I'm 60, Do I Really Need Long-Term Care Planning?

Casey Weade: You're 60 years old, you've reached that magic age, and you're ready to evaluate long-term care solutions, but you're not sure that you want to pay for that traditional long-term care insurance. Today we're going to evaluate all types of different long-term care solutions and find the best one for you. Hey, I'm Casey Weade, CEO and founder of Howard Bailey Financial, also a certified financial planner practitioner, and I'm here with you today to discuss long-term care.

We're going to be discussing long-term care, giving you a high-level of overview of what long-term care is, when you might use it, and if you're starting to evaluate different solutions, we want to walk you through what you should be looking for when you're finding the best solution for you in your unique situation. We're also going to take a look at some hard numbers. So often I see a lot of general videos out there on long-term care, long-term care solutions, the pros and the cons, but you never really get the hard numbers.

Today we're going to be taking a look at the hard numbers, we're going to take a look at facts and figures and what the actual effective rate of return you're getting on these different types of tools really is, and find the best one for you at the end of the day. You'll get to see these numbers, and I think this will all help you make a better decision about the right long-term care solution for you.

Before we get into the unique circumstances and actually start running the specific numbers here for a 60-year-old couple, we need to take a look at a high level of overview of what long-term care is really all about. I want to walk you through, as we get started, through some facts and figures. When it comes to long-term care solutions, we're taking a look at a 65-year-old who has almost a 70% chance of needing some type of long-term care services. You've heard that before? "Hey, you're 65 years old, the odds of you needing long-term care in some way, shape, or form during your retirement life is about 70%." That number is accurate, but I think there's more to the story.

One of those things being family and friends are the sole caregivers of 70% of the elderly today. That means your children, your grandchildren could be put in a place to take care of you if you don't have some type of care solution in place. A lot of these care solutions might even allow you room to pay your children or your grandchildren to provide that care to you if that's what you so choose. A lot of people are picking up long-term care because they don't want to place that burden on their children or their grandchildren, something for you to think about.

Those age 65, they face a 40% lifetime risk of entering a nursing home. We see that 70% chance is of you needing some type of long-term care service, but there's a lot of different types of solutions out there. That could be home health care, assisted living, nursing home care. Most people think, "Well, nursing home care is probably not going to happen. Maybe it's home health care, assisted living." 40% of the time, it's actually going to be nursing home care, and 10% of those needing nursing home care will be there five years or longer.

People often feel they'll only be there for one, two, three, four years, but you could be in a facility for a much longer period of time, and we need to safeguard ourselves against that. Because for a lot of the wealthy families that we work with, long-term care is that one piece of their financial puzzle that's missing, and the one piece that could result in disastrous consequences. Usually it's because you need long-term care at a young age and for an extended period of time.

Women face a 50% greater likelihood of actually entering a nursing home. I think this is because on average, males will pass away sooner than their female counterparts. 85% men are going to die when they're married. That means that women are going to be left to take care of themselves. We see this many times with the families we work with, the woman in the household takes care of the man in the household, and then he passes away. Now she needs care, but we've seen it both ways. We've really seen it both ways.

40% of those currently receiving long-term care services are 18 to 64 years old. I think that's an important stat for us to really grasp, because I think most often we're told, "Well, don't look at long-term care solutions until you're 50 or 60 years old." However, many times it's happened prior to age 60, prior to age 50, even 40 or 30 years old.

I worked with a couple not long ago that were in their early 50s, late 40s. She was in her late 40s, he was in his early 50s. They came in wanting to implement a long-term care solution because one of their friends that was in his 40s ended up needing long-term care for a very extended period of time. It put the surviving spouse and their family in dire circumstances. We want to look at these types of solutions regardless of what our age is. I myself have my own long-term care solutions in place. I am well younger than 60 years old today.

How long are you going to need that care? This is an important factor when determining what type of care that you might want to get through a solution because you could have a two-year solution, a five-year solution, a 10-year solution, an unlimited solution. We're going to take a look at those in a moment. On average, women will need care for about four years, men about two years. Take those things into consideration. How much is it going to cost? The cost of that care for in-home care, assisted living and nursing home care varies quite significantly from maybe $2,000 a month for adult day health care all the way to $10,000 a month roughly for nursing home facility care in a private room.

