Business
5 Money Lessons From People Caring for Their Elderly Parents
Shortly after Sarah Coomber moved her parents into a retirement community and started sorting through her childhood home, she discovered the mold.
Seeing those telltale spots was only the beginning of an enormous undertaking that involved hiring contractors to remove sections of walls and flooring and clean the entire house. When Ms. Coomber, who is 56, described the ordeal to a colleague, he reassured her that she was not alone.
“Now I see so many people are going through this, and they always have been,” she said.
Last year, about 11,400 Americans, on average, turned 65 on any given day. That wave of aging is continuing this year, too. Families, particularly those headed by members of Generation X, are confronting what older relatives may need and from whom — whether loved ones or professionals. It is the part of retirement no one wants to consider, yet for many it will touch every facet of life, like finances and health care, and the most fundamental questions of where and how to live.
Retirement in very advanced age is a possibility that longevity experts say could become a reality for more Americans than most people realize. Surya Kolluri, who leads the TIAA Institute, the research arm of the retirement plan provider, warns that many Americans underestimate how long they could live.
In a 2025 survey by the institute, only 33 percent of respondents answered correctly when asked how long a 65-year-old typically lived. The answer: For a woman, the average is 87 years and for a man, 84.
Despite recent reports of a decline in average life expectancy, the chance that someone who is 65 reaches 90 can’t be overlooked: It’s 40 percent for women and 30 percent for men, Mr. Kolluri said.
“We are racing toward 100-year lives,” he said.
When The New York Times asked readers about their own experiences, dozens of stories came flowing in: a relocation that revealed a painful illness, a son’s need to sell his house, spouses arriving at a tough realization. Here is what some of them shared.
You may have to help pay their bills.
When Paul Stanley’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, he and his sister initially took turns checking in. But with a demanding career as a software engineer and his mother’s increasing health care needs, Mr. Stanley knew she needed more care than they could give. At first, he and his sister relied on in-home aides, but it became expensive — about $10,000 a month — and insufficient after their mother had a hip replacement and needed round-the-clock care. So with their mother, now 83, they found an assisted-living community near her home in Florida.
“Putting a parent in an assisted-living facility is one of those things that you usually see in a movie and the person hates it and it’s terrible,” said Mr. Stanley, 41, of Berkeley, Calif. “But my mom knew that she needed the help, and she had struggled for long enough that she appreciated it.”
Understanding their mother’s limited resources, Mr. Stanley and his sister, who lives in Atlanta, each contribute $1,900 a month to help her cover her bills. Mr. Stanley and his partner even sold their home and became renters to free up money and time.
“We’re fortunate that we can generally afford my mom’s care,” he said. “But it competes with kids’ college funds, retirement and homeownership.”
Your mother’s dream could be your burden.
When Jenn Adrien’s parents uprooted themselves in their 60s from their Tacoma, Wash., community and moved to what they called their dream home 2,000 miles away in rural Illinois, “it was a big shock,” she said. Most of their family lived in the Tacoma area.
Her mother “didn’t consult any of us,” Ms. Adrien, 51, added. “She just did it.”
Although Ms. Adrien, who still lives in Tacoma, and her brother visited, they missed what she now suspects were some early signs that their parents were struggling. It wasn’t until their new neighbors called that she learned her parents needed help or were in a hospital. Her mother had several operations, and her father, who had kidney failure from diabetes, was in and out of the hospital.
“It had been my mom’s dream to live in a nice house and have lots of land,” Ms. Adrien said. But there were downsides — long drives to doctors, for one. “It was really neat to see my parents flourish in their retirement, but then the reality seeped in of what it’s like to care for a 4,000-square-foot home for two people and what it is like to live in a rural area.”
Your career may suffer.
At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ms. Coomber and her husband hatched a plan to move from Washington State to Moorhead, Minn., to be closer to her family and, she hoped, get help with their son, who has special needs. She recalled asking herself, “Why are we so far apart?”
Ms. Coomber’s parents were getting older, and she had noticed her mother was forgetful sometimes when they talked on the phone. Soon after moving, however, Ms. Coomber became concerned when she saw her mother losing interest in what had been lifelong pleasures in gardening, cooking and seeing friends.
“For me, it was a little bit of a selfish move, that I was coming back to get help,” she said. “But once we got here, we really started to see my mom’s dementia was worse than I realized.”
In 2022, her parents agreed to some in-home care, but it was inconsistent, and Ms. Coomber urged them to consider moving to a retirement community. Not long after the move in March 2023, Ms. Coomber’s mother’s health declined. She advanced to hospice care and eventually died. A month later, her father had a stroke.
