One can hardly pick up a newspaper or periodical and not see stories about families struggling to provide for a loved one who needs long-term care. Often accompanying the article is a statement about whether long-term care insurance may be appropriate for you. Unfortunately, whether you should or should not buy the product is based on a series of statistics that suggest that your chances of going to a nursing home or ending up with a chronic illness increase as you age.
Rather than focus on whether long-term care insurance is appropriate for you, it is far more important to consider the impact that not having a plan for long-term care could have on your family. No one believes that awful things will happen to them, therefore you may think purchasing a long-term care insurance product is a waste of money. You may ask, ”Why spend money to pay for care if I am never going to need care?” A better way to approach the subject is to consider what needing care will do to your family.
If you have had an experience with providing care or are going through it right now, you know there are two sets of devastating consequences: the emotional and physical well-being of those taking care of a loved one, and their financial viability because they have to take money from their retirement portfolio.
Here are some thoughts that may help you decide if having a plan for long-term care makes sense. If so, purchasing long-term care insurance to protect that plan may also make sense.
Providing care to people who are chronically ill often makes healthy caregivers chronically ill. You need to understand that this happens because of the nature of the care. If you cannot get through your daily routine or need supervision because of a cognitive impairment, someone is going to have to help.
Put simply, if you ever need care over a period of years, your life is not going to end. Someone else’s life is going to end.
Are you aware that paying for care will likely lead to a reallocation of income? At a minimum this will impact the caregiver’s lifestyle and if the illness lasts long enough it could cause an invasion of your investment portfolio jeopardizing the financial viability of those you promised to take care of.
You will notice that the emphasis is not the risk of an event happening to you but rather the severe consequences to those you care about if you ever need care. If you believe those consequences are severe enough, then long-term care insurance makes perfect sense – not to protect you but those you love and everything you worked so hard for.