In the Philippines, adult children are expected to care for aging parents at home rather than in nursing facilities. John Jonas explains how multi-generational living cuts housing costs and provides childcare, while formal care homes remain expensive and mostly serve expats.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS. This is episode 151. Retirement and nursing homes are rare in the Philippines. So a few years ago, my grandparents died at 99 and 100. This is my dad's parents. They died a few months apart, both of them still at home. They never went to a care facility. Now, I hope I don't live that long, but I certainly have some. Some really long living genetics. This is kind of morbid, but I actually have a death plan. And I understand it's not super realistic, but it would be amazing if it could happen. So my plan is if I'm. I don't want to live to my 90s, so if I'm in my 80s somewhere and things start to decline, then I'm going to go skiing in the backcountry on a really high avalanche day, and I'm going to ski the perfect avalanche slope so that if it avalanches and I die, well, you know, I didn't really commit suicide. I just went skiing. And if it doesn't avalanche, then I just had the most amazing ski run ever. It seems like an amazing plan to me. My wife always smacks me every time I say this, and I understand it's super unlikely to actually. I'm super unlikely to actually carry it out. And I'm a long ways away from being in my 80s, too, so. Okay. To the Philippines. So this past month, two of my OFs, Jam and Julia, who are married, and they both work for me, and they're both amazing, they traveled to Manila to visit Jam's parents. When they told me about it, I said, you know, sweet, like, I'm glad you're visiting parents for vacation. It's been a long time since you've seen them. And Julia responded to me and said, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no. This isn't vacation. We're going there because Jam's parents are elderly, and Jam's family asked us to come and help because we don't live close to them. So retirement homes are, like, really, really uncommon in the Philippines. They exist, yes, but culturally, it's not something that families do financially. It's not something most families can afford. And so the facilities that do exist generally cater to expats, not to Filipino people. In the Philippines, you're expected to take care of your parents as they age. And this is why most people continue to live at home as they grow up and including after they get married. So you graduate from high school, you graduate from college, you continue to live at home, you get married, you move in with one of the parents. Those that do move out are expected to live close by home so they can keep tabs on their family. And really the kind of exception to this is if you're forced to move away due to work. And that's why Jim and Julia were traveling to Manila to go visit his parents, to go take care of his parents, because they had moved away years ago before they started working for me for work. Also, this setup with living with your parents provides free child care for the rising generation. As you grow and you start to have kids, the grandparents will generally take care of your children while you go off to work. It also makes so that you don't have to pay rent. If you're young or you're newly married and you're living with your parents, well, you don't have to pay rent. Or at least having more incomes helps pay the cost of housing and it makes it easier for everybody. On the opposite side of that, retirement homes are expensive. Like the cheapest thing you're going to find is like 15 or 16 or $1,700 a month for a retirement home, which you know, is more than most people ever made. And so it's just kind of not an option. So then as you can imagine, houses, homes, people's homes, they get crowded. You know, I got this picture from Julia as she was visiting the parents. She's trying to work at the table while her mom's on the phone and her dad's eating lunch and her husband's making something or working. And you can see that all of like there's just a lot going on and places get crowded, but it's still just a part of their culture. And they. It's amazing what man, it's amazing what Julia and Jam can do. Even when they're, they're working at their parents house and there's aunts and uncles around and cousins and they're still productive and still doing such good things. If you want to make your OFS more productive, check out the training that we provide for you. It's done for you. Training available@vasmadee.com youm can buy the entire system, the package of 30 trainings or you can buy one or two, whatever is relevant to your business and provide that train, hand that off to your ofs. They get trained, you build trust in you for them, you get more productive work done. It's a win. Win. Vasmadeeasy dot.