For Ms. Coomber, helping her parents so much cut into her work as a writer and took over entirely. On top of health concerns, she had to sort through what she calls their “very full home” of more than 30 years.
“I have felt many times my life is on hold, my career is on hold,” she said. She writes as a freelancer now, including a Substack column called Sandwich Season, which focuses on her experience assisting two generations. “And yet here I am writing about it,” she added. “Maybe I end up helping other people.”
You need a support network.
In 2020, Ram Rajagopal and his wife, Nidhi Gupta, faced a challenge: Mr. Rajagopal’s mother moved in with them and their two young children in Upper Saddle River, N.J. Mr. Rajagopal, a management consultant in the technology industry, and Mrs. Gupta, a physical therapist, felt the stress mounting. They all seemed to be waking one another up in the middle of the night.
“It’s difficult for your partner to love your parent the way you do,” Mr. Rajagopal said of those days together. “And they’re seeing your parent at their most weakened state — difficult, cantankerous and needy.”
But that experience caring for his mother, who died in 2022, is now helping Mrs. Gupta and her parents, who increasingly need assistance. They are still active, but Mrs. Gupta’s father had extensive surgery last summer and a tough recovery.
“I say to Ram now, some of the stuff that I didn’t quite understand when his mom was going through it, now I see,” she said. “He’s able to help me probably better than I was able to help him now that I’m having that experience.”
Mr. Rajagopal and his former classmates at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School have a WhatsApp group, Elder Care Connect, where he offers support and advice. “I don’t know if it’s an uptick or that people need to connect, but people are going through the same stuff,” he said.
You should take a hard look at yourself.
It is impossible to predict how each person will age, but watching how your parents and grandparents did may lend valuable insight for your own future. Hal Hershfield, a professor of marketing and behavioral decision making at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies how envisioning your future self can help you plan. He describes older relatives’ experiences as either associative or dissociative, or behaviors and habits that you choose to emulate or avoid entirely.
“To some extent, your parents are the closest proxy for your future selves,” Dr. Hershfield said.
He said optimism bias leads us to be overly positive about our projections. For some people, he added, watching a parent falter could offer a realistic counterpoint to a rosy view of the future.
Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and the author of “Being Mortal,” said discussing preferences with family members was a vital part of helping them sustain a fulfilling life, especially those with serious health problems. He recommends a series of questions, called the Conversation Project, to help guide family decisions. The questions include: What does a good day look like for you? What activities bring joy and meaning to your life? If your health gets worse, what are your most important goals?
“It’s almost embarrassing that it took me writing a whole book, interviewing 200 families and patients and scores of experts, to come to a pretty simple conclusion,” Dr. Gawande said. “People have priorities in their lives besides just living longer, and in order to understand what those priorities are, you need to ask them.”
For Ms. Coomber, seeing her parents struggle prompted conversations with her husband about what the two of them want. An overstuffed house isn’t on the list.
“We’re setting deadlines,” she said. “By the time we’re 65 or 70, we’re going to downsize the heck out of the situation.”
Steven Spielberg’s latest sci-fi thriller, “Disclosure Day,” topped the box office this weekend, an encouraging sign for what could be a big summer for theaters.
The film, which stars Emily Blunt and Josh O’Connor, brought in $44 million in the U.S. and Canada for a worldwide total of $92.9 million, according to studio estimates. The opening weekend totals beat box office analysts’ expectations of about $40 million to $50 million.
“Disclosure Day” is Spielberg’s latest alien-centric movie that charts a desperate race to show the world the truth about extraterrestrials.
The film, which had a production budget of about $115 million, was also scored by legendary composer and longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams, who is now 94 years old.
Spielberg described the film in April as “way closer to truth than fiction” during a speech at the CinemaCon trade convention in Las Vegas. The veteran director of 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and 2005’s “War of the Worlds” said at the time that he’s been curious about “what’s going on in the night” since he was a child and “been very fixated on the possibilities.”
Focus Features’ “Obsession” came in second at the box office with a domestic haul of $19 million, a continuation of the film’s strong run in theaters.
“Scary Movie,” “Backrooms” and “Masters of the Universe” rounded out the top five at the box office.
Recent box office performance — particularly with Gen Z hits “Obsession” and A24’s “Backrooms” — along with a slate of upcoming blockbuster franchise installments has buoyed the hopes of exhibitors and studio executives for a strong summer.
Next week, Walt Disney Co. and Pixar will release “Toy Story 5,” while Warner Bros.’ DC Studios has “Supergirl” landing in late June.
