Most Important In Dementia Caregiving: Time, Money, or Effort?
As a dementia caregiver, you’re constantly making decisions.
Should you spend more time with your loved one, invest in outside help, or find ways to conserve your energy? Every choice has trade-offs, and prioritizing the wrong thing can make your journey harder.
Lizette explores the reality of these trade-offs and how to decide what’s best for your situation.
The Three Trade-Offs in Caregiving
Caregiving requires balancing three main resources:
✔️ Time – The hours spent managing daily care, appointments, and responsibilities.
✔️ Money – The financial investment in resources, home modifications, or outside help.
✔️ Effort – The emotional and physical energy spent handling everything yourself.
The reality?
You can’t save all three. If you focus on saving one, it usually comes at the expense of the others.
Saving Time Often Means Spending Money or Effort
Many caregivers want more time but feel stuck in their routines. The truth is, to free up your time, you often have to:
💰 Pay for extra help – Whether it’s hiring a house cleaner or a respite caregiver.
💪 Put in extra effort upfront to set up systems that make caregiving easier in the long run.
Example: Instead of spending hours searching for dementia care advice online, investing in a course or coaching program can give you expert guidance and save you time.
Saving Money Often Means Expending Effort
If money is tight, caregivers often compensate by doing everything themselves. This might mean:
✅ Managing all care tasks alone instead of hiring help.
✅ Relying on free support groups and resources instead of paid coaching or education.
✅ Coordinating family, church, or community help to avoid paying for professional services.
💡 The Hidden Cost: Trying to save money can lead to exhaustion and burnout, especially if you avoid seeking help when it’s needed.
Saving Effort Can Mean More Time and Money Later
Some caregivers try to avoid effort now, thinking they’ll deal with challenges later. However, this often creates bigger problems down the road.
Example: If a caregiver avoids tough conversations about moving a loved one into a safer living situation, they may face a crisis move later, leading to more stress, money, and time spent fixing the problem.
🚨 Avoiding effort now often means a bigger burden later. Instead, be proactive and make decisions before a crisis forces your hand.
The Hidden Costs of Prioritizing the Wrong Thing
Focusing too much on one resource (time, money, or effort) can lead to:
⏳ Lack of connection – Rushing through caregiving tasks to “save time” can weaken relationships.
💸 Financial stress – Avoiding paid resources now might lead to costlier solutions later.
💪 Burnout – Taking on too much alone can lead to emotional and physical exhaustion.
Finding the right balance is key to sustainable caregiving.
Practical Solutions to Lighten Your Load
📌 If you need more time:
✔️ Hire a respite caregiver (even for short breaks).
✔️ Invest in caregiving education to reduce trial and error.
✔️ Ask family, friends, or your church for specific help.
📌 If you need to save money:
✔️ Use free caregiving workshops and church support.
✔️ Maximize Medicare benefits for therapy and home health services.
✔️ Reach out to nonprofits or government programs for assistance.
📌 If you need to save effort:
✔️ Plan ahead to avoid last-minute crises.
✔️ Automate tasks (meal delivery, medication reminders).
✔️ Accept that some things can wait—you don’t have to do everything at once.
Finding Balance in Caregiving
Caregiving comes with tough choices, and there’s no perfect way to balance time, money, and effort. Some days, you’ll feel overwhelmed. Other days, you’ll wish you could do more. That’s okay.
If today feels heavy, take a deep breath and ask: What’s one small change I can make to ease my load? Start there.
Read More:
How To Reframe Dementia Caregiving From Frustration To Fun
How To Let Go Of Dementia Caregiver Guilt and Shame
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Upstate Nonprofits Receive Funding Boost to Expand Dementia Services.
Transcript
Introduction to Caregiving Priorities
[0:01] When it comes to dementia caregiving, what matters most, saving time, saving money, or saving effort? What if I told you that focusing on the wrong one could actually make your caregiving journey harder? In today’s episode, we’re going to unpack how to prioritize wisely so you can reduce your stress both today and find hope in your journey. Hey, Christian Care Companion. Welcome to Dementia Caregiver’s Support for Christians, the podcast where I teach Bible-believing Christians how to think differently about dementia caregiving. If you are a Christian spouse, the adult child, or a family member of a person living with dementia, and you want more clarity.
[0:50] Less stress, and you want to provide better care, this podcast is for you. Here we will provide you with practical solutions, hope and encouragement.
