Quote of the week:

“Why wouldn’t everyone do this?”

A question from a new client who heard my presentation about linked-benefit life.

 

If you will read no further:

Read this short article in the Wall Street Journal (9/13/13) then consider what your self-insuring client must do if suddenly he has a serious stroke and requires eighteen hour per day care in his home like a friend of mine did for 3 ½ years before he died. Trust me, his wife won’t last 3 months doing that. How would $10,000 to $12,000 per month in expenses impact the portfolio you are managing? Now project it out at 5% (historical increase) per year for the next ten years and you are facing $16,000 per month. Now add the fact that you are competing with thousands of other patients for these services. You think the price isn’t going even higher?

Under those circumstances wouldn’t you feel better knowing that you (successfully) advised your clients to create an additional $5,000 or $6,000 per month to add some needed flexibility to their financial resources at the time of need.

 

Thought for the week:

You probably are tired of me talking about long-term care. I get it. You give investment advice.  You are not an insurance agent. But you need to hear me out (or at least read to the end of this piece) because, like most advisors, you are under the misimpression that many (even most) of your clients can self-insure. They have plenty of money, and they probably won’t need to pay for care anyway, because they are “in good health”.

But if you read this article and think about it, you will soon discover that you and your clients are leaving out a very important factor in your thinking about their future. LTCi options are going to become scarcer as the millions of boomers consume available resources.  This means that the cost of the kind of care your clients would come to expect will rise to levels that are not even conceivable right now.  Most planners advise their clients to self-insure but without a strategy like linked-benefit insurance it may become almost impossible to “self-insure” the level of care at an acceptable cost. 

Consider what your self-insuring client must do if suddenly he has a serious stroke and requires eighteen-hour-per-day care in his home like a friend of mine did for 3½ years before he died. Trust me, his wife won’t last 3 months doing that. What would $10,000 to $12,000 per month in expenses affect the portfolio you are managing? Now project it out at increases in cost at 5% (historical increase) per year for the next ten years and you are to $16,000 per month. Now add the fact that you are competing with thousands of other patients for these services. You think the price isn’t going even higher?

I’m not suggesting you purchase an insurance policy to cover all the expenses to provide a free long-term care experience. I’m just suggesting that if I were their advisor, I would sure want to have advised them (successfully) to create an additional $5,000 or $6,000 per month to add some needed flexibility to his financial resources at the time of need.

Having an asset in their portfolio that can add $thousands to their monthly income will be a godsend to even the wealthier clients.  Accomplishing this without spending money for insurance premiums just may be viewed in retrospect as a “genius strategy”. Certainly it should be an “automatic” for clients who can afford to allocate 10% of their assets not needed to support their lifestyle to a strategy that will create this additional income.

We continue to present the linked-benefit concept to clients in seminars with amazing acceptance. If you think your clients don’t want this, it’s probably because you have not presented it so they understand the issues and how easily they can be addressed. Call us. We can help.