Can You Afford not to Pay for Long-Term Care?

Can You Afford Not to Pay for Long-Term Care? In the middle of all this work, you are certainly trying to put some savings aside. However, I want to talk about a monthly overhead you may have wrongfully set aside; or completely ignored.

Let's talk about the “Sandwich Generation”; the ones with minor children and elder parents to protect. Believe it or not, with the amount of elders I work with on a weekly basis, I am always taken back by the number of them that do not have long-term care. Whenever I ask why, the reason is always the same: “I couldn't afford it back then!”. Let's look at the flip side shall we?

The first threshold (I happen to know because dare I say it… I made the mistake in my family) to get over is the thought of not wanting to invest in a financial instrument you may never need or call upon. Let me be upfront, I agree with this statement whole-heartedly. However, in the event that you are wrong; you will be facing a financial crisis well above the couple of hundreds of dollars it would have cost you to purchase it… Long-term care insurance.

The Milliman Consulting Firm states that people age 65 and older who have purchased long-term care, had a 45% chance of making a claim. That is almost half of the people that own the insurance. This means that the hundreds of dollars you would have put into a Long-Term Care Insurance per year, could end up saving you thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars over time. Being a child of the Baby Boomer generation myself, I saw what out-of-pocket cost was when my Father needed it.

For those of you who believe Medicare will cover the cost of a Nursing Home for instance, that is not accurate! Medicare would cover it only for a very short period of time, and then the rest would be up to you. Also, please keep in mind that with medical progress, the chances of our needing it one day is irrefutable. The goal is not to become a financial burden to our family in the future. Even for the families that do not ever contemplate putting a loved one in a Nursing Home, you would at the very least appreciate the financial assistance that it could provide if you so choose to make a claim. Lastly, why take a chance? The average cost of a private NH in California ranges anywhere from $5,000-$7,500 / month on average. Trust me when I say, this is not a monthly overhead you would want to face. As always Medi-Cal is always an option, but it goes beyond the scope of this article. This is just a small, yet very wise investment you can make in the event you see a parent, or even yourself possibly facing this issue down the line.