There are a few certainties in life: death, taxes, and, for many of us, eventually caring for an aging loved one or needing care ourselves.
Yet long-term care is one of the financial planning conversations people are most likely to postpone. It is understandable. When you are healthy, active, working, traveling, and enjoying life, it can be difficult to imagine a future in which you may need help with the activities you handle independently today.
But that is precisely when the conversation should begin.
Living Longer Changes the Equation
People are living active lives well into what previous generations considered their retirement years. Sixty can feel like the new 50. We are working longer, traveling more, exercising more, and remaining independent later in life.
That is good news, but longevity also creates a financial planning challenge: the longer we live, the greater the possibility that we may eventually need some form of assistance.
Long-term care does not necessarily mean a nursing home. It can range from periodic help in your own home to home health services, assisted living, memory care, or skilled nursing care. The need can arise gradually with age or unexpectedly because of an illness, cognitive impairment, stroke, accident, or other change in health.
After nearly 30 years advising, we have unfortunately seen clients experience significant changes in their health at times they never anticipated. One lesson has remained consistent: waiting until care is needed to decide how you will pay for it is not a long-term care plan.
Who Will Provide the Care?
The financial cost is only one part of the conversation.
It is equally important to consider who would physically be available to help you. Families today are often geographically dispersed, and adult children may simultaneously be managing careers, raising their own children, and caring for more than one aging family member. For an only child or single parent, those challenges can be even greater.
Moving an aging parent away from his or her home, physicians, friends, routines, and community can also be disruptive, particularly when that person is already experiencing declining health or cognitive changes.
Planning ahead can create more choices. It can help determine whether you can remain in your home, receive professional assistance, move to a community of your choosing, or avoid placing the full responsibility for your care on family members.
We Insure Our Homes. What About Our Independence?
Most of us would never consider owning a home without homeowners insurance. We willingly pay premiums year after year to protect ourselves against an event we hope never occurs.
Long-term care deserves a similar risk-management conversation.
I have personally served as an advocate for clients who needed long-term care services. Their circumstances and ages have varied considerably, from individuals needing periodic in-home assistance to those requiring full-time assisted living or skilled nursing care. Their needs have resulted from conditions including multiple sclerosis, strokes, automobile accidents, and cognitive impairment, along with simply not being able to negotiate the activities of daily living.
For clients who had planned for these possibilities, insurance did more than help pay bills. It gave them greater freedom to choose the type and location of their care while helping preserve assets intended for a spouse, family, charitable giving, or other financial goals.
The Cost Can Change a Retirement Plan Quickly
Imagine paying off your mortgage and entering retirement with a carefully constructed financial plan, only to later experience an increase in expenses monthly that quadruples overnight for personal care, assisted living, or nursing services.
Those costs can place significant pressure on even a well-funded retirement.
Without a strategy for long-term care, families may be forced to redirect income, liquidate investments, sell property, or substantially alter the lifestyle they had planned. The purpose of long-term care planning is not simply to protect an inheritance. It is to protect choice: where you receive care, who provides it, and how much financial independence you retain.
Those decisions are much easier to make thoughtfully while you are healthy than during a health crisis.
Long-Term Care Insurance Is No Longer the Only Option
One important development in this area is that planning for long-term care does not necessarily mean purchasing a traditional, stand-alone long-term care insurance policy. Recently, there has been a significant increase in long-term care premiums due to several factors.
Today, certain life insurance policies can be structured with long-term care riders or benefits. Depending on the policy, these provisions may allow the policyholder to access a portion of the life insurance death benefit during his or her lifetime to help pay for qualifying long-term care expenses.
This creates another way to think about the risk.
With traditional long-term care insurance, the primary purpose of the policy is to provide benefits if qualifying care is needed. With certain life insurance-based strategies, the policy may serve two potential purposes: providing a death benefit to beneficiaries if long-term care is not needed, while potentially making funds available during the insured’s lifetime if qualifying care becomes necessary.
There are also hybrid or linked-benefit policies specifically designed to combine life insurance and long-term care benefits.
These approaches are not appropriate for everyone, and policy provisions, eligibility requirements, premiums, benefits, limitations, and tax considerations can vary considerably. But they have expanded the options available to families who may be reluctant to purchase traditional long-term care insurance because they are concerned about paying premiums for a benefit they may never use.
Why the Conversation Should Start Earlier
For people in their 50s who are in good health, long-term care planning is worth discussing now, not because care is imminent, but because health can significantly affect the options available later.
Insurance coverage generally requires medical underwriting. As health conditions develop or become documented in your medical history, certain policies may become more expensive or unavailable altogether. Waiting until a health problem causes you to recognize the need for coverage may mean waiting until your choices are already more limited.
That does not mean everyone in their 50s should purchase long-term care insurance. It means this is an appropriate time to understand the risk, evaluate your resources, and determine whether you want to self-fund potential care, transfer some of the risk through insurance, use a life insurance-based strategy, or combine several approaches.
The insurer itself also matters. Financial strength, claims-paying ability, policy provisions, premium structure, and the support available when a family actually needs to access benefits should all be considered alongside the initial cost of coverage.
Final Thought
Long-term care planning ultimately is not about predicting exactly what will happen decades from now. None of us can do that.
It is about deciding, while you still have choices, how you would like to respond if your health and independence change.
At The Legacy Foundation, we have spent decades helping families evaluate these questions as part of their broader financial plans. That includes reviewing traditional long-term care coverage, life insurance policies with long-term care benefits or riders, hybrid strategies, and ways to customize coverage to balance potential benefits with premium costs.
The best time to make decisions about your future care is not when you need it. It is while you are healthy enough to have options and enough time to make those decisions thoughtfully.
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