How To Best Use Long Term Care Insurance In Dementia Caregiving
Have you ever considered how long-term care insurance could protect your family from financial stress? For many caregivers of loved ones with dementia, it’s a topic often overlooked—until it’s too late.
In Episode 177, we explore this crucial yet under-discussed topic: long-term care insurance. Whether you’re caring for a parent with dementia or considering your own future needs, this episode offers a clear guide on why planning ahead is essential for every caregiver.
Our guest Luke Mangum from https://southcarolina.massmutual.com, is a married guy with kids, who loves being around friends and meeting new
people. He’s passionate about helping others simplify their finances and make smart money decisions. Always curious and eager to learn, Luke enjoys picking up new skills.
When he’s not busy with work, you’ll find him hiking or exploring the outdoors, soaking in nature. His friendly, down-to-earth attitude makes him great at what he does and fun to be around.
The Hidden Costs of Dementia Care
Dementia caregiving is emotionally and financially draining. It’s estimated that the average lifetime cost of care for someone with dementia is around $400,000. Most families aren’t prepared to absorb this kind of expense.
This is where long-term care insurance can become a lifeline, helping to cover the overwhelming costs of nursing care, home care, and more. Without a plan, families often face tough decisions—selling homes or draining retirement savings just to afford care.
Why You Shouldn’t Wait
One key takeaway from the episode is the importance of getting long-term care insurance early. Waiting until you or your loved one needs care is too late.
Long-term care insurance works best when it’s obtained earlier in life, especially in your 40s or early 50s, when rates are lower and you’re more likely to qualify based on health. By starting early, you not only save money but also provide financial protection for your family.
As Luke explains, “If you’re not in retirement age yet, it’s a great time to look at it.”
Protecting Future Generations
Many caregivers are already financially supporting their parents and can feel the strain. Without proper planning, the cycle continues. The episode discusses how long-term care insurance could break this cycle, ensuring that caregivers won’t pass the financial burden onto their children.
By securing a policy for yourself now, you’re safeguarding your family from having to shoulder the high costs of care in the future. It’s a proactive way to stop the cycle of financial strain that so many caregivers face.
What Does Long-Term Care Insurance Cover?
The episode also breaks down how long-term care insurance works. It covers care that typical health insurance or Medicare won’t, such as in-home care, nursing homes, or assisted living. It provides peace of mind that, when the time comes, there will be funds to support the care you or your loved one needs.
The guest emphasizes that coverage varies, and it’s important to assess what’s right for your situation. Options range from standalone long-term care insurance to riders added onto life insurance policies.
The key is having a plan in place before care is urgently needed.
Planning for Peace of Mind
The episode wraps up by encouraging caregivers to take action now. Waiting too long often results in fewer options and more stress down the road. Meeting with a financial planner or insurance professional can help you understand your options and ensure you’re prepared for the future.
Are you ready to consider long-term care insurance as part of your caregiving plan? It’s never too early—or too late—to start thinking about how to protect your family from the financial burden of dementia care.
Start planning today, and secure peace of mind for tomorrow.
Ever Wonder How To Know What Is Causing Your Caregiver Stress?
Take Our FREE Caregiver Stress Assessment Today!
Are You A Christian Dementia Caregiver Struggling To Cope With Caregiving?Join the FREE “Ask the Dementia Mentor” Monthly Meet Up! And be on the podcast, get support and your questions answered.https://dementiacaregivingmadeeasy.com/ask
Read More:
Talking About Caregiver Burnout With Michelle Gordon
Check the other podcasts: https://dignicarebydesign.com/category/podcast/
Transcript
[0:00] Hey, Christian caregiver, welcome to Christian Dementia Caregiving, the podcast where I teach Bible-believing Christians how to navigate dementia with practical solutions, a kingdom focus, as well as help you find hope for the future. These episodes are brought to you by Think Different Dementia, where we create better futures for caregivers by building community around caregivers.
[0:30] Today’s episode is a difficult topic for a lot of people because many people do not think about getting a long-term care insurance policy until it is too late. The reality of the matter is, if you are a family caregiver of somebody living with dementia and they don’t already have a long-term care insurance policy, it is too late for them. However, having said that, the reason I brought our guest Luke Mangum onto the podcast is so that we can hopefully alleviate some of the stress for you as the family caregiver to perhaps consider something that you haven’t considered before, which is to actually get long-term care insurance for yourself. So let’s listen to the episode with Luke where we unpack long-term care insurance. Now, I don’t know if many of you listening have done this yet, but on the website at thinkdifferentdementia.com.