This is an important thing for us to dial in as well is what is the cost of our care today and what's that potentially going to be in the future? This is where you start to take a look at things like inflation riders so that benefit increases with your need for it over time and increases with inflation because the average cost of health care usually increases and on average has increased at a higher rate than the generalized rate of inflation in the country, CPI. We want to make sure that we're going to have enough benefits when we actually need the care and not just have enough in benefits today.

Another thing that I thought we could mention here is that what I often see, long-term care solutions being placed for from financial advisors, financial planners, long-term care salespeople, they're often solving for the entire long-term care need. They'd say, "Hey, your cost is currently $6,000 a month. We need to cover the entire $6,000 a month." Don't you have other income that you could use to cover that expense without even tapping into your savings? Because many times you have your social security, you'll have your pension, maybe you have some investment income.

If you're in a facility, especially if you're a single individual going into a facility, now your expenses drop because all of your expenses, in large part anyway, are going to be taken care of by that facility. You can reorganize some of that income to address different expenses, those expenses that are related to health care, so you don't need to buy nearly as big of a policy as you might have thought you needed to buy.

Now we get into all of the different factors. We want to evaluate cost. Is there a death benefit attached to the policy? Is there cash value that I can walk away with? Are the premiums adjustable? Will they go up over time? Are they fixed and guaranteed? How strong is the insurance carrier? What's the benefit type and what is the elimination period? Let's start with the cost. What is the cost of the policy and how is that premium structured?

Many policies can be structured in a variety of different ways. You don't have to pay for a policy for the rest of your life like you would an auto insurance or a homeowner's insurance. You can pay annually for a period of 10 years. You could pay a period for 10, 15, 20 years. You could have a fixed premium over that period of time. You could even have a lump sum.

You could say, "Hey, I have some lazy money over here. I have some cash sitting on the sidelines. It's not making anything. I just want to have some benefits attached to this." Maybe we move it over into a policy that gets a little bit of a rate of return, but now you have some long-term care benefits attached to it. These are all different things we want to evaluate, the period of time you want to pay and how you want that payment structured.

Then you have death benefit. This may be something that's new to you, but this is what we're going to see with a lot of the hybrid solutions that we're going to evaluate when we start looking at these numbers is that there's death benefits attached to these hybrid type policies that are out there. Traditional long-term care insurance didn't have that death benefit. It was use it or lose it.

In addition, you could structure that death benefit in a variety of different ways. You could have a death benefit that is equivalent to the amount of premiums that you pay, maybe a little less than those premiums. You could have a death benefit that's quite significant up front or lower up front and grows over time. We want to evaluate all of those different options to find the best one that best fits or best suits you.

Then we have cash value. This is something also that's relatively new, and this is why hybrid policies are becoming so popular. Hybrid policies have some cash value. Traditional long-term care insurance, you decide to cancel that policy 10, 15 years from now, you're not getting any money back. There were some return of premium options that you could attach to a long-term care policy, but those would only last for a few years with a traditional policy.

With a hybrid approach, you have cash value in those policies, and the cash value could have a growth rate on it. It might not have a growth rate. There might be penalties or surrender charges. There's a variety of different solutions. I think this is one of the beauties of long-term care insurance today, anyway, is it wasn't this way 25 years ago, but today you have the ability to customize a solution that's best for you. I know it can be a little daunting and overwhelming, but I think all of this flexibility that you have within these policies allows you to better customize it so you find the best fit for you and your family.

Then you have fixed or adjustable premiums. This is a big one. If you own traditional long-term care insurance over the last 5, 10 years, then it's been very frustrating because those premiums on traditional long-term care insurance are much like your health insurance. They go up over time. Those increases were significant. The NAIC, National Association of Insurance Commissioners, their long-term care task force, they approved more than 3,500 rate increases in 2021 with an average single requested rate increase of 78%. They requested rate increases. The carriers did. It would almost double somebody's premium in 2021.

The average single approved rate increase was almost 40% and that average cumulative rate increase on enforced policies in 2021 was 112%. That means your policy premium could have doubled. These premiums aren't cheap. That premium could have went from $15,000 to $30,000 a year, made it unaffordable, requiring you to cut off your benefits or maybe cancel the policy altogether and lose all of those dollars that you paid into those policies. We're going to show you some solutions to fix that today.

Of course we have carrier strength. It's really important that you don't just buy the policy without looking into how strong that insurance carrier is. There's a number of different rating agencies out there because the policy's only as good as its backing. That backing is the insurance carrier. Great insurance ratings that you've heard of, AM Best, S&P, Moody's. One you may have not have heard of is the Comdex. Comdex is one of the things we love to rely on here in our office which really aggregates all of these different rating agencies which is going to give you the most accurate number, most accurate depiction of just how strong that insurance carrier is to fulfill those claims that they may have in the future.

