MayDay,
I never understood why my parents like to adopt "older dogs". I always thought it was better to get a young dog so you could train him YOUR WAY and avoid the possibility of un-doing other people's bad training.
Then we got our new puppy. Oh, the energy. He needs significantly longer walks and exercise. He chews. I wouldn't trade him, but I do understand why people might like to skip his phase!
However, to give a balanced approach, our old girl (whom we lost last summer before last) needed more care in her last year of life than she had in her earlier years. She was more expensive because she needed anti-seizure meds. We took her to the vet more often. We started feeding her canned food in an effort to get her weight back up. And we were constantly worried: Will this be the day that she goes? We wouldn't go out of town because we didn't want to leave her with anyone. And in the end, she died on the same day as my grandmother, and the result of that awful circumstance was that she (the dog, obviously, not my grandmother) crawled under the house and died alone on the hottest day of the year. Getting her out was not easy, and it was not a good end for a creature who'd been beloved for more than a decade. No, the last year of a dog's life isn't as much fun as the first years.