[1:34] I have a caregiver assessment where you can go do an assessment that will tell you exactly where your stress levels, particularly to caregiving, are coming from. So I invite you today, if you haven’t done it, it doesn’t take super long, go to the website and take the caregiver stress assessment or the caregiver assessment. And also I would love if you would leave me a written review on Apple Podcasts. It is something that is so touching and wonderful for me to read feedback from people who I might never have met, but that I’ve impacted their lives through this podcast. So if you haven’t written me a review, I ask that you go to Apple Podcasts and leave a written review for the podcast, Christian Dementia Caregiving. So we can get this information in the hands of people who need it. Now, without further ado, here is the episode on long-term care insurance with Luke Mangum.
[2:40] Well, welcome back to Christian Dementia Caregiving. I am very excited we have a special guest here. This is a topic that we haven’t spoken about on the podcast as of yet, But we met at a local networking event, and it intrigued me because even though I do this a lot, I don’t talk a lot about long-term care insurance. And so I thought it would be good for us to have Luke on the program today, where he’s going to talk to us a little bit about the benefits and the reasons why it’s important for us as family caregivers to consider adding a long-term care insurance policy into our financial planning. Because as everybody knows, dementia and dementia caregiving is extremely expensive, and it is something I think that we don’t consider sometimes until it’s too
Luke’s Journey into Financial Services
[3:30] late. So Luke, welcome to today’s program. How about you start us off and tell people a little bit about how you got into financial services?
[3:38] Sure. And thanks for having me, Elizabeth. I appreciate it. So my name is Luke Mangum, as you mentioned. I used to work in the tech industry, actually, and we did a lot of crisis mitigation or disaster recovery planning. Basically, risk mitigation is what it was. So as a hobby, I used to help friends and family with anything that had to do with their finances from getting out of debt or setting up retirement accounts, because I discovered that I liked helping people with that. I didn’t grow up with a background in any sort of wealth or any sort of structure and intentionality in my own finances. And so as an adult, I, for whatever reason, my adult brain thinks it’s very cool to be able to help people with that. And kind of, it’s like a game where if you do A, then you get B result over here, that kind of thing.
[4:16] So with that, that background in the tech industry and sort of my passion for helping folks with finances, I moved to the finance industry and made it an actual job. So I will say this is what I want to do when I grow up. Well, we’ll see, you know, as as the years go by, what’s what I think of it going forward. But yeah, so far, it’s I’m in my first few years of doing this.
Understanding Long-Term Care Insurance
[4:34] And it’s been great so far. Wonderful. So tell us to start with what. Actually is long-term care insurance? Sure. So I will start by describing what a long-term care event is and then contrast that with some of the other kinds of insurance.
[4:48] So a long-term care event is where you have, just to put it in layman’s terms, you have a financial, you’re probably not going to get better long-term. So usually what you think of your grandparents that are sort of in their last day, that tends to be a good layman’s way to think of it. I’ll give you a quick technical definition that helps you kind of think through. There are a few activities of daily living. This is how it’s described by the medical profession and the insurance profession doing things like being able to dress, eat, bathe, things like that. There’s a list you can find on the internet of six or so different activities. So if you are unable to do two of those activities, then you are considered qualified to begin getting the coverage that you have been paying for. That makes sense. So that’s what long-term care is. It is a quick couple of things. Folks will have health insurance, either through their work or that they pay for themselves, ourselves, Medicare, Medicaid, those kind of thing, those are health insurance, and they don’t pay for the specifics of what long term care covers. And that’s why folks will get a separate policy to cover those kind of things. One other quick thing, often, again, through work, or just on your own personal side, you’ll have a disability insurance.
[5:50] And that is a tool to serve a different purpose. And we could talk about that a different day. But essentially, it’s paycheck protection. So I used to think of it as I’m in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. Now I’m disabled. Now I’m on disability insurance. And that obviously is the case for folks. And we feel very bad for anyone who’s had that happen in their life. But if you have anything that keeps you from doing part of what you do for your living, where you know, you’re partially unable to earn your living, even that can be considered disability, and then you can get some coverage for there. So again, the thing back to long term care that I’ll stress for disability insurance is it’s generally not a in my last days of life, it’s more like I’m going to recover and go back to full or almost full health or if you end up going on disability, you don’t have those basic life functions that you’re.
