Why Your 'Golden Girls' Retirement Plan is a Legal Nightmare

Sharing a house with your best friends at 70 sounds like a dream, until someone needs a wheelchair ramp, a tax lawyer, and a professional diaper service.

Picture four friends in their late sixties buying a mid-century modern ranch in Austin. They drink chardonnay on the deck, split the grocery bills, and promise to look out for each other. It is the ultimate television fantasy, right up until one of them falls in the shower, breaks her hip, and needs round-the-clock physical assistance that her friends are neither qualified nor willing to provide. The dream of aging in place with your favorite people is booming, but the reality is a complex web of zoning laws, property deeds, and raw human exhaustion.

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