Long Term Care solutions can be tricky at best and downright confusing to anyone trying to figure them out. We started discussing the long term care problem here. Today, we’re going to look at the first two of four types of solutions to this long term care problem that grows every year. More and more people need either a nurse to visit their home or to live in a nursing home and end up losing everything because of this need. Let’s look at what you can do about it…
There are many ways to protect yourself and your family from a long term care need. This discussion will provide you several ideas of ways to protect yourself. It will offer some level of detail on each, but will not go into all the different options that each type of policy provides. You should carefully examine the particular long term care insurance or benefit offering. We’re simply trying to introduce you to the types of offerings available with no intention of trying to fully describe every offering.
Stand Alone Long Term Care Insurance
This is the best type of coverage to have for this need. If you have a deluxe policy that covers any facility that you would want to stay in for an unlimited amount of time with inflation riders that will cover the actual need when it one day arrives, then you’re set.
Unfortunately, this is also the most expensive. It’s not all that expensive when you’re younger, however, people who are younger are typically more concerned about building towards a retirement (or a child’s college education) than they are about covering a possible need decades in the future.
When you reach the age that the realization dawns that this could be a very real need, the cost has often grown prohibitive. The option then becomes to scale back the amount of coverage either in daily/monthly/annual benefit, or in number of years that it’s provided, or some other benefit add on.
This option should be considered because it’s the best, but if you can’t afford it, there are some great new alternatives that might be just what you’re looking for.
Long Term Care in an Annuity Benefit
Some annuities have an add on benefit that will increase (perhaps double) the lifetime income that they will pay you if you have a LTC need. Depending on how much money you have in the annuity, this might be a small supplemental benefit or a large benefit that covers the entire need.
On Monday, we’ll discuss two more ways of covering this risk that are perhaps the most exciting ways because they can be done with very little to no cost to you if you don’t need the benefits. And of course, if you do need them, then it’s financially crucial that you have them!
This is the 3rd post in our series of innovative new insurance products. You can find the previous posts at: 1) Innovative Insurance, 2) Long Term Care. If you’d like to read the entire series on insurance that we previously wrote, you can do so by reading Pt 1, Pt 2, Pt 3, Pt 4, Pt 5, Pt 6, Pt 7, Pt 8, Pt 9, Pt 10, Pt 11, Pt 12 and Pt 13.