[1:02] And all through a biblical lens. Have you guys joined me for my free monthly workshop yet? These monthly workshops are my gift to you. This next one is coming up on March the 8th, and in this we are going to look at three ways that you can make your journey easier. I guarantee you. You will leave feeling empowered. You will leave with the first best next step that you have for your caregiving journey. And it is in a wonderful new platform that is unlike anything else you’ve ever been in related to online course or online platform or online presentation webinar. It is not at all like it. It is interactive. Like we can communicate during this workshop. And so if you haven’t yet signed up, if you haven’t yet come to one of the free workshops, the next one is March the 8th. It’s coming up quick. This episode is going to be airing on the 28th of February. So go ahead, register. The link is in the show notes. You can find it also at thinkdifferentdementia.com forward slash WSL. And I really, really hope that you come. It’s two hours. I promise you, you can register, you can sign up for the replay afterwards.
[2:31] And even the replay is interactive. So go ahead and come join me on Saturday,
Personal Caregiving Stories
[2:36] the 8th of March, and we can see how we can support you in your dementia caregiving journey. So today’s episode, I have been thinking about this topic actually for a fairly long time, because I know that for myself, sometimes I have more time, sometimes I have more money, and sometimes I have more energy or effort. Right? Many, many years ago, I will never forget this. My parents tell a story of when we were living in New York. Now, I don’t share a lot of this because my life has actually been pretty interesting growing up. My dad was a diplomat for the South African government, and my first place that I actually remember is growing up in New York City. He worked at the UN for the South African government. So he was a diplomat. So Central Park was my backyard. We lived in New York and my parents tell the story that at that time of their lives, so they were young and newlywed, you know, in their early twenties.
[3:47] Living in New York on not a very high salary at that given period of time, that they tell the story that they dropped an egg in the apartment on the kitchen floor. Now, if I remember correctly, not only was it on the kitchen floor, but the kitchen floor was carpeted. So it landed on the carpeted kitchen floor, but it was the last egg in the house and they had to feed their two girls. They had to feed my sister and I. So they tell the story that they took the time and the effort to scrape up the egg off of the floor because they didn’t have the money to actually go buy another egg and feed the kids. Now, how much of that story is actually true? I’m not entirely sure, but it makes for a good story, right? So now fast forward. Later in my life, my husband and I moved to Greenville, South Carolina for him to go to seminary. And by then I was a fairly proficient occupational therapist with probably 15, 18 years of experience.
[4:49] And I was able to get a very good paying job in the Greenville area. And we were homeschooling. My husband was in seminary. Our kids were 10, 12, 14 years old. And I had more money at that period in time than I had time. And so for me, it was worth more to me to invest in somebody to come clean my house than it was for me to expend the time and the effort in cleaning my house. It’s not because it’s beneath me, but it was a better investment of both my time and effort and my resources to hire somebody to clean the house than it was for me to spend all my free time actually cleaning the house. And I wanted to share these two stories with you because Ecclesiastes.
Evaluating Your Caregiving Resources
[5:45] Speaks about a time and a season for everything. But for today’s topic that we’re talking about what is more important in dementia caregiving, saving time, money, or effort, it’s going to depend on you. It’s going to depend on where you are and what you value most. Perhaps you’re at a time or a place or a season where expending effort is something that is more valuable to you than it is spending time or money. It may be a time or a season in your life where it is more important to invest money than effort and time into coming up with the solution for your particular problem. But I also want you to consider that we have to look at this from two perspectives.
[6:40] We have to look at this particular question from a how investing time, effort, or money into yourself as a caregiver will help you maintain your own well-being, which means when you are finished with your caregiving journey that you still have enough health or well-being to actually enjoy the remainder of your own life. And the other side of it is it is also possible that it would be helpful to invest time.
[7:20] Money, or effort into preserving both the autonomy of the person that you are caring for and or their quality of life. So the reality of the matter is you cannot save everything. And what do I mean by that?
[7:38] Is there trade-offs? If you are saving time, it often, very frequently in life means spending more money or spending more effort. So what does that look like in relation to you as a caregiver for maintaining your own health or well-being? That may mean paying for somebody to come in and.
[8:02] Help you so that you can take respite, okay? Another way that you can save time by spending money is you can buy books or online courses so that you’re not frantically spending hours on Facebook trying to glean the information related to you and your specific situation in your caregiving journey. It also could mean that we are saving time and spending money so that we can learn how better to take care of the person that we are helping through reading a book or taking an online course and expending a little bit of both effort and money into solving the problem. The second thing that we want to look at is saving money oftentimes will mean that we are expending effort. So when we are wanting to save money, and we’ve all been there, right? I’m definitely there at times in my life where saving money is more important than expending effort. And what that can look like for us is that we are going to these free communities, these Facebook groups.
