A company may be looking for a very specific skill set, but the candidate they are looking for may have a completely different skill set that would be just as perfect for the job. This is often the case with job candidates. The moral of the story is that sometimes what we are looking for is right in front of us, but we just don't see it. When he went to show his friends his prize, the acorn had turned green. Finally, he found an acorn that was the exact color he was looking for and placed it in his pocket. The story goes that a man was looking for a purple squirrel and searched high and low, but could never find one. In fact, the term is based on a story that has been told for generations. While the term is relatively new, the concept of a purple squirrel is not. This term is often used when a company is looking for a needle in a haystack, or that one perfect candidate to fill a role. He is an advisor to Orange County’s OC-CARES Dementia Capable Community Project.A purple squirrel is a term used in the recruiting industry to describe a candidate that is so perfect for a job that they are almost impossible to find. He has been interviewed by ABC News and National Public Radio. Lorenzo speaks often on dementia and the challenges associated with caring for loved ones. Lorenzo is the founder of Dementia Friendly Orange County an effort to make local businesses more accommodating to people with dementia. In 2014, the Alzheimer’s Foundation named him the Dementia Care Professional of the Year in the United States. In 2013, he became a Qualified Dementia Care Specialist. They founded Acorn based on their experiences caring for his mom, who suffered with Alzheimer’s Disease. Lorenzo Mejia and his wife, Mary Lynn Ryerson, are the owners of Acorn, a caregiver registry located in Chapel Hill. People over 65 rely on Medicare but insufficient coverage, high premiums and the need for patients to pay some of the expense force many people to dip drastically into savings. Such amounts provide scant cushion for an unexpected health problem. The bottom fourth of households had about $3,000 in savings. In 2016, the median household led by a person 65 or older reported savings of approximately $60,000. For about a third of folks on Social Security, their monthly check represents nearly ninety percent of their disposable income. Some people have been unable, or failed, to save. Taking on a second job in order to pay unexpected bills is almost impossible. People in their later years are less able to recover from bumps in the road.įinding employment is more challenging as you age. When this happens, the remaining element of the social safety net is protection through bankruptcy. The article points out that when the costs of getting old are off-loaded onto people that do not have adequate resources, something has to give. Many retirees return to the workforce and find they are working for less money than they ever did in their life. The reduction of income associated with retirement exacerbates the problem. The transfer or risk has occurred in a number of way: the longer waiting period needed to receive full Social Security benefits, the elimination of employer-sponsored pension plans in exchange for 401(k) plans and the trend to higher out-of-pocket spending on medical care. Sadly, the social safety net is shrinking leaving many more people on their own financially. This trend is driven by a three-decade long reallocation of risk from employers and government to individuals. And this older group represents the largest share of all bankruptcy filers. Research highlighted in the Times article provides dimension to the problem: the incidence of people 65 and older who file for bankruptcy is three time what it was in the early 1990s. Pensions are rare, the costs of healthcare are exorbitant, and many people have inadequate savings the underlying issues have been festering for years. A recent article in the New York Times highlights a distressing trend: that a growing percentage of elder Americans are declaring bankruptcy.
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