100 years ago your parents would have expected to have lived to be 49.

Now the average life expectancy is 77 years.

The fastest growing  group of the aging population are seniors over 85.  The second fastest are those over 75.

What does that mean for us?

There will be more of us dealing with the daily responsibilities of bathing, dressing, sometimes diapering, and taking general care of our aging parents.

If our parents are suffering from chronic illnesses we must learn how to juggle their care with our work and home responsibilities. 

However, help is coming from a surprising source.  Your employer.

More and more businesses are recognizing this problem and are willing to give elder care benefits to employees who need them.

This is important because it signals a switch in thinking.  No longer are the younger workers  who need daycare the main employees being considered.

In order to get and keep good maturing employees, businesses are going to have to be more sympathetic toward their needs and the needs of their aging parents.

The Wall Street Journal has a very good article  giving more details about elder care benefits.

Read Employers Expand Elder Care Benefits

Popularity: 3% [?]

• We Need Eldercare Help Now We've often talked about why we need to give elder care to our aging parents as they grow more elderly. What about the how? How exactly do we do provide family eldercare when we're still working, strapped for cash, dealing with massive healthcare costs, and a recession? I've said......
• 3 Ways to Help Your Lonely Parent  As people age, they often feel isolated.That is partly because they can no longer drive and get out.But isolation can also come because many of their friends have died and aging people have not always made new younger friends.Here are 3 tips for helping your aging parents manage their loneliness.1.Get......
• AARP Condemns EEOC's Health Benefit Ruling  The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission gave a Christmas present to corporations Wednesday with a ruling which states health benefits for former employees over age 65 may be eliminated.  In other words, if you're over 65, your employer-sponsored health benefits could become  a thing of the past.AARP  immediately went on the record strongly condemning the......
• How to Keep the Elderly in Their Own Homes  One of the biggest challenges in caregiving is taking care of the elderly in their own homes.The approach now is the keep aging parents and the elderly in their homes as long as possible instead of institutionalizing  them.  It's not always easy.Angie Hicks' piece Old Story:Hoping to Age in Place......
• How to Talk To Your Aging Parents How do you talk to your aging parents about the subject that must be discussed such as a living will, funeral arrangements and finances? Image by Tobyotter via Flickr It is certainly difficult to bring up such subjects especially if your parents do not want to talk about them.  However,......

• The Costs of Job Hopping This month's Money Magazine featured a few stories of the unemployed looking for work. Experts were brought in to give advice on what the job seekers were doing wrong and how they could improve their prospects. One story was about a 45-year old auditor who went from $215k to zero......
• Would a minimum wage hike cost jobs? As I am sure many people have heard, there are several states (Arkansas, California, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia) that have raised their minimum wage as of January 1. Here in California, the minimum wage is now $7.50 per hour, which works......
• Determining the Best Age to Start Social Security Many baby boomers are in the home stretch toward retirement and thinking about what will be the best age for them to claim Social Security retirement benefits.  I have already written about this issue from several different angles but I thought it would make sense to pull all of that......
• Where to Begin with Investing If you are just starting out on your own as an adult, or if you are approaching the age of retirement, you are probably thinking about where you stand financially and what your financial future will be like. It is time to stop thinking and start actually planning and taking......
• Do Your Parents Need Long Term Care Insurance? A few months ago I wrote about how finding out your parents financial situation can be stressful and I thought I would touch on that again now that my brother and I have been talking a little more about it. My mom is living off the savings that her and......