Then we have something called reimbursement and indemnity. This is benefit type. You have different types of benefits that can be paid out to you when you have long-term care. You could have a reimbursement policy or you can have an indemnity policy. Traditional long-term care insurance was always reimbursement based. That's much like your health insurance. You get a bill and they reimburse you for the amount of that bill. If your bill's $550, they're giving you $550. With indemnity, they're giving you cash. Once you qualify for those benefits, say you can't perform two out of six activities of daily living, you're past your elimination period, then they start paying out those benefits and you're getting a chunk of benefits every month, your maximum benefit.

In some cases, you can use those benefits for whatever you want. Maybe you want to leverage those benefits to pay your son or daughter to take care of you instead of providing care through a licensed long-term care provider. That's something that may be attractive to you. You have to evaluate all these different policies based on what's most important to you in your unique circumstance.

Then, of course, we have elimination period. The elimination period could be from immediate all the way to 365 days. That means once you qualify for benefits, you might have a waiting period. On average, that waiting period is 90 days until the policy will actually pay out. You qualify for benefits, you can't perform two out of six activities of daily living, now you have to wait 90 days and then they will start paying those claims. This is a really important number and once you get below that 90 number, you get to 60, 30, 0, the cost of the policy can increase quite significantly.

What are the types of long-term care solutions that you have? You have traditional long-term care insurance, of course. That is our use it and lose it policy, the one that you're probably most familiar with. Then you have the ability to, of course, self-insure. I think this is something that's quite often misunderstood. People say, "Well, I'm just going to self-insure."

Self-insure, what does that really mean? I feel like it should just mean self-pay. That means you're going to pay for whatever needs that you might have, whether you have the money or not. You're going to spend down your own money and you may need that care long enough and have assets that aren't substantial enough that eventually you spend down all of your assets and you end up on Medicaid. This is how most long-term care and nursing home expenses are covered today, are through Medicaid. This isn't something that you want to be on.

Then, of course, our newer solutions and those that are rising and most popular today, more popular than traditional long-term care insurance, are these hybrid solutions. We're going to take a look at some hard numbers between these two different solutions so you can find the best solution for yourself. Why are we looking at hybrid? Here's the thing. When you compare these things side-by-side, traditional long-term care insurance, it has adjustable premiums, right?

We don't have that guarantee that our premium isn't going to go up and go up potentially quite substantially, as we saw, maybe 30%, 40% in a single year. We don't have any death benefits. We pay into this policy. We never use it. There's nothing left. Too bad. It's much like your homeowner's insurance. If you never use it, then it's use or lose it. Then you have your no cash value. There isn't any cash value, no ability to walk away with what you have in those policies, which has frustrated a lot of policyholders over the last 20 years.

Then we have hybrid long-term care. Hybrid long-term care was introduced to really solve for all of those things that people didn't like about traditional long-term care insurance. Here we have fixed premiums. We don't have to worry about premium increases. We have a death benefit attached. We have a death benefit that will pass on to our heirs if we never use it. We have cash value in there. If we need to go back in, we want to access some of our cash value, we have the ability to go back and do that to different degrees depending on the policy structure that you so choose.

Let's look at a case study. Let's look at some hard numbers so that we can start to really understand the differences between these two and do some pros and cons between the two. We're going to be taking a look at a 60-year-old couple that are in average health and they have a budget of about $15,000 a year. Let's take a dive into the numbers. I'm so excited to dive into these numbers with you because we've really done a lot of hard work in order to run all these things for you.

We went out and we ran quotes from some of the top hybrid carriers, traditional long-term care carrier, and just comparing it to a traditional investment so you can see all these different attributes side-by-side. This is how we evaluate long-term care solutions in our office. If you would like to have a customized spreadsheet built for you so you can see what all these different benefits might look like for you, then give us a call. Call the number on your screen. We'll run a customized analysis for you and if you qualify, we'll walk you through a personal financial review.

Let's take a look at these. We have hybrid A, hybrid B, C, D. We have traditional long-term care insurance and then we have another hybrid here and then we have this investment thing over here. All the way to the right, why did we do that? Because many will say, "Well, I'll just self-insure. Rather than paying that money into an insurance policy, why don't I just put that into an investment vehicle?" We're going to be comparing that solution as well.