[6:34] In a limited capacity around like bathing and eating address. And so those that’s where the difference comes from disability and long term care as well. So hopefully that makes sense. It does. So while we’re talking about the disability and long term care, they’re not mutually exclusive, right? So a person can have a short and a long term care disability policy, and then also a long term care insurance policy that they can kind of seamlessly flow all the the way through, you know, from working all the way through stopping working because you’ve either retired or you’ve become disabled. And then you have your retirement to live on, your money that protects you. And then as your ability to take care of yourself goes away, that’s when the long term care can kick in. Is that correct? Yes.
[7:21] I hope not. That would be a first on the program. him. I know, trying to keep it interesting for your audience.
[7:28] For sure. Oh, that’s kind of funny. Hopefully it’s not too loud. But anyway, yes. So you are correct that they are somewhat related, but mutually exclusive. And I guess the two basic things I’ll tell you is one, if you’re thinking about your financial strategy, they are two separate things that are coming out of your bank accounts, as far as what you’re paying for. In most cases, they’re not one of the same. And then you are right where you’re using them, it could be that you are fully or partially disabled, And then at some point having to use long-term care and they would be sort of often mutually exclusive when it comes to, it’s a thing that the key to know is it’s the medical professional,
Who Needs Long-Term Care Insurance?
[8:01] the doctor would have to give the insurance company what they consider to be an approved. Okay, you are approved to start the coverage for the policy you have in place. Right, perfect. So who needs a long-term care insurance policy?
[8:14] The short answer is everyone. And all of us who are alive need it. You mentioned that, you know, often when you value using long term care, you’re old enough where the expense is so high that it doesn’t make sense financially anymore. So to make it more practical, what I would say is, if you’re not in retirement age yet, it’s a great time to look at it. If you are, that’s fine. But any insurance, not just long term care is based on your age and your health. Those are the two main things. And you can, there’s a lot of different types of products out there that are really great for long-term planning when it comes to things outside of long-term care as well. But that’s generally the broad answer is the sooner you do it, the less expensive it will be. And part of, we would recommend finding a financial planner to work with to kind of figure out, okay, what should we be spending on this? What does it actually get us? Is that worth getting now? What should we do here? Because everyone’s life is a little different. There’s not one single silver bullet that fixes the answer for everyone.
The Cost of Dementia Care
[9:07] But yes, the younger you are, the more healthy you are, the less expensive it will be. And particularly for me, in light of the fact that the people that I serve are typically the family caregivers of somebody living with dementia, who, you know, as I started the conversation, and I don’t know if you actually even know this or not, but the average lifetime costs for one person living with dementia is about $400,000. It’s crazy. Yeah, it is crazy. So when I put that into my mind as a family caregiver myself.
[9:42] Related to helping my parents who emigrated in their early 60s, and my mom had had a massive stroke in her early 40s, she probably would not have been a good candidate for a long-term care policy. It probably would have been pretty prohibitive anyway, because she’s going to need some sort care at some point. So when I think about the people that are perhaps listening to this program or that are interested in this topic, oftentimes I believe, are you familiar with, and I’m going to throw something totally out of left field, with Andrew Lloyd Webber. Do you know who Andrew Lloyd Webber is? I can’t place where, but as a music or as the music guy. He did Cat and Phantom of the Opera, and all of those. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Well, he actually wrote one that’s not as familiar in the United States. It’s called Evita. So it’s the story of Evita Peron.
[10:37] Out of Argentina in the 1940s or whatever, but there’s a song in it that talks about get them while they’re young Evita, right? So with long-term care policies, it’s almost like you’ve got to get them while they’re young. The earlier you start, the better it is. There’s perhaps not somebody in their 20s, but somebody in their 40s or early 50s are definitely people who I think in the the caregiving economy.
[11:05] Especially if they’ve already been a family caregiver of somebody living with dementia and have seen the financial implications on both the person living with dementia, but oftentimes it’s the family who is supplementing it for the person living with dementia. You know, those are the people that was the reason I wanted you to come on so that we We could talk to that group of people in that late 40s, early 50s phase to not just kick the can down the line because they’re probably picking up financially for their parents because their parents didn’t have a long-term care insurance policy, which means that if something happens to them in the future,
The Importance of Planning Ahead
[11:46] all of a sudden their own children are going to have to help kick in for them. So it kind of stops the cycle if people were to consider or even just explore looking at at a long-term care insurance policy. So that sets us up nicely for the question, why actually use it? You actually sort of answered it in talking about how it’s a big drain on a family’s finances, whether it’s the money that you’re making in a job or just the, you know, you’re talking about someone that’s in their later years, they have whatever large or small amount of money that they’ve piled up that they would hope to give to their kids or grandkids or foundation, something like that. We don’t have to get into the statistics and you can find them online.
