Deciding how you'll pay for long-term care, and talking it through with your family ahead of time, gives you more say over where and how you receive care. Robert Fenn Giles III, CFP®, CAIA, Managing Partner at Wealth Advisors of Tampa Bay, and Ryan Chard, CFP®, CRPC®, a Wealth Advisor with the firm, host Steve Brinkman of Ash Brokerage to walk through the options.

Steve starts with what long-term care covers (home health care and assisted living as well as nursing homes) and why Medicare and Medicaid get confused. Medicare pays for short-term skilled care. Medicaid can cover ongoing custodial care, but only after you've spent down your assets, and it leaves you with less control over where you receive that care.

The conversation then turns to four ways to transfer part of the cost to an insurance carrier: standalone long-term care insurance, hybrid life insurance policies, annuity-based coverage, and a long-term care or chronic illness rider on a permanent life policy. Steve explains how repositioning an underused asset, such as an old annuity or a life policy's cash value, may create a larger pool of tax-free benefits. He also covers how indemnity and reimbursement policies pay out differently. The session closes with the family side of planning, including a personal story from Steve about why the conversation with your children belongs in the plan.

Transcript Summary

• (00:00) Fenn Giles and Ryan Chard of Wealth Advisors of Tampa Bay introduce guest Steve Brinkman of Ash Brokerage, an insurance distributor that works with many carriers.

• (03:58) Long-term care covers chronic, custodial needs such as home health care, assisted living, adult day care, and nursing homes. It doesn't include skilled care after a hospital procedure, and most people prefer to receive care at home or in assisted living.

• (04:56) Longer life expectancies and rising care costs are prompting families to plan sooner, often after watching their own parents need care.

• (08:19) States will carry much of the cost of care in the coming decades, and Washington's payroll-funded program is an early example of how states may respond.

• (11:39) Every plan is different. Steve suggests starting with longevity expectations, what extended care would look like, and a clear conversation with adult children so the caregiving burden doesn't fall on one sibling.

• (13:45) Medicare covers short-term skilled care, not ongoing custodial care. Medicaid can pay for custodial care, but qualifying requires spending down assets, it includes a five-year look-back on transfers, and it offers less control over where care is received.

• (18:53) Qualified long-term care benefits require being unable to perform two of six activities of daily living (such as bathing or dressing) for at least 90 days, or a cognitive impairment. The benefits are generally received tax-free.

• (20:51) Steve covers four private options. Standalone coverage has the lowest annual premium but is use-it-or-lose-it. Hybrid life policies and annuity-based coverage come next, and annuity-based coverage asks fewer health questions. The fourth is a rider on permanent life insurance, which fits best when the death benefit is the priority.

• (28:03) Hybrid policies are often funded by repositioning an existing asset: low-yield cash, old life insurance cash value, or a non-qualified annuity with a large gain.

• (28:59) Benefits pay out through reimbursement or indemnity. Indemnity pays a set amount regardless of expenses, so it can cover informal care from a neighbor or family member.

• (35:56) Fenn's three takeaways: know whether a policy pays indemnity or reimbursement, review old policies before repositioning them, and weigh a limited benefit period against lifetime coverage.

• (37:49) Steve shares his grandfather's story to show why family conversations belong in the plan, even when detailed estate documents are in place.

Fenn Giles (00:00):
All right. Well, thank you all for joining us today. I'm Fenn Giles with Wealth Advisors of Tampa Bay, and I'm joined by my colleague, Ryan Chard. Ryan has 15 years in the business and is one of the CFPs in our office. Ryan and I are working to host these calls on a quarterly basis, and we're trying to rotate between bringing in a specialist and hosting them ourselves. For instance, next quarter, Ryan and I will be speaking a little more in depth about investments and how to incorporate year-end tax strategies like gifting your qualified RMD and making charitable donations through things like donor-advised funds or highly appreciated stock. But this quarter, we're bringing in Steve Brinkman. Steve started his career at New York Life and moved over to Ash Brokerage in 2007 as a life insurance case design specialist.

(00:55)
He's really a go-to resource for us when we're doing our more complex estate planning case designs around life insurance. Like us, Ash is a family business. They began in 1971, and they've grown into one of the largest insurance distributors in the country. I'll turn it over to Steve to talk a little more about that as we hop into long-term care.

Steve Brinkman (01:24):
Excellent. Thanks, Fenn, and good afternoon, everyone. As Fenn mentioned, we're going to spend some time talking about long-term care today. I'm with Ash Brokerage. Ash is a company that helps advisors across the country find solutions in the insurance space: think life insurance, long-term care, disability insurance, and so on. We work with many carriers, so we're very product- and carrier-agnostic when it comes to solutions. Today we'll touch a little on products, but it's much more about having a plan. Long-term care is probably one of the biggest growing topics in financial planning on our side of things, because we look at it as a risk that some may face in retirement. We encourage people not necessarily to buy insurance, but to have a plan.