[9:23] And gleaning what we can from there and doing it ourself and piecemealing it together. That means that we have to spend both time and effort to actually save that money. That might mean spending effort in scheduling people to come in and be respite care providers. That may mean expending effort and asking for help at church related to somebody coming and sitting with the person so that you can go run an errand. When we are trying to save money, we frequently have to expend more effort and often spend together with that, then more time. Now, the third part of that is saving effort often can also mean spending extra time. Now, this one sounds a little counterintuitive because we frequently think to ourselves effort and time go together, right? But when we are saving effort, we sometimes are spending more time. Now, where does this come out? Well, when we are not expending the time.
[10:36] When we’re not taking the time to learn the effort, we’re not putting in the effort to actually learn either the skills that we need to provide care, not learning how to communicate with the person that we are helping, what will result in over time frequently is that you’re going to be spending more time to undo the thing that you might have inadvertently created for yourself because you didn’t take the effort to learn these skills at the beginning.
[11:11] Or another way that this can show up is, and this is my specific situation right now, my husband and I have actually out loud said that we are going to save the effort right now in not trying to move my mom and dad before they are ready to move because it is going to take too much effort and time to convince them to do it now. But we recognize that when the shoe drops, when the first domino goes, we will be spending that time. So we’re kind of kicking the can down the line a little bit in this particular situation because we don’t want to expend the effort now. We’re trying to save ourselves the effort now. But you have to be open and honest with yourself that that is actually what you’re doing. So we have planned ahead, we have a plan, but we have recognized that we would rather live in the crisis than expend the effort now. So we’re saving the effort now, but we recognize that we’re going to spend more
Understanding Hidden Costs
[12:17] time later on because we are trying to save the effort at this particular moment in our journey. Now, where wisdom comes in is knowing which is the right.
[12:31] Approach for you. And each person is different. Some people do have more financial resources. Some people do have more time resources.
[12:42] Some people have more ability to expend effort in learning things or doing things differently. But you are the only one who can answer that particular question for yourself. Which is the most important for you? Saving time, money, or effort? So next I want to look at the hidden cost of focusing on the wrong thing because there are costs to every decision that we make.
[13:14] Sometimes if we are so focused on saving money, we burn out because we didn’t get help or we didn’t learn the skills or we didn’t invest in a course or a book or something to make our journey easier for us because we are trying to save money. The hidden cost of saving time can be because we are prioritizing the task of bathing, dressing, grooming, whatever it is, by trying to rush the person that we are helping who is living with dementia instead of taking our time and connecting with that person. And so what will happen is we’re trying to save time, but we prioritize the task instead of the human. And what that results in over time is a lack of connection with a change in our relationship because we’re rushing the person through and actually over time, I will contend.
[14:27] Will result in you having to spend the time to undo the thing that you did because you’re focused on the task instead of on the person that you’re helping. The other hidden cost of focusing on the wrong thing is you’re putting too much effort into controlling the situation instead of adapting to the situation. So for example, you’re putting so much effort into controlling and saying this is not happening. You might be a family caregiver who doesn’t want to see what your siblings are saying related to your mom or your dad.
[15:09] And so the hidden cost of focusing on controlling every part of this is that instead of adapting to and accepting the changes as they come, we’re trying to control and we spend so much effort in trying to set out that control. And so if you haven’t yet, I invite you to listen to episode 176. This is one of Pam, who is and was in my community. Her mom just recently passed away. Shout out to Pam if you’re listening. I love you. But she always tells me this is one of her favorite episodes, 176. Why being in charge and not in control makes dementia caregiving easy.
Solutions for Caregivers
[15:54] So go and listen to that episode. They kind of dovetail nicely together. So what are some solutions? It doesn’t help I just give you the story, but what are some solutions?
[16:04] I ask you if you are a spouse and you are… Taking care of your spouse. Use your money to take care of yourself. Most of us, when we are Christians, we want to leave an inheritance to our children. And I cannot tell you over the years how many people I’ve met that would not spend their money on themselves because they wanted to have an inheritance for their children. Use your money for yourself. Use your money to take care of yourself. Use your money to get help in the house. Whether that mean you get a hotel room once a month and you go away and you pay for a caregiver, whatever, the particulars are up to you. But use your resources to take care of yourself and to take care of the person that you are caring for. This is a marathon. It is not a sprint.
