Anyone who’s been a hands-on “informal” family caregiver probably knows these feelings: worrying about the health and well-being of your loved one, trying to keep track of the cash flow, figuring out how to find that needed 25th hour in your day or even grieving over the life you used to have. If you’re lucky, you have siblings or involved family or friends who are helping or have money to hire professional help to offset some of the burdens.

But the costs can be so much more than the actual hours of hands-on care. A new study published in The Journal of the American Geriatrics Society details the real costs of the sort of “informal” caregiving a daughter might give to her mother, for example, especially as the functional status of the mother declines. No big surprise that actual costs of such caregiving go well beyond the specific hours spent with the care recipient, and include the costs of lost opportunities and leisure time. With estimates that 35 million of us are providing informal care for loved ones over 50, caregivers are bearing an enormous amount of money and impact for which society is not paying. Read more about the study here. And since it seems the majority of baby boomers are counting on their kids to provide this type of care, this will continue to be an ever-increasing problem. A recent piece by physician Sandeep Jauhar in The New York Times revealed his own personal experiences with informal family caregiving. He posits that insurance companies should begin looking into compensating for this sort of hands-on family caregiving. That’s a provocative, and unlikely-to-be-realized, suggestion. But what will likely happen is that more and more of us will be drawn into the caregiving role, or require it for ourselves, as our population continues to age- and the costs of this informal, unpaid caregiving will inevitably be borne by all of us, and society at large, one way or another.