(02:33)
That's what we'll talk through: what it means to have a plan if I had a situation where I needed care. What does that plan look like, both from a financial aspect and from a family aspect? The family side is just as crucial when you're discussing long-term care. So we'll look at what long-term care actually is and why it's coming up in more conversations between advisors and their clients. We'll take a high-level, 10,000-foot look at what Medicare is and what Medicaid is. Often, as we're educating people on this topic, those two get confused and mixed up, so we'll be very specific about what each one is. Then we'll give a high-level overview of what we'll call private insurance options, if somebody decides they want to transfer the risk.

(03:40)
Because regardless, what we do know is that it's a risk we all potentially may face. We just decide whether we want to manage that entire risk ourselves or transfer some of it.

(03:58)
So what is long-term care? It's a chronic situation. Think about things like assisted living, nursing home care, and home health care. There are other things, like adult day care, that you can see on the screen here. Here's what it is not, and this comes up a lot: people hear long-term care and think it's only nursing home care. That's not the case. A lot of care actually gets provided at home or in assisted living facilities, and that's where people prefer to receive care if they need it. It's also not skilled care. We'll take a little bit of a dive into that, but think about skilled care as nursing care in the hospital. You go in and have a procedure done in the hospital. That's what we'd call skilled care, and that's not really what's covered here.

(04:56)
It's going to be more of those chronic situations. So why is this so important? Why is this topic coming up more and more with advisors and their clients? One reason is that people are living longer. Every 10 years, on average, our life expectancy grows another two and a half years. The longer we live, the greater the chance that we're going to slow down and need some level of care. We're seeing a generation now of people approaching retirement or in early retirement whose parents have gone through a chronic situation. They say, "What do I need to do to make sure we're not a burden to our kids, or that we have a proper plan in place?" because they're experiencing it right now. In addition to that, they're seeing the cost associated with care.

(06:04)
It's not getting cheaper. I was just in a meeting this week: the average inflationary cost of care is about five and a half to 6% a year. So these costs are rising faster than most costs out there. It's been one of the highest rising costs over the last 10 years. This is a look at the average cost from probably a few years ago at this point, but you can see it's still a significant amount of money. As I mentioned, most people would prefer to have their care through home health care or assisted living. One, it's generally cheaper, and two, you're at home. If you start getting nursing care, it gets to be very, very expensive. But if you're in your 60s or maybe your early 70s today, that's not your concern. Your concern is what it looks like in the future.

(07:00)
So if we just use a basic inflationary factor, one that's actually lower than current inflation on these health care expenses, you can see these numbers become pretty impactful for folks. Let's say in 15 years, if you're in an assisted living facility, somebody's going to be coming up with maybe $12,000 to $15,000 a month. There are some places where you could be paying that today, in all honesty. But let's just say $15,000 a month. As you're working with your advisors, they might look at that and say, "Okay, that's what you need to pay the facility or the home health care agency. What do I need to do to create that?" So you get into this compound conversation about how to generate income, and how to generate it efficiently. That's part of this conversation when it comes to creating income.

(07:57)
But note that these costs can be very, very impactful. Most people have not written ongoing checks for $20,000 a month for four or five years. That's why it's a conversation we're having with advisors, and advisors are having with their clients today.

(08:19)
This is a three-year summary. You can see these numbers become pretty impactful if you look at a longer-duration event, three, four, or five years. You can multiply it out from there. I like to tell people, when we're talking about care, that we're in a situation right now where 12,000 people a day are retiring, or turning 65, I should say. Think about those numbers, and 70% of people will need some level of care. The people on this call probably aren't going to be the ones the state pays for, but a large percentage of people in this country will rely on the state to pay for their care. That means the states have the biggest burden to pay for care over the next 15 to 20 years.

(09:23)
I joke that there aren't a lot of states out there, if any, that are really flush with cash. And generally speaking, government tends to wait until we're in crisis mode to figure things out.

(09:39)
But every state in this country will need to figure out how it's going to pay for the care of the folks in that state. As these people retire, it'll be about 10 or 15 years before the folks who are 65 to 70 today start to slow down and might need care, but they're going to need it. What you're seeing here is a map of the country. What I want to focus on is that there was a state just a few years back that tried to put a solution in place. They passed legislation to create a 58 basis points, 0.158% tax on income to help pay for it. In return, you get a $30,000 benefit. They gave people the chance to become exempt from that tax, but they had to go get an insurance policy.