[12:24] But for the sake of just our conversation here. Statistics are good. I love, I love. They are, yes. Yeah, throw some statistics out for people to hear. Sure.
[12:32] People aren’t going to necessarily go look it up themselves. So if we can give them easy statistics, that kind of, you know, makes it real. Yeah, well, I was going to say broadly, on top of not being covered by the normal health insurance, like we talked about earlier, it tends to be the largest thing that depletes a family’s assets outside of anything else. So you can spend years investing in your 401k and all that, and then boom, you get some sort of event that hits and it just can drain everything. We’ve had folks that have had to sell houses, all kinds of crazy things. And to your point, even it gets into what about children or uncles or brothers and sisters, anyone that’s related that wants to help out. It’s wonderful when you have family that can do that, but it drains your family’s resources a lot. So you can look at stats that are probably going to be changing in the actual dollar amounts, depending on inflation, all that kind of stuff. Up, but you’re looking, you know, two, two, $300 a day, $400 a day for even just simple in home care. And that, that might sound like a lot, may not sound like a lot, but you’re looking at a lot of money. Yes. Several thousand per month. Yes. And the main thing I’ll say here is that’s not like a full on nurse, even that’s in your house. That’s, you know, what, if you want to have a person that comes by and helps for a couple of hours a day, right. That’s not 24 hour care. That’s just, yes. And the $230 to $300 range is what a nursing home costs per day. Exactly. You read my mind. That was what I was going to talk about next. And this is 2024.
[13:55] What if we’re planning for 20 years from now that there’s inflation? It’ll be more. So anyway, go ahead. No, no, no, for sure. Absolutely.
[14:02] So people can use, and correct me if I’m wrong, people can use long-term care insurance both at home and in a facility, correct? Yes. And there are, like anything else in life, there’s levels and different flavors of ice cream to choose from. But yeah, essentially you can have the care done in a facility or in your home. And then there’s different levels of, some of it’s just based on the extremity of the health situation in in context, of course. But yeah, what’s nice is a lot of the coverage, they’re now trying to encourage folks to not only be in your own home, but have like a person that’s sort of pseudo trained, like, you know, if it was my wife that was in the care, then they would train me a little bit. So I could cover some of the things. And there’s some reimbursements and some coverage that could help me a little bit, but it helps, you know, exactly.
[14:46] And then it helps save us a little bit of money helps not have to use up as many medical resources for us and keep our costs down, they can help folks that have more severe benefits. So it kind of helps all around. It’s a lot of good options, basically, where we could talk about the history of long-term care a little bit. I would really love to hear a little bit more about the history because, you know, as I’ve been working in healthcare for over 30 years, I’ve come across long-term care insurance policies. And for a period of time, and I’ll just be very frank, you know, the older types of policies paid really, really well, like right at the beginning. And then it was like, there was this period of time when it was like, everybody’s like, don’t get a long-term care insurance policy. It’s not worth it. But it almost seems to me like the pendulum has swung and the product that is being designed and put together for long-term care is actually a better product than what it had been. I don’t know if it’s as good as the beginning ones, but definitely better than that middle little period of time when it was like, oh, don’t do that. Bad, bad, bad decision.
The Evolution of Long-Term Care Policies
[15:51] Right. Yes. And you’re absolutely right. It was really good stuff back in the 90s era and that kind of thing where your long-term care policy would pay for a lot and also for a long time or just for forever. So insurance companies, just to put it simply, they couldn’t keep paying for all of it without going out of business, which might sound crazy because then they have a lot of money. But when they’re averaging their risks and the money that they’re paying out to everyone across cross a lot of folks that turns into a lot of money. So yes, so to your point, those policies, and even to this day, it’s more of a, what would you say, a lot of people use it or lose it. It’s more like a term life insurance policy. And you don’t have to go into the weeds of products and things. But the point is, it’s more like renting a house where you have it for a bit of time. And if you don’t keep the money that you build into it, if you’re healthy, which is what we all want, then you just paid for something you don’t need to use. So one thing that folks have as an option today is permanent life insurance, which has nothing to do with long term care necessarily. Necessarily, it’s more of, you know, if I had passed away a week ago, my wife and children would have whatever death benefit passed to them. Not a fun thing to think about. But you can add riders is what they’re called. They’re just like an optional additional bell or whistle, you can add on a policy for permanent insurance, excuse me, and you can add a long term care rider.
