Considering the current financial markets many people may be wondering if they should look at long term health care insurance. The answer is a resounding yes.
Long term health care insurance needs to be looked at as income insurance. When people are young and working it’s not unusual for them to get disabilty insurance. Look at AFLAC. AFLAC sells little add-on policies that people buy at work, usually inexpensive, so that if and when income stops people can still get money. People understand that if their income goes away due to a disability that they’re in trouble. What many people fail to realize, however, is that when you have a long term disability you’re going to suffer many more consequences and this is particularly important for couples.
Let me tell you a story. There was a couple who had long term care insurance and the husband wrote out a check each year to pay for the policy. One year he thought “you know, I’m never going to use this….”. That was the year he stopped paying. About 8 months later he took his wife to the doctor…she hadn’t been feeling right. Sadly she was in the early stages of Alzheimers. As it would turn out this man had to begin writing checks once again but this time for the care of his wife. At the time I was told this story this man had written more than $200,000 in checks and wished somehow he could have turned back the hands of time. In the end he was right - he didn’t need the insurance (at least not at the time) - but his wife did. What ended up happening, as it does many times, is that as the wife’s health dropped the husbands income and lifestyle went with it. A lose-lose situation every time.
When financial planners get together with people they’ll always talk about insuring your income but what about insuring both income and retirement? It used to be that people died, I’m not kidding here. People are living longer than ever before and this is creating problems (especially for couples) when it comes to long term care. I saw this with my own father. He got sick - quite suddenly after a surgery - and ran up more than $40,o00 in bills. The expenses would have kept piling up but…..well, my father died. That $40,000 was in just 6 months. What happens is that people take things for granted hoping against hope that everything will go along as it always has. That is never the case.
What really matters to you is learning the inside out of long term care insurance and that’s why I wrote the guide “Insider Secrets”. The information that consumers are getting is skewed toward people who are making money from you; agents, insurance companies, companies that give you quotes, even financial planners (who are usually licensed to sell insurance products.)
What you need to do is learn from and ex-agent who got so fed up with the insurance companies that they left the business altogether. Read the guide and learn for yourself how long term health care insurance works, if it really is for you and how to structure a plan that protects your interest without overly benefiting the insurance company. Look, people are in business to make money and it’s up to you to learn how to protect yourself from uninformed agents and greedy insurance companies. Until next time…..
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