(10:40)
So it flooded the markets, carriers stopped offering coverage, and so on. But what you want to note here is that most of the folks here are probably in the state of Florida.

(10:50)
You can see other states are having these conversations, but it will be true for every single state. So it makes sense to have some kind of plan for insurance, because this may impact all of us at some level as the states start implementing things to create more income. This is a simple slide, and I won't go into a lot of detail here, but when it comes to funding long-term care, if you happen to be a business owner, definitely talk to Fenn or Ryan. There may be some tax-favorable ways to pay for long-term care premiums, and that's something you don't want to overlook. As a business owner, you might be able to pay for them in a more tax-efficient way.

(11:39)
So what's your plan? Here are some of the questions we think about, because every plan is different. If I talk to 10 people, their plans are going to look different. What's important to one person is different from what's important to the next. That's why our approach to this conversation is all about education. Working with your advisors, you'll figure out the best plan for you and your situation, and how you might generate income if an event occurred. Think about longevity: how long do you think you're going to live? We don't have a crystal ball, so we don't know for sure, but sometimes it's family history, and sometimes it's that feeling of "Hey, I'm pretty healthy." The healthier you are, the greater the chance you'll live a longer life.

(12:28)
Look at some of these other questions, too. What does extended care look like for you? Those are the types of questions you'll want to consider. I mentioned early on that a lot of the time the focus is on the numbers, but I'll tell you, just as important as the numbers is that it's a family event. A colleague of mine put it this way years ago: if you have multiple children, usually the child who lives the furthest away has the most to say. Meanwhile, the family usually handpicks a daughter, or whoever lives closest to Mom or Dad, to help with care, and often the proper conversations don't happen. So you get stressed relationships after a care event, because it wasn't communicated well, and a lot of the burden ends up on one of the siblings.

(13:32)
So making sure everything is well communicated, and that everybody understands Mom and Dad's wishes, is very, very key and very, very important.

(13:45)
I mentioned the government. People say, "Well, what's the government really going to cover? What won't it cover?" At a very high level, these two terms often get mixed up: Medicaid and Medicare. Medicare is something we all receive. At 65, we're eligible for Medicare. Think of Medicare as that short-term hospital stay benefit. Generally speaking, after you get past 100 days, that's not going to be covered by Medicare. What we're talking about today is more custodial care, and Medicaid is what would pay for that custodial care if the government were paying. But there are challenges there. If you have qualified, pre-tax dollars (think about your 401(k)), you have to use that money up before you can qualify. You have to agree to some age-based limits as far as your income goes.

(14:52)
There are a lot of limitations on what might be available to you as a recipient. Essentially, you have to spend down your assets. The way I put it is that you have to become poor, and then you let the government take ownership of your care. I had a situation several years back working with a family. When they came to our advisor, they had about a million dollars in assets earning almost 0%. Their daughters were involved by then. Dad was going into a memory care facility, and Mom was very healthy, in her mid-70s. The daughters were asking, "Well, what can we do?" Well, you're going to have to spend down the assets. The attorneys mentioned something about a five-year look-back. So if somebody's in that situation...

(15:52)
Go ahead.

Fenn Giles (15:53):
Yeah, I think where you were going with the five-year look-back is that it gets really hard to plan around, because you basically have to give away or move out your assets, and then you lose control.

Steve Brinkman (16:04):
You give up control.

Fenn Giles (16:05):
And a lot of times, by the time people are thinking about this as a last resort for qualification, they've already missed the five-year look-back. Medicaid is really, really tough. I think what you're saying as well is that it's not a great way to plan. You're not going to get the best care, and it's really for people below a very, very low threshold of assets. It's truly hard to qualify at that level, especially unless you want to give up control of your assets and give everything away well before you even have a long-term care event.

Steve Brinkman (16:44):
Yes, you're exactly right. I look at this and say a lot of people have worked hard and accumulated their assets. Is it really the plan they want to give away control of all their assets so the government can take care of them? Then add the point I mentioned earlier: each state in this country is going to have an issue paying for care for the vast majority of people, maybe not your personal situation, but the vast majority. So what does that care look like if costs keep going up? It may look different than it does today. Maybe it's dorm-style care.

(17:22)
We don't know what the states might implement. So you're putting your trust in the state governments to decide what your care will look like. And if you're in Florida, as I expect most of you are, you won't necessarily be in the facility down the street from your kids. If you're in Tampa, you might be placed in a facility down in Miami, or maybe up in Pensacola. Again, it's the government's choice where you get placed. So once you start to educate on all of those things, generally speaking, if people have accumulated assets, they want to avoid it.