[17:02] Onto your whole life. To your point about what it used to be and then what it is now, we often find folks use that because it gives you options of if you need to pull some of the value out of your whole policy, you can. And if you don’t, then you at least have the money to use for passing on to the next generation, to your beneficiaries. So it lets you either have that money or you do need to pay for some things you can. I again, recommend sort of getting with a financial advisor about how much of potential future costs would we want to cover? Maybe 60% of it. We can only afford 20% of it. We can afford all of it. We don’t know what it’s going to cost. Let’s just try for some. There’s all kinds of ways to attack it. But if you have at least some sort of intentional plan, that helps a lot. And you can use something like permanent insurance to cover long-term care. So I’ll leave it at that for now. I think that’s very interesting. I’m going to ask a couple more questions
How Long-Term Care Insurance Works
[17:48] related to that because I’m super interested in this topic, period. You don’t have to have a permanent insurance policy, life insurance policy, like a whole life in order to get long-term care insurance. You can have a freestanding long-term care insurance, correct?
[18:02] Correct. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. That’s awesome. So tell me a little bit about how the long-term care insurance works. Sure. So we all wrapped together a couple of things that we talked about. So first of all, you qualify for just like with any other insurance. If it’s personal policy to you, you have to get medical screening done and that kind of thing, get it put in place, pay for it, all that stuff. So that’s kind of the upfront process, if you will. And as a quick side note, I’ll come back to some planning details about that in a minute. But for how it works, then it’s just you pay for it until you need it. And obviously, we don’t want to have to need it. But if you do, then at that point, the doctors would make a report that says you have at least two of the six basic living functions that you no longer can do on your own. And I guess another kind of corollary one is like mental kinds of things, which again, place more into dementia and stuff like that. But if you’re declared sick enough, if you want to put it that way, then that point insurance company would start to pay based on what it is that you were paying for them to pay you about. And then that’s the long and the short of it. The other thing to note is back to your point about how awesome the policies used to be. Nowadays, unfortunately, it’s just whatever amount of money is there in total is what you’ll get. So it can be that you could run out depending on the situation of how much they’re.
[19:12] Paying you or how long the the time is that you need the coverage, how much everything costs, et cetera, et cetera. So nothing is infinite, I suppose, but it’s much more than nothing. And this ties back to the planning thing I wanted to mention was that. So part of what you want to consider is things like inflation, like I was talking about earlier, how much will things cost 10, 20 years from now, et cetera, et cetera. And other things like how much the percentage I mentioned, how much of the coverage do you want to kind of theoretically plan to pay for? Are there other things that could help outside of a long-term care insurance policy? Could you sort of plan on family helping or is there not really much of a plan? Do you have a specific home that you’d like to be in? Some people, they have a very specific one they want to be in. Anyway, I can go into a lot of different types of options, but just to keep it short, there’s a lot of planning up front that would lead to the specifics of how it works, but just the basics is just like any other insurance, you just start paying for it. And then at whatever point you qualify to start having it had paid out to you,
Optimal Age for Long-Term Care Insurance
[20:06] that’s how that would work. It does. Is there an optimal aid for somebody to get a long-term care insurance policy or is it just really kind of, you know, okay, let me rephrase the question this way around. Is any point in age that you’re too old to try to get one? Sort of, yeah. And then the way I would say is if it’s going to be for you, you know, when you’re in the time where you need it, it’s too late. So you need to think of it as like future planning.
[20:32] There are some insurance companies where if you’re over a certain actual age, they’re like, yeah, probably not. But it’s going to be one of those kind of case by case sort of things. So not really. I liked your illustration of get them while they’re young. So in my company, we were more like big picture planning folks. And so we’re not really focused on a specific product that we’re trying to get clients to buy, if that makes sense. So what I was going to say is other things that are around your long term planning is do you as simple as it sounds, do you actually have an emergency fund set to help pay for a couple of months of expenses? And obviously, that will not even begin to pay for a long term care event like we’re discussing today. But little things like that can play into is it time to actually start paying out of pocket it for a long-term care policy that we could use in the future? Or are there other basic building blocks that should be put in place first? So that’s kind of our angle from it is more the broad picture of planning. Do you have a massive amount of student debt that you should take care of first? Once you free that up, that money that you were spending towards that, maybe that could go towards something like a long-term care policy or towards investment towards retirement or whatever the case is. This is great. I was trying to think if there was anything else that I wanted to know specifically about a long-term care insurance policy. Now, I know it’s person specific, but is it better to, from a financial perspective.