Universal Pictures and Illumination’s “Minions & Monsters,” Disney’s live-action “Moana,” Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” and Sony Pictures’ “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” are all slated for July.
That steady cadence of new and different films is key for a healthy box office and a successful summer, said Daniel Loria, editorial director at the Box Office Co.
“We’re seeing that momentum come back on a weekend-by-weekend basis,” he said. “What we needed to get back to a healthy industry post-pandemic is consistency, and that’s the difference here in 2026.”
As inflation rates rise to their highest in years, Californians are again getting hit the hardest at the gas pumps, with a regular tank costing upwards of $100 at some stations in Los Angeles.
Inflation figures released this week show consumer and producer price rises at more than three-year highs, driven by the energy crisis stemming from the war with Iran.
Gasoline prices took the biggest bite out of consumer spending power, with prices up 41% in May from a year earlier.
While the national average for gasoline prices is a little above $4 per gallon, in California, it is near $6 per gallon. In a small number of gas stations in Los Angeles, it is even tipping toward $7.
When asked about inflation in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Trump told reporters the numbers looked great.
“I love inflation,” Trump said. “The numbers are going to be phenomenal because what’s showing is that despite the fact that we’re in a war, the numbers are much lower than anticipated, and when we’re out of that war, the numbers will be at lower numbers than they were even before it started.”
Consumers aren’t feeling the love.
Workers in front of a crude oil storage container at Sable Offshore Corp.’s Santa Ynez Unit in Santa Barbara on Friday, June 5, 2026. California producer Sable Offshore Corp. expects to restart a platform capable of pumping 10,000 barrels of oil a day some time in the third quarter this year, the company said in an investor presentation Monday.
(Caroline Brehman / Bloomberg)
The Costco gas pumps in Inglewood were busy Thursday morning, with a constant flow of cars looking to save money on its relatively low per-gallon price of about $5.50.
Inglewood resident Eddin, who chose to not give his last name, said even though his Honda Civic isn’t a big gas guzzler, he has switched to using his girlfriend’s hybrid for longer trips.
“We just take her car now just because it’s more cost-effective,” he said as he filled his tank. “I wish there was more the government could be doing for not just gas prices, but for prices in general. It seems like prices have gone up for everything.”
The unforgiving prices at the pump are set to make everyone’s summer more expensive. After gas, the largest price rise for consumers was in airline tickets, which jumped 27%.
Even staying home doesn’t shelter shoppers — the beef they might want to put on their backyard barbecues is up 15%.
Virginia resident Mario, who also opted to not give his last name, got hit twice with the inflation tax as he left Los Angeles this week. He was paying more to refill his rental as he headed for a flight home, after having paid much more for the ticket than earlier in the year.
“All of the flights are way more expensive than they used to be,” he said as he paid almost $5.80 per gallon at the 76 on Century Boulevard near Los Angeles International Airport.
The average price for a gallon of gas is around $3.90 in Virginia.
While the surge in prices is happening around the world, gas costs more in California than almost anywhere else because of higher taxes, fees and cleaner-fuel requirements.
The state’s gas supply is also particularly vulnerable because it has lost much of its drilling and refining capacity in recent years, making it more dependent on fuel from other states and countries.
As gas prices continue to climb in L.A., locals are forced to adjust their lives to the price at the pump. For some, that includes cutting back on other necessities such as food, budgeting strictly to afford half a tank of gas a week and rethinking side hustles such as food delivery service.
Public transit has become a more favorable option for some — weekday commutes on the Metro increased by nearly 8% from January to May.
Recent reports have shown a decline in spending on expensive household goods, and credit card data show that both luxury and discount shoppers spent less than usual recently on lodging, groceries, clothes and theaters to accommodate a larger gas budget.
Another Inglewood native who opted to not give her last name, Liz, is putting off filling up her gas entirely because it is so expensive. Instead, she makes more frequent visits, putting a little gas in her car at a time.
“I have to budget and do half a tank now, and half a tank later, or ask for an advance on my paycheck just to get gas,” she said.
Most people at the pumps agreed: Something needs to change.
Wayne Faulkner is from Los Angeles but now lives in Indiana, where gas is about $3.50 per gallon. He complained as he filled up his rental at the LAX stand.
“Our gas situation is much better than here,” he said.
Anthropic PBC has disabled access to its most advanced artificial intelligence models, including Mythos, following an unprecedented order by the Trump administration to keep the technology out of the hands of all foreign nationals.
The U.S. government told Anthropic to suspend access to the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models by any foreign national “whether inside or outside the United States,” citing national security concerns, the company said in a statement.