When we compare that solution as far as investing those dollars, we're doing the same type of investment across the board. We're doing about $15,000 a year across the board as a premium or as an investment and we're assuming that you invest these in an S&P 500 index and we are utilizing the historical return of the S&P index price return and that's roughly 10% per year is what it's annualized and we'll have a link in the description.

Assuming that we're investing those dollars for you, we're just using an index so that you can get an idea of what that comparison might look like between these different tools. Then of course we have our traditional long-term care insurance here which there's a lot of blank columns in there, right? Because there's no cash value, no walk-away money, no death benefit.

We have the annual premium being the same across the board and then we have it being fixed or adjustable. When we look at these first two hybrids, that premium is fixed, it's $15,000 a year, that premium does not stop. We then have these performance-based policies. These are going to be built a little bit more like a traditional life insurance policy you may be familiar with and the returns are going to be indexed inside of that policy to an S&P or something along those lines, but it's going to be based on the performance of the policy. If you're looking at life insurance solutions, that might be a universal life policy based on interest rates, it might be indexed universal life based on indexes in their returns, it may be variable universal life based on actual mutual fund investments or ETF investments within the policy.

Then we have another one we're looking at over here, traditional long-term care insurance and of course we know that premium is adjustable, it could go up over time. We have a hybrid over here, in addition this one's fixed and then of course we have our investment, we said, "Hey this is performance-based," because we don't know what the returns are actually going to be over time, but we're basing them off of what the S&P 500 index has performed at over time. If it underperforms that, then in order to get those benefits essentially, which are the dollars invested or the dollars accumulated, then you're going to have to adjust what you're investing.

Then we have what those premiums are over time. We have what is the premium accumulation over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? All of these first four are going to be the same because they're lifetime pay. We also have lifetime pay over here in traditional long-term care insurance, but the quote didn't come back quite at an even $15,000 per year. Then we have this other hybrid here, which is a 10-pay. We're only paying that $15,000 per year for 10 years, and then we don't have to pay any more into that policy. Then, of course, the investment. We're continuing to pay that premium over the life of the policy.

Let's take a look at our walkaway money. That walkaway money here we have in our hybrids. In 10 years, we have paid in $150,000, but we're only getting $30,000 to $60,000 back. We're only getting $70,000 back or $135,000 back. You can see the variability across hybrids and how much you can get back of that original premium that you've been paying. In 20 years, it'll be a little bit higher and substantially higher with some over others, whereas the 10-pay over here is staying roughly about what we put in at about $140,000. Of course, our walkaway money with our investment is always whatever that investment is. With the other traditional long-term care insurance policy, we have no walkaway ability.

Then we have death benefits. We have death benefits attached to these first few options, which are life insurance policies. This is a tax-free death benefit, which varies from $150,000 to $700,000, $1.1 million. I want you to see just the variability between all of these different options. This isn't what they might look like for you. They might look quite a bit different for you based on your age and your health and your funding level and all of the options that you choose. I'm hoping we're setting a real good foundational understanding of how you might analyze these things.

Then we get to our long-term care pool. What's fairly new is more and more of these companies are coming out with unlimited benefits. We looked at what the need might be, on average being two to four years. We also said that 10% of individuals are experiencing long-term care needs beyond five years. If you really want to truly protect yourself against a catastrophic need, that you want to evaluate an unlimited benefit solution, of which we have three in here.

Our first two hybrids are unlimited, and our traditional long-term care insurance policy here is unlimited. While the pools are all variable with these others, being that it's growing year over year with these two hybrids here, those life insurance policies that we have that are growing that cash value. The death benefit is growing over time more rapidly with one, starting off lower with one and growing over time, where it is staying fairly stable with the first one, but it can fluctuate a little bit depending on the performance of the policy. Then we have unlimited benefits with traditional, as I stated. We have this one here that is variable, our 10-pay. Those benefits, that pool is going to increase over time because we have an inflation rider attached to it.

The 20-year benefit pool, what does that look like? The benefit pool is unlimited, of course, with our unlimited solutions. Then we have these two policies, where it's $726,000, a half a million, and $1.1 million. You really want to know when you're going to need that care. This is like that social security decision. If you can tell me when you're going to need the long-term care, I can tell you exactly what policy is best for you, but we're trying to typically guard against a more catastrophic situation, as I stated.