Fenn Giles (18:05):
And Steve, I'd just like to ask a clarifying question to tie it back to what you were saying, and then we can move on from Medicaid. What you were saying about Washington is that if you had your own private long-term care plan, you didn't have to pay the tax into the state long-term care plan, because you were covered.

Steve Brinkman (18:23):
Yes, that's correct.

Fenn Giles (18:23):
So the idea is that if you plan ahead, you can avoid that potential tax. We don't know what will happen. I don't think we'll see the same thing here for a while, but by planning ahead, you're taking control as opposed to the state.

Steve Brinkman (18:41):
Yes. Plan for your own personal situation. That's why it's important to have the conversation and make sure you feel comfortable with the decisions you're making today, regardless of what the government may or may not do.

(18:53)
Take control of those things yourself. So thank you. We're going to transition a bit into private insurance options. Again, as I mentioned before, it's about having a plan. People who engage in private insurance options usually see some benefit in what I call transferring the risk. We can't control whether it happens or not, but if it does happen, we can determine how much of that risk we want to be responsible for versus how much we want to push into the insurance carrier's pocket. The level of risk people want to transfer, and the way they want to transfer it, is different for every single person. One thing I'll mention about long-term care is that you have to qualify for benefits once you go on claim.

(19:56)
To qualify, you have to be in a situation where, for at least 90 days, you can't perform two of six activities of daily living, called ADLs, and you have to be certified by a medical practitioner, or be in a cognitive situation. These are the types of things you aren't able to do that allow you to qualify. The other very important piece is the tax-free nature of the benefits from these qualified plans. The fact that this income is tax-free helps keep your overall taxable income lower. As I mentioned, somebody could be taking out a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in additional income. If it's coming out tax-free, that's something somebody might want to consider: having that tax-free benefit to help lower their overall tax burden.

(20:51)
I was talking with Fenn the other day about another one that comes up more often. If you had to take a couple hundred thousand dollars of additional income, your Medicare premiums may go up, and you'd have to pay more for Medicare. A lot of folks don't like that. So it's all about working with your advisor to have the proper expectations of what would happen in different scenarios. There are four primary types of solutions people are using to transfer the risk of a long-term care event and create that income. The first one is what we call standalone long-term care. It's pure insurance. Think about your car insurance or your homeowner's insurance: I get a benefit from the insurance carrier that provides a monthly benefit if I need care.

(21:49)
In return, I usually pay an annual, ongoing premium. If I use it, great, those are my benefits. If I don't, it goes away. It's pure insurance. Typically, that could be something like a $5,000-a-month benefit. That's how most benefits are structured today; older policies might have a daily benefit. Generally speaking, you'll see anything from a two- to five-year benefit duration. Again, it's customized for the client and what risk transfer looks like for them, because for those who do transfer the risk, today's long-term care solutions don't cover the full potential cost of an event. One, it may not happen. Two, you have assets, and you just want to take the edge off that event.

(22:41)
If it's going to cost $25,000, maybe I can get $10,000 tax-free at that time, and if I need more, I'll pull from other assets. You'll see inflation options anywhere from no inflation up to 5%. Generally speaking, 5% pricing is really, really expensive, so if you're in your 60s, you'll more likely see 3%. Then there's the elimination period. Think of that as a deductible period. That's very common with insurance solutions: you go on claim, you meet the requirements, and they have you wait 90 days or 60 days until the benefits start. That's pretty much standalone long-term care. It's going to have the lowest annual premium for the amount of benefit access you get.

(23:41)
The second and third types of solutions are very similar. These are the ones we see most often. Again, we work with financial advisors, and their clients tend to have some assets. As I walk through these, you'll see they fit well for folks who have assets and may be able to self-fund, but just want to take the edge off. They want to transfer some of that risk. They have the ability to pay, but they want a bigger pool, or some other benefit that comes along with it. To make that work, these solutions have a life insurance component or an annuity component, which we'll look at on the next slide. But the purpose of getting these is long-term care income protection.

(24:32)
That's what they're doing. The life insurance, generally speaking, is really there to get your investment back if you don't use it, or to make sure you get something back. As I mentioned, the prior solution is use it or lose it. If you don't use it, you lose it. You might pay in $10,000 a year for 30 years, and if you don't use it, that's what it was.

Fenn Giles (24:58):
Kind of like term insurance, or like you said, car insurance.

Steve Brinkman (25:01):
Yes, very much like that. With these hybrid policies, you're sharing the risk: you maintain some control, but you share the risk with the insurance company. They'll use your portion of the asset first, but if you have an event that lasts three, four, five, or six years, you're getting a lot of leverage on the back end. As Fenn and I were discussing, we have