The problem is that eventually Mom will be unable to live alone AND you don't want her to run out of money. Ownership compounds this. We faced this with my MIL; she was living so long that her friends in her neighborhood had all died & she was becoming a hermit. Her house was a serious fall hazard & money pit to maintain. She initially wasn't happy about moving, but my SIL was no longer willing to drive 3 hours RT several times a week to keep her company. MIL could no longer safely drive her car & we didn't want to wait until an accident happened.
The solution was a CCRC (Continuing Care Retirement Community) located 10 minutes from my SIL. She used some of the proceeds from the sale of her house (& car) to buy a share in the CCRC. Her CCRC has a main building with 1 & 2 bedroom apartments, a number of one-story duplexes that allow residents to initially move into a house-like setting first if they prefer, & an assisted living building should residents eventually need that. Some now offer a memory care facility. MIL chose a 1 bedroom apartment & paid a monthly fee that covered 2 meals per day & weekly housekeeping services. This place was like a nice hotel, with a staffed exercise room, craft room & regular projects, library, game room, computer room, bank, beauty salon, small convenience store, bistro grill, & a dining room with waiters (college students). The intangible benefit was that she made friends again & had activities. It has a 100 year old chapel incorporated into the place so she could walk down her hall & go to church services every day if she wanted to, an important part of her life that she was missing in her house. While it is run by a religious organization, this is not a requirement for residency. We credit this place with allowing my MIL much improved quality of life, not to mention many more years. When she finally died at 99, 90% of her share price was returned to her beneficiaries. If she had exhausted her means to pay the monthly fee, the CCRC would allow her to stay while tapping her share each month.
The 'catch' to a CCRC is that you must move into it while you are still healthy enough for independent living, even though it offers an eventual transition to assisted or memory care facilities.
We had a widowed and childless great aunt who did this, and it worked great for her and she lived many more years, transitioning through the 'levels' until her death. However, I think these are quite expensive facilities, though I am not certain of that. ETA: Thanks MrMoogle, that's what I thought.
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partygypsy, we faced a similar situation with my mother, except she had no assets at all and her SS check was slightly bigger. I paid off her debt (several thousand) and we bought a second home for her, then covered her basic bills for ~5 years. Obviously, this is not an option in your situation as I know from your other threads.
However, after 5 years, I think our mothers' situations were fairly comparable, in that my mother received a modest inheritance (not perhaps as much as if she had owned a modest home and sold for equity, but enough of a chunk to invest and generate a few thousand $ per year). So now she is essentially self supporting except for the fact that we own/pay for her housing.
Your mother might qualify for low income assistance, but it varies by state. In our state, the fact that my mother had 'free' housing automatically disqualified her from all the assistance programs. This was a good tradeoff in terms of $, though, because the $ value that would have been given by the state was less than the $ value we offered (i.e., her standard of living would have been worse on state assistance). At any rate, I doubt you are in a position to offer any financial assistance to your mother, but if at some point you do so, you will need to look into these tradeoffs.
If your mother is set on buying another property, I would strongly encourage her to downsize to a very small condo/apt, etc. Upkeep on a house becomes problematic. My mother is quite vigorous and is an avid gardener, so we bought her a small house with a big yard. But 7 years later she is unable to keep up with it, and has hired a handy man for yard upkeep etc. And of course, the house requires constant upkeep, which falls primarily on myself and DH. I figure if we hold the house another 3-5 years, it will have essentially been a 'break even' $ proposition after 15 years of ownership (as opposed to us having sunk money helping her rent a place for the past 15 years).
Bottom line is, consider the most modest, lowest upkeep residence possible for your mother.
The other challenge is managing money over and above that sunk into housing. The biggest problem comes with having just a little nest egg but not one large enough to generate meaningful cash flow. Even a small nest egg can sometimes make qualifying for low income assistance challenging, and gifting the money away to meet assistance requirements (while legal) comes with some tricky loopholes/traps to navigate in order to make it work.
It's all very complicated. For sure, as soon as you have an idea of what your mother's final assets and income will be, see a state employee who specializes in social programs for the elderly to see what the options are for her situation, run the numbers, and go with what works best.