Then we have our 20-year monthly benefit and our 30-year monthly benefit. This is the benefit each individual is going to get. We are running this as a couple policy. There might be some couple discounts embedded in some of these different policies, but each beneficiary is going to have this benefit, $8,000 a month for each individual, $9,500 a month for each individual, and so on and so forth. Some of these policies are growing over time. In the amount of benefits we can get month over month, whereas some are stable. There isn't an inflation rider attached to these two. Where there is an inflation rider attached to our hybrid A, as well as our traditional long-term care insurance and our hybrid E.

We also have a mix of different types of benefits. We have some that are reimbursement-based and some that are indemnity-based. I put over here that your investment dollars are indemnity-based to just create that parallel because you really could use these dollars wherever you wanted to use them for and take as much as you want at any given time.

Now, how do we evaluate if we're getting a good deal or not? You want to evaluate whether you're getting a good deal by looking at the return on the investment. Now, these aren't really investments. Traditional long-term care insurance isn't an investment, but it is something that can act like an investment because you put X amount of dollars in, and then when you need the care, if you need the care, they're going to give you a chunk of benefits back. When they give those benefits back to you, we can calculate an effective rate of return, and that'll at least let us know if we're getting the best price that we can for the product that we're looking at, looking at the effective rate of return of each of these.

The way that we're going to do this is assume that this couple that's age 60, they need this care at age 80. The average age that we need long-term care is around 84, so we're going to look at age 80 and assume that they both needed that care for four years. Then we're going to look at age 90 and assume they need that care starting at age 90, and they need the care for a period of four years. Then we can see what the effective rate of return was on all of those different solutions. The odds of both of these beneficiaries needing four years of care at the same exact period of time is probably a million to one or more, but it's still valid in helping you determine, again, the best price. Am I getting a good deal in comparison to these other options?

Let's look at the age 80 analysis to kick things off. Okay, so we're now comparing all these different solutions side-by-side, and we're going to be looking at that rate of return. We have all of our solutions side-by-side, just like we looked at a moment ago, and then let's assume that they're needing that benefit at age 80. What is the annualized benefit that they would receive between the two of them if they both needed that care at the same time? Those benefits are $200,000 roughly to a low end of $100,000, $300,000.

Then we're just assuming with the investment dollars that we're taking this benefit pool total of $920,000, and we're just dividing it over a period of four years, and we're no longer going to be over that four years. We're no longer going to be getting a rate of return. We're taking those dollars out, and we're putting them in, say, cash.

What is that annual premium? It's annually for everything except for this one policy we looked at, which was a 10-year period of time that we pay that premium, and then we're done. What is the period of care? We said we're looking at a four-year. 20-year benefit pool. Some of them are unlimited. We have some that have limits attached to them. Some have death benefits, and one does not have a death benefit, which is that traditional long-term care insurance.

How do we run this? Let's take a look at our first one, Hybrid A. We got Tom and Kathy. They're 60 years old. They're going to be paying that $15,000 a year for 20 years. Then they need the care, and it's going to pay out $193,000 a year for four years, assuming they qualified for the max benefit, use it right there, pass their elimination. What is the effective rate of return that they got out of the $15,000 a year they put in when they received back $772,000 from age 80 through 83, four years? That's an effective rate of return of about 7.5% a year.

What do those rates of return look like on each one of these different solutions? If we look at them side by side, we can see on the low end, we have one that's about 3.5%. Then we have one that's about 6.96%. The best return is 10.5%, which is traditional long-term care insurance, and we should expect that because if we're buying traditional long-term care insurance, it's only accomplishing one thing, and if it's only accomplishing one thing, it should do so more efficiently. Obviously, if those premiums increase over time, it might bring that 10.5% in line with some of the other returns we see of 8.5%, 7.5%.

The investment down here is at 8.79% because, again, yes, we achieved a 10% roughly rate of return for the first 20 years, but then we said, "All right, when we need the money, we're taking it to cash," which drug the actual internalized rate of return down a little bit over that entire period of time. Now let's say that we need that care later in life. Let's say we don't need the care until we're 90 years old. If we look at that 90-year period we have much higher benefits with most of these policies. Now with the investment all the way over here, we've accumulated $2.8 million in that investment, and so if we spread that over four years, that's about $700,000 per year.