[17:03] It takes time. Another way that you can look at this is if you don’t actually have the resources, and a lot of people don’t, I certainly at times in my life have had more or less, depending on what the Lord has blessed me with, you need to talk to the deacons at your church and ask for help. The church is willing to help you. They just don’t know how. The church can help you with either time or they can sometimes help you with money. They can help you with a volunteer who can maybe come sit with your person so you can go have your nails done or your hair done or go for a ride on your bike, right? To give you some respite. Another solution is spend some time, invest some time in learning. There are lots of free resources.
Utilizing Community and Resources
[17:56] This podcast, my free workshop, which is coming up on March the 8th. And learn what is available out there. Find the right program for you. I have several different ways people can work with me. Lots of them are free. I have a free workshop. I have a free Facebook group. We have this podcast. We have the Ask the Dementia Coach monthly question and answer opportunity where you can come in live and actually ask me your questions. But it takes you.
[18:32] Expending a little bit of time and effort into these free resources, but spend that time and effort, invest that in yourself to find the right program for you. Then something that I’m finding more and more as I’m doing this free workshop every month, I ask a question to people is, and one of the questions is, are you actually using your insurance benefits? And it floors me how few people who are family caregivers are actually having the person that they are helping receive skilled therapy, PT, OT, speech therapy.
[19:13] Use your Medicare insurance benefits. If there is a change in function, even if it’s a little change in function, the buzzword for the doctor is, my person has had a decline in function, a decline in ability. At the very, very least, get an order, have an evaluation, and then try a course of therapy and keep doing it every month or two months or three months. Don’t just take it for granted. What happens so frequently is the person will come home from the hospital, they’ll get a lot of therapy, and then it stops, right? And then we think everything just needs to keep going until the next crisis. Well, if there’s even the smallest decline, anytime somebody falls.
[20:03] Anytime somebody’s losing a lot of weight, anytime that there is a discernible change in their abilities, that is a trigger for you to ask your doctor for PTOT or speech or nursing or home health or outpatient. And if you’re struggling to figure that out, reach out to me.
Investing in Paid Support
[20:22] I’d be happy to help you with that. And then the last thing is invest in paid resources, like courses.
[20:32] Like memberships, community memberships, like my group coaching program, where when you join my community as a paid member, and I have a variety of ways that we can work together. But if you invest in a paid resource, if you join my one community, you join for one investment for lifetime access. I don’t know of anybody else that’s doing this. And so when people join my community, and I only take 25 in this particular community, when you join this community, you join for life and beyond the person that you’re helping moving on. So your support is from now until and through your caregiving journey. So this will save you time and money in the long run. You will have your questions answered in a timely manner. We have two opportunities a week and a lot of touch points. So invest in yourself.
[21:34] Invest in a paid course, a paid resource, a paid community. There are a variety of different ones out there. I’m not the only one, which is why I said, take the time to learn about the right program for you. But having said that, if you are ready for a paid community, if you are ready to invest in yourself, as well as the well-being of the person that you’re taking care of. Hop on my calendar for a Care Companion success call. These are 20 minutes. I promise you, you can tell me your biggest struggle in your caregiving journey right now, and I will help you with your first, next, best step, right? It took me 31 years to learn everything that I know about dementia and dementia caregiving. I can’t give it to you in a 20-minute call, but I can help get you on your next best step. And then after that, I will tell you how we can work together and if it makes sense for us to work together. There’s no pressure. I don’t believe in high pressure. I believe we’re either compatible or not. And every single day when I do my morning devotions, I literally pray.
[22:53] Lord, prepare and provide the right people for me to work with. Because this is a ministry for me. This is what I want to do to make your caregiving journey easier for you. So just to recap today’s episode, what we looked at was, what is the most important in dementia caregiving? Saving time, saving money, or saving effort? And the answer for that was, there are always going to be trade-offs because you can’t have everything. So if you’re going to save time, you’re probably going to spend money or effort. If you’re going to save money, it probably means expending effort and time. If you’re saving effort, it frequently can mean that you’re spending time or spending money later on trying to solve this problem. So yet again, consider coming to the next free monthly workshop, which is March the 8th at 12 Eastern. The link is in the show notes. And if you’re ready to hop on my calendar, it is called a Care Companion Success Call. And I look forward to seeing you on my calendar. And as I try to remember to end all of these podcasts, may the Lord bless you and keep you. And I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.