[21:45] Are they better products if they’re attached to a permanent life policy versus a freestanding long-term care insurance policy? Are they kind of like term life insurance policies come in the Cadillac version all the way down to the Volkswagen Beetle, right? The 1960s Volkswagen Beetle and the Cadillac version, right? So we’ve got a wide range and I understand that. And I’m sure you hear this specifically in your line of work a lot. It’s also confusing. I hear that all the time related to dementia. It’s probably not as confusing to you because you work with it every day, but are the broad strokes of how we can kind of see what are the better ways of mitigating this risk for people through a long-term care insurance policy. Can you speak to that for me for a bit?
The Financial Landscape of Caregiving
[22:37] Are you feeling stressed as a Christian dementia caregiver? Let me help. I offer a monthly dementia care audit to one listener of this program to provide you with personalized but evidence-based strategies from a biblical perspective. We only have one session available each month. Don’t miss this opportunity to make your dementia caregiving journey easier. Schedule your own dementia care audit today?
[23:07] Sure. Yeah. And you’re right. Some of it is just whichever flavor of ice cream you want to pick. So the more streamlined things are going to be more economical. And then the ones that have a lot of bells and whistles will be more expensive. And so that applies like anything else, of course. A couple other things to think about where we are with long-term care and long-term care planning and expenses. It’s kind of a result of a lot of really awesome things that have happened in our country in the last decades and century. So as an example, women are much more free nowadays than they were 10, 15, or 50, 100 years ago, like, we can all vote together, we can all work together. And while there’s a lot of what you say, and I mean, this in a good way, like traditional family roles, where the women often is the caregiver, and we guys tend to be the dumb ones, and we tend to live less length of time on average. So what all that means is you have, usually the wife or the mom or whatever the case is, or the daughter is going to be doing the primary caregiving, but she’s also probably working herself. What if she still has kids in the house. Like there’s a lot of weight on the women. Statistically, you can look at all this too. And this means a few things. One is when you’re planning, you can think about, yeah, it’s good to cover one specific person, but if you’re married, what about a little plan for the both of you? What if statistically women need a little bit longer care than men? And I always joke that it’s probably just because we guys are more dumb and accident prone and we die quicker anyway. So, but I will tell you what my dad says. It’s because we women nag them to death.
[24:31] There you go so for women tend to live longer than they statistically need some more long-term care um they end up on average and there’s other it’s hard to find this in the in the data it’s sort of becoming more of a thing now but if you’re caring for a loved one and you have a job it’s probably going to affect your performance at your job which means you may not get as many promotions and you may get a lot of there’s a lot of stats around like burnout and mental strain and stuff like that and health strain that has to do with being the caregiver of somebody else even if you’re in a more mild case and how it kind of affects the job. So I figured what your actual question was, but in planning, it’s often good to sort of think about other factors that are not literally just what is the dollar amount to cover the medical expenses. It’s going to be like, what is this going to look like for my specific family 20 years from now or next week or whatever the case is and sort of thinking, okay, would it be useful to sort of plan around kind of a broader group thing for both spouses? Does it make sense to, financially to do that? Is it better just to look at kind of, we just have a little bit of money to play with, not a lot. So we’re going to have to just, you know, do what we got to do. And if we have a little bit of coverage, that’s, that’s what we can afford.
[25:36] Yeah. A little vague, but my point is that it’s, it’s very individualized and very, very specific. Yeah. And I would highly recommend to think of it more in terms of, Hey, let’s look at the big picture plan as opposed to here’s a specific product that I can buy on this website. That would be my recommendation. So you bring up a couple of really interesting things as you were talking. You mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, over the last 50 to 100 years, in my local networking group that I attend, I had a conversation with a woman in that group, and she’s maybe 10 years older than me. And within her lifetime, as a young adult, when she started out as a young adult, she could not get car insurance without her husband having a driver’s license. And it blew my mind. It blew my mind when she told me that because I haven’t experienced that in my lifetime, but she has, and she’s not that much older than me. She’s a little, she’s about 10 years, 10 years, only 10 years older than me. So that, that was interesting. And then some of the statistics related to dementia and dementia caregiving that I think are pertinent to this conversation about 60% to 66% of family caregivers are women. Of those, of the women, about 66% are the daughters of somebody living with dementia. And of the daughters, about 60% of them are working 30-plus hours a week.
[27:02] So it’s typically the oldest adult daughter that gets the brunt of the caregiving dynamic.