Then we have others that were fixed. We have some that are a little smaller. We've got $175,000 a year. We have our traditional long-term care insurance, which is approaching $400,000 per year. Looking at all the rates return of each one of those solutions, not kicking it on for a period of 30 years now, we can see that the rates of return are going down on all of those different solutions. They're going down a little bit over time. On the investment, it's going up over time. This is a higher rate of return now than we see on the investment, than we see on the insurance policies. This is the big point for you to consider, is when do I need the care? If you need it sooner, you're going to have a higher rate of return.

It's just like life insurance, right? If you buy a life insurance policy and you pass away tomorrow, that rate of return is a heck of a lot higher for you than if you paid into that life insurance policy for 30 years and then you received the payout. You buy life insurance to protect you today in most circumstances. You're really trying to protect yourself against those catastrophic situations. That's where the investment may not make sense to you unless you're willing to take on that risk that you don't need that care for 20 or more years.

Let's jump back into our side-by-side comparison here and look at each one of these. I want to highlight a few things for you in summary. All right, so I summarized all of these numbers side-by-side, a lot of the things that we're looking at, some of these most important elements that we need to highlight. We can see at the age 80, rate of return, the best rate of return effectively we're getting, if we're looking at internal rate of return here, is with traditional long-term care insurance. That's the best bang for our buck if we want to put it in another way.

Then we have that 10-pay hybrid. That's going to be the runner-up, but some of them aren't too far off. There's just some that are definitely not going to be the best solutions early on. Then if we go all the way out here to age 90, we still have that 10-pay solution looking like a pretty competitive solution, if not the best solution across all of the long-term care solutions we have here, other than, of course, our investment is going to be the best annualized rate of return.

Then is the premium adjustable? We're highlighting those things. We have the green ones that are highlighted that are fixed premiums. We don't have to worry about them increasing. We have a death benefit. I've highlighted the ones with a death benefit. I've highlighted the ones with unlimited long-term care pools, if you want the maximum protection possible. Then we have, is there cash available? Greens are highlighted there. Then what type of benefit are you receiving?

If you look at all these different things, I think what you really have to do is sit down with your advisor and walk through what your biggest priorities are. Maybe your biggest priority is having a death benefit and a long-term care benefit attached to a policy that kicks in sooner rather than later. If you want that benefit today and you want to make sure you're protected in those early years, then it might be this hybrid E over here, where we know it has good pricing. We don't have to worry about premiums going up. We have a death benefit. We have some cash available.

Now, on the other hand, you might say, "What's really important to me, I'm willing to take a little bit of risk, but I want the biggest death benefit I can possibly create for my family. If I need long-term care, it's nice to access some of it." Maybe that means you're going with one of these hybrid C's or hybrid D's over here. Maybe you're a risk taker and say, "I don't need that coverage for next 20 years. I'll roll the dice. I want to have some fun investing in the market." Maybe investment tool is the one that's right for you. Maybe you just want to go with the most efficient, cleanest tool out there, go with traditional long-term care insurance, and you're willing to take the risk that the premiums may increase over time. You have to weigh these things for yourself to find the best solution for yourself.

When it comes to finding the right allocation in your financial plan to solve for this need, one of the things you can do quite often is just to optimize that financial plan. Sometimes you might have some cash that's sitting idly by that you're not leveraging. Could we reallocate that cash and pick up some long-term care benefits? Maybe you have some old life insurance policies that really aren't providing you the benefits you need today. You have some cash value, you have a death benefit, but you say, "I really don't need the death benefit, but it would be great-- I would need it if I could use it while I'm living for long-term care, home health care."

Maybe you have the ability to upgrade that policy and access the death benefit for long-term care purposes. Maybe it's just time to diversify your savings vehicles. You've invested in your 401k already. Maybe you've invested in your HSA, you have some $529 around, and you want to diversify where you're placing those dollars for specific needs, such as long-term care.

Now, our process is to visit with you and address your specific questions and concerns, review your current financial situation, and then stress test your strategy. Stress test it against market risk, stress test it against tax risk, and of course, as we're talking about today, long-term care. We want to look at that big picture so we understand the specific benefit amount that you're actually going to need.

We can't put the proverbial cart ahead of the horse and start figuring out what long-term care solution is best for you until we actually have taken care of creating that income strategy for retirement, implementing that tax strategy. There are some things before that have to come into play, which may result in you not needing as large of a long-term care policy. That's what we'll walk you through. If you want to walk through that process, it's super easy to get started. All you have to do is call the number on your screen and we will sit down with you and provide you with a complimentary long-term care analysis in conjunction with a personal financial review.