About us

Our philosophy and mission:

Aging Deliberately is a business that educates and motivates people to plan for their aging in the long-term – and helps older people and their families to make well-informed choices when someone needs care and there’s no longer time to plan ahead.

We believe that personal accountability and planning are key to having some control over what happens to us as we grow older. Nothing can stop us from getting old -- except death. When people embrace their aging rather than deny it, they begin to age “deliberately,” taking purposeful steps that will allow them to age as gracefully and with as much dignity as possible.

About Liz Taylor

No, she isn’t the movie star.

Liz Taylor, President and founder of Aging Deliberately, is an award-winning journalist, speaker, and pioneer on a host of aging issues.

Unlike most of her colleagues who come from social work and nursing, Liz began her career in the early 1970s as a consumer and antitrust fraud investigator for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In 1976, Elizabeth Dole, an FTC Commissioner at the time, appointed Liz director of a nationwide investigation of the nursing home industry. Fascinated by what she found, she’s worked in the aging field ever since – over 30 years.

About the investigation

Asked to develop new regulations, she and her team discovered that nursing homes were already among the most over- (and ineffectively-) regulated industries in the country. Despite reams of rules, extraordinarily poor quality care flourished. What was needed, they decided, was not more mandates but consumer education that would empower families to get better care by showing them how to kick tires and make the right choices.

Their recommendations went nowhere, and to this day, a philosophy of even greater command-and-control dominates the long-term care industry.

What’s happened since

Over the years, many more kinds of care developed – in-home services, retirement communities, assisted living facilities, and adult family homes.  Yet families still operate in the dark, costs have skyrocketed, taxes to pay for them are off the charts in every state, too many providers offer poor quality, and many older people aren’t getting the services they need.

Because the government thinks it’s in charge, it’s never made consumer empowerment and education a priority.

Getting back to our chronology…

In the 1980s, Liz established one of the first geriatric care management businesses in the Pacific Northwest, helping thousands of older adults and their families to make the right decisions on a host of aging needs.

In addition, in the 1990s, Liz was the primary caregiver for her two parents for eight years.

All these experiences taught Liz an important lesson: that aging successfully requires deliberate planning – a series of steps to take while we’re healthy that will ensure a high quality of life when we’re not.

In 2000, Liz started a new business -- Aging Deliberately -- its mission to help people stop aging accidentally and do it with planning and forethought, deliberately. While education won’t prevent us from getting older, knowing what to do will get us there with more control and less stress.

Isn’t that what we all hope for, ultimately?

Today, Liz consults, writes and lectures widely on a variety of aging topics. Her mission is to educate families, older people, community planners, legislators, and providers on important issues that affect how we age. Her popular newspaper column on aging appeared every Monday in The Seattle Times for years and attracted readers nationwide. You can still read them in The Times’ archives. (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/growingolder).

Liz continues her popular columns on aging, but today publishes them via e-mail by subscription only in the Aging Deliberately newsletter every other Monday (click for subscription information).

In 2002, Liz was selected as one of 15 journalists to attend a weeklong conference on aging in New York City, sponsored by the International Longevity Center – USA and funded by The New York Times Foundation. In 2005, she was a delegate to the White House Conference on Aging in Washington, DC. In 2007, she received the American Geriatric Society’s Aging Awareness Media Award for outstanding reporting on health care for older adults and the Excellence in Media Award from the Washington Association of Housing & Services for the Aging.

Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest (and named after her grandmother, Elizabeth Taylor), Liz lives on Bainbridge Island, just a 35-minute ferry ride across Puget Sound from downtown Seattle, Washington, with her dog, Abby.