On Your Own Terms

You want to stay in your own home. You also want to remain the person who decides what happens there.

Those are two different goals-and protecting both takes more than good intentions.

In On Your Own Terms: Taking Charge of Aging in Place, Paul Wilczynski offers a practical, plainspoken guide to making the decisions that shape your later life before a fall, a hospital stay, or someone else's worry makes them for you. Written by a 78-year-old retired software developer who is navigating these choices himself, this book speaks to you as a capable adult-not a problem to be managed.

Staying home is a strategy, not simply what happens when you don't move. Through clear explanations, relatable stories, and chapter-ending checklists, you'll learn how to:

• Assess your home, health, finances, and support network honestly-and spot the weak points before they become emergencies.
• Prioritize home modifications that matter, prevent falls, and evaluate what medical alert devices can actually do.
• Use monitoring, voice assistants, telehealth, and other technology without handing over your privacy or control.
• Build meaningful connections, protect your money from sophisticated scams, and keep getting where you need to go as your driving changes.
• Calculate the real cost of staying home, explore possible sources of financial help, and hire support without surrendering your say.
• Decide in advance what would make moving the right choice-so that, if the day comes, the decision still reflects your wishes.

This is not a catalog of gadgets, a promise that you can stay home forever, or a lecture about accepting your limitations. It is a working plan for protecting your independence, using your money wisely, and accepting help on terms you understand and choose. Whether you live alone, share your home, or have family nearby or far away, the starting point is the same: know your situation, make a plan, and remain in charge.

Your home. Your rules. Your say.