an example of a family that we helped a few years ago, and the reality is I could give you probably hundreds of examples at this point, but this is the first one that comes to mind.

So this is a family in Grant's Pass. And the son, when the father passed away, the son purchased the business and he was making payments to her rather than taking out a lump sum loan and making payments to the bank. The challenge was that mom. Was only getting about $2,000 a month and she really needed to move into memory care.

And the combination of what was she was receiving in payments from her son and her social security, it wasn't enough for her to move into memory care. It just simply was never going to be enough with those payments from her son and her social security. So when we asked him the question, why are you not taking out a loan from the bank and paying your mom, he said my mom has one of her grandchildren living with her, and the grandchild has been exploiting money from the bank account on a regular basis.

And even when he's not taking it, my mom is so sweet, or his mom is so sweet that. She just gives him the money. So he felt very reluctant to buy the business outright, deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars into a bank account because the fear was from the entire family that mom would just gift all of those funds to her grandson.

So we walked him through the necessity to get guardianship and conservatorship in place. That is a court appointed document that comes from the court that essentially gives all of the financial responsibility to the son. So the mom would, at that point, not be able to gift money to the grandson. So we met with the entire family.

I sat down with all the other siblings and the son and explained how all of this would work. Then we helped walk them through the process of putting that in place with the courts. Then mom was able to move into memory care and have all of those funds available to executing a regular monthly payment to a memory care community.

Like I said, that is one example of probably hundreds that I could give you. Another one that just very quickly pops into mind was a man who was living check to check on social security. He was not going to qualify for Medicaid because he had a massive sailboat docked in San Diego, valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he didn't own his house anymore.

He had vested everything into his boat, and he really needed to be in adult foster care. He was suffering acutely with a number of different things that had happened to him here in southern Oregon. So we met with him went through all of his finances and his health and everything else. We found a foster home for him to move into.

Because Team Sr was at the helm of what was happening. We were able to convince the adult foster home to allow this gentleman to move in and not pay their full rate in the meantime until the sailboat in San Diego sold. Once that sold, he was able to pay them retroactively. And I can tell you right now that if we had not been engaged in that entire process, I'm not really sure what would've happened to this gentleman.

But the entire family that he had across the country, they were also impressed because they were trying to make phone calls from all over the place. And they weren't making any headway. And literally within a week of meeting with this gentleman, we were able to figure it all out. I wanna thank everyone for listening, and I want to invite you back.

We don't yet have a schedule in mind, but we are going to create a schedule. Ultimately, we will be visiting with you every single week at the same day and the same time. But until then. Please take this opportunity to think about things that you might want to learn about in the long-term care spectrum and send us some information.

We really want to deliver to you what it is that you wanna learn about in the long-term care spectrum, navigating insurance, any of those things. We wanna hear it from you so that we can give you a more information about the things that you'd like to know. You can do that by hopping on our website, which is team senior.org.

So team, like we're all a team senior, like an elder person.org. There's a contact us form right at the top and if you fill out that contact us form and just give me some insight into what it is that you'd like to learn about. I will absolutely get it on the schedule or give you a personal call myself and talk through whatever it is that you need to know at that time.

Thank you for listening to the Team Senior podcast. We're here every week sharing new and relevant information. Remember that we're just a phone call away. Team Senior can be reached at 541-295-8230. Again, 541-295-8230. Until next time, this is Jamie Callahan.