A U.S. official confirmed that the Commerce Department sent the letter. The model developer has since shut off access to both systems to all customers to ensure compliance.
Never before has the U.S. government taken such sweeping measures to rein in foreign access to frontier AI models developed by an American company. The Trump and Biden administrations have limited access abroad to other consequential technologies such as semiconductors and supercomputers, and some have debated the merits of blocking access to AI models. But restrictions on the software itself have raised constitutional and commercial concerns.
Anthropic said it believes the U.S. government issued the order after discovering that it’s possible to “jailbreak,” or bypass the guardrails, of Fable 5, a recently released version of Mythos that the company blocked from carrying out cybersecurity tasks.
“We disagree that the finding of a narrow potential jailbreak should be cause for recalling a commercial model deployed to hundreds of millions of people,” Anthropic said in its website post. “If this standard was applied across the industry, we believe it would essentially halt all new model deployments for all frontier model providers.”
Researchers at Amazon.com Inc. had conducted jailbreak research that revealed some vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s model, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Amazon and the U.S. government were in contact about the vulnerability before the controls were imposed, according to people familiar with matter who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy was involved in those exchanges, one of the people said. The Information reported earlier that Jassy raised concerns to senior U.S. officials.
An Amazon spokesperson said it’s not uncommon for governments to consult with the company on security risks, but declined to share details of any such discussions.
The government’s move to so widely restrict access to a set of AI models in the name of national security threatens to set a precedent for all major AI model developers including OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc. Industry leaders such as Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have in the past encouraged the US government to instead promote worldwide adoption of American AI systems and protect the nation’s lead.
“For anyone who was naive and perhaps hoping that this leverage wouldn’t be exerted, it’s a massive wake-up call,” Aidan Gomez, the co-founder of Cohere Inc., a Nvidia Corp.-backed AI startup, said Saturday in an interview. “No one can deny it any more.”
Anthropic said it received the government order at 5:21 p.m. New York time on Friday. The end-of-day directive runs counter to earlier statements, as well as an executive order recently signed by President Trump, which suggested the administration wouldn’t pursue a licensing regime for model reviews.
Friday’s directive also threatens to escalate long-standing tensions between Anthropic and some within the Trump administration. Earlier this year, the AI developer clashed with the Pentagon over the use of its technology for military and surveillance purposes. The administration declared the company a U.S. supply-chain risk as a result of the blowup and ordered U.S. agencies to phase out the use of its products.
Privately held Anthropic, which has long positioned itself as a more responsible AI developer, first released its Mythos model in April to a very limited group of companies and institutions, warning that its ability to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities made it too risky to distribute more widely.
There were signs that the limited release was working to ease tensions between Anthropic and the Trump administration: In April, the U.S. government was preparing to make a version of Mythos available to major federal agencies, Bloomberg previously reported.
Mythos also accelerated the Trump administration’s efforts on AI policy, which included the recent executive order that called for voluntary model review. That order explicitly said that nothing in it should be construed as creating a mandatory licensing regime.
David Sacks, Trump’s former AI czar and current co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, said that Anthropic refused to fix a jailbreak of the guardails in its Fable model.
“The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release,” he wrote in a post on X. “The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority.”
The latest government restriction is colliding with a race among U.S. developers to deliver the most advanced AI models and prove to their investors that the technology can turn a profit. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are seeking initial public offerings as soon as this year, following SpaceX’s own historic IPO.
The rush to deliver the most cutting-edge AI models spurred Anthropic itself to post a lengthy blog earlier this month, calling for the creation of a system in which governments and AI developers collectively decide when to slow work on the technology to stave off the risks it may pose.
“It would be good for the world to have the option to show or temporarily pause” AI work that may be dangerous, the company said in the post at the time. AI is advancing to the point where the technology can make human work thousands of times more efficient or even replace it, creating a new set of risks, the company said.
The European Union’s executive arm said that it’s assessing Anthropic’s statement and is continuing to talk to allies about the potential risks and cybersecurity concerns related to powerful new AI models. The European Commission added that the latest developments underline Europe’s need for technological sovereignty.
‘“s a person in the field, I’m not particularly thrilled to see this,” said Cohere’s Gomez. “I don’t think this is partnerly, I don’t think this is the right thing to do for the broader technological alliances that have developed over the course of the past 80 years.”
Eastland and Lowenkron write for Bloomberg. With assistance from Shirin Ghaffary, Yi Wei Wong, Gian Volpicelli, Spencer Soper and Thomas Seal.
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