I would love to say it is possible to nail down the sale and eventual bankruptcy problem, but it's tricky. Any enterprise can be well-managed today and badly managed in the future.

In the case of legal CCRCs (which are something of a hybrid residential complex/insurance company), the institution assumes actuarial risk and does so for a fairly small risk pool -- they guarantee lower costs for higher levels of care to qualifying residents based on their estimate that overall, residents who have more needs will be balanced by those who have lesser needs. There is really no way for a resident to know whether they've gotten that calculation systematically wrong until it's too late. In our case, we would probably not have qualified in any case because my husband has a stroke in his medical history, although I don't know that for sure.

We looked at similar places with the same selections of co-located care levels but without the insurance component -- these are not regulated as CCRCs. We applied a three-layer financial screen here. First, we focused on locations run as non-profits that had a long history in the region and that we deemed unlikely to be available for purchase by for-profit or private equity buyers. Second, we gave some thought to each of their business models, and whether those models comfortably funded their operating costs and gave them access to necessary capital. Finally, we asked for their most recent financial statements and tax filings, and had a friend with a deep financial background review them for red flags.

None of this, of course, is absolute protection, especially if we may live there for a couple of decades. As with any investment -- and from a certain perspective, this is an investment -- the past and the present are not necessarily indicative of the future. But it was the best we could do if we wanted to put roots down into a campus with all the possible levels of future care we might need.