[27:11] Because it just… It just is the way it is, you know, I mean, God gave us differing interests and abilities and women are typically the nurturer, the mother, the, you know, the mother figure, the mothering figure. So it just is more practical to, to really consider, you know, the implications of it. And you brought up another very, very valid point. I recently did a presentation where I was talking about, you know, the burden that the healthcare system puts on family caregivers. And as I was researching that, I actually learned something new myself, which is there are three different categories of caregivers. And before, when I was working as an occupational therapist, a caregiver was a caregiver was a caregiver. You know, we’re directed to instruct whoever’s there that particular day. So if it’s the grandchild, you instruct them. If it’s the spouse, you instruct them. But as I was researching it, it really, there are three different categories of caregivers.
[28:16] Spouses, adult children, and a new category called a young adult caregiver. And a young adult caregiver is a caregiver between the ages of 21, 22, and early 40s. And they’re right in that category that you were talking about. They have to decide between their own education and their own raising their children and their own jobs.
The Impact of Caregiving on Family Dynamics
[28:37] And economically, it is very impactful on that particular sector. Factor like I turned into a caregiver in you know my early 50s which means my kids are grown and flown so yes you know it does impact me but it’s impacting me in a different way than it does the young adult caregiver and it also impact it impacts me differently than it would a spousal caregiver you know interesting as we’re as we’re having this conversation I really think young adult caregivers would be the ideal person to get obviously me as well but but a young adult caregiver who would be the ideal person that this could really protect financially for for their future um but it’s also the person that’s already struggling financially because they’ve got themselves pulling in two different directions yeah and this will sound selfish but if you think about from their standpoint there there are obviously folks who are like oh when grandma I’m going to grab a die.
[29:41] Just to use that as an example, I’m going to get $10 million. This is going to be amazing. I’m going to be able to just be a trust fund baby, live on my money, whatever sort of cliche you want to use. There are folks out there like that.
[29:51] But you do have anything that you may get from your family. It may be a smaller amount, but it’s still something. It’s still a big generational change in kind of wealth, even if it’s just $50,000 or $100,000.
[30:02] Anyway, one of the most fascinating things as a quick side note was that I find it amazing learning how people view money and kind of learning about them and their lives. And you’ll have the same comments from a person that is looking at $10,000 as the person who’s looking at 10 million. You can have each person think it’s like, eh, that’s not a lot of money, or wow, this is an amazing amount of money. So it’s really cool to see people being able to pass money on from all the years that they’ve worked hard to get it, whatever the actual dollar amount is. So where was I going with that? I guess to your point about the young caregivers, they’re probably the most severely impacted by any of that potential wealth, to use that word, transferring to them because it can be just evaporated by medical expenses. And right now we’re in the spot where this is probably going to get, I’m going to use the word worse, but what I mean by that is we’re heading into the time as you can find stats all over the place about where there’s a lot of baby boomers that are getting into retirement age and long-term, you know, elderly years where you do have your long-term care events happen. Like, you know, after you’re age 65, about 70% of folks over 65, you’re going going to be in some sort of long-term care event that’s at least three years long, something like that. That’s kind of what the stat says. So yeah, there’s a lot of families that that can impact. And then to your point, the family has to kind of pull from a lot of different places to figure it out if you don’t have some sort of intentional plan in place. Anyway. Right.
[31:23] To wrap up the conversation, you’ve mentioned this a few times and it speaks to my heart. It’s the concept of planning ahead because that’s one of the biggest struggles that, that I, um.
[31:38] Observe family caregivers of people living with dementia have is they’re not planning ahead.
The Importance of Future Planning
[31:46] Like from the moment that you get a diagnosis of dementia, and it was really interesting because I had a conversation with a woman on the phone last week, and I actually said to her, I said, if your mother-in-law lives long enough with dementia, she will require 24-hour care. And she She said to me, I’ve never heard anybody say that out loud. She’s like, the books say they may require 24-hour care. I said to her, yes. The reason the books say they may require 24-hour care is because some people don’t because they die before they get to that point. So they have dementia and die because they’re in a car accident or they have a heart attack or they have a stroke and they die and they didn’t need 24-hour care. But if you live long enough with dementia and you do not have a medical comorbidity that takes you out, you will require 24-hour care. But we don’t say that out loud, which means that, you know, we, the we I mean is the healthcare system isn’t saying that to people. Doctors aren’t saying that to people, social workers, therapists, nobody. It’s not commonly spoken about that if you have dementia and you live long enough, you will need 24-hour care.
[33:02] Because I think people are afraid to say that because they don’t want to scare people. But what happens then is people stick their head in the sand and they don’t plan ahead for the journey, which means by the time they get their head out of the sand, they’re in deep yogurt. They’re in deep trouble. And they don’t have a plan, which is why I do the podcast, which is why I do all of the education I do, is because I’m trying to get people to plan ahead for it. And long-term care insurance is a part of that. It’s probably too late for the person with dementia. But having people be more aware of it as a solution for themselves or their own children, because that’s the other part, the longer I do this, that I keep observing over and over again, is this whole little vicious cycle that we’re in related to caregivers. Caregivers burn themselves out because they don’t take care of themselves. They don’t build in respite. They don’t plan ahead.
[34:04] And so about 30% of family caregivers die before the person they’re caring for dies. Which means I’m the husband taking care of mom with dementia and I die. All of a sudden, my daughter becomes the primary caregiver and I have just precipitated this whole negative cycle to keep continuing. And so planning that my long diet read had to do with future planning, planning your financial future as a caregiver, as just a normal person anyway, absolutely needs to to be like a vital part of your whole financial well-being and ability to maybe, like you mentioned, leave a legacy for the next generation. You know, what a wonderful way to stop these cycles of people not having planned ahead and then we just keep kicking this can down the line. Indeed. A couple of things. Yeah, you’re talking about the caregivers. Givers, we’re so used to taking care of children or toddlers, college age kids, anyone where what’s the trend between all of those, they are young, resilient, getting better. But you’re looking at regression, the person you’re caring for is not going to get better. And it’s not a fun thing to talk about. But it’s Yeah, it’s your point. It’s it’s the today is probably the best it’s going to be compared to the rest of the story until our family member passes. So yeah, for sure. Intentionality is the thing. There’s one more thing I’m going to add. And this we didn’t really to talk about this, but this is a thing I tell to as many people as I can, who I hear this from. And this is from my own personal experience. I grew up not a lot of money. Probably that’s why I’m partially as passionate about as I am. It’s just, I’m trying to do the same thing for my family as what I see as possible now. What I’ll hear people say is like, I’m not a wealthy person, so I can’t even try to do this kind of stuff. So what I want to say to all of your audience is we meet with some people all the time who, whether you consider them wealthy or not is a different different story but the reason that they have whatever small or large pile of money they have is because they just started doing something right you never it’s never fast the the whole get rich quick win the lottery thing you know the stats show if you win the lottery you you very quickly lose the lottery money that you got on top of what you have to pay for taxes to begin with but slowly over time yes it is a uh there’s folks like uh you know like the the dave rams again that’s kind of famous for like getting out a credit card debt like folks like him really harp on not the correct math, but changing your math, the kind of stuff that really makes the generational change. So I guess my point is don’t sell yourself short, find someone you can talk
Conclusion and Call to Action
[36:35] to to do something and moving the needle even a little bit helps a lot over a long period of time. Absolutely. The sooner you start, the better, and it’s never too late to start. Right. Awesome. Well, Luke, thank you so much for talking to me about long-term care insurance. I had a lot of questions because I want to know about it because I probably need one. And when I’m ready, I will be back to come talk to you about it. Happy to help you on. Thank you for letting me chat. So I enjoy talking about anything that, again, that has to do with finances and helping people to kind of figure out like, oh, okay, there’s… There’s hope, there’s things I can control out here. And I can be intentional about this for again, a thing that you hope never will happen. But it’s, I guess there’s the plan that you make is better than having no plan, even if it’s not a perfect plan, at least you have a plan. And you can even if your plan is that you’re not sure if your plan is going to work, you still have a plan, right? Well, and the thing is, the outline of a plan is better than, you know, you can adjust a plan if you have a plan. But if you have no plan, you’re flying by by the seat of your pants and you don’t know what you’re doing and you end up stressing even more because you you’re constantly just putting i call it whack-a-mole right just trying to to put out the next fire the next fire so i do i do um encourage people to you know to consider meeting with your financial person if you’re in the greenville area luke is in the greenville area the link will be in the show notes for anybody who’s interested in exploring it for him to just reach out to him. It’s just a conversation. But if you’re somewhere else in the country, just consider meeting with somebody and finding out what your options are. All right. Any last words, Mr. Luke, before we get going? Nothing for me other than just to reiterate big picture planning, be intentional. Don’t listen to the negative stories we tell ourselves in our own head. And if you make some sort of plan, you can at least have something to sort of give to the rest of your family in the future. So that’s it for me. Thank you very much. Awesome. I will see in the next time we meet, okay? Indeed. Thanks, Lizette. You’re welcome. Bye.
