This week, we’re talking about long-term care and why it’s important to make some decisions today about how you’re going to pay for long-term care in retirement.

Yesterday, I told you about my client Lucy who was rapidly draining her retirement nest egg to pay for her late husband’s alzheimer's care. Today I want to dive a little deeper into long-term care insurance, because for the vast majority of Americans in the financial middle, some long-term care insurance makes sense.

Why? Well, being in the middle class or upper middle class is where paying for long-term care can do the most damage. The poor will be covered by medicaid and the rich have plenty of assets to pay for long-term care. But if a $200,000 lifetime spend on long-term care over your lifetime is going to wipe out your nest egg, then you’ll want to look seriously at long-term care insurance.

So let's take a look at insurance today, starting with: what does long-term care insurance cost? I ran the numbers for a 57 year old, single female in Oregon and the estimated monthly premium amount is $151 per month, which would provide a long-term care monthly benefit of $2500/month.

If you can afford the cost of insurance, it can provide for a significant long-term care benefit if you need to use the policy later in life.

Insurance policies have also evolved over the years, so if you don’t end up using your long-term care insurance you can tack on a life insurance benefit so at least you won’t have to “use it or lose it”.

That’s it for today. Thanks for listening.

Tomorrow we’re going to talk more about when you should buy long-term care insurance.

My name is Ashley Micciche and this is the One Minute Retirement Tip.

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