Society is living longer. We would normally think this is a good development. However, many of our seniors haven’t planned to live nearly as long as they are and the need for long-term care is on the rise.
With the baby boom generation reaching retirement and unprecedented advances in health care, the long term-care needs of many people are often overlooked. Most people never saw the unprecedented amount of long-term care in their lifetimes. Their parents and grandparents didn’t live as long or need nearly as much long-term care.
Attempting to insure the problem later in life by buying long-term care insurance has yielded mixed results. Many people find the long-term care insurance to be too costly. But just as many can afford the insurance but cannot qualify because their already poor health causes them to be automatically disqualified.
We never recommend not getting long-term care insurance in favor of Medicaid planning when there are policies available and within your price range.
The need for planning grows exponentially when you are uninsured because the cost of care is so high. The average cost of a nursing home is over $7,000 per month. At those rates, a person of modest resources can go broke in no time at all.
Most people do not envision working all of their lives just to pay a nursing home more money in a year than the patient ever made in a year while they worked. That high cost of nursing home care has become a disincentive to the American dream.
And anyone who is married and potentially needs care has the additional burden of worrying about how to make sure that their own personal health crisis doesn’t leave their healthy spouse at home going broke.
With so many problems people face in what are suppose to be the “Golden Years,” it’s fortunate that there are ways to help plan for long-term care if you are unable to get or afford long-term care insurance.
Medicaid planning becomes the solution to so many to help arrange their finances restructure their assets in the most Medicaid friendly way possible. From small estate to large estates, from people trying to protect their IRA to people trying to protect their family farm, we have solutions that can help you.
Call us or email us if you recognize a need for planning in your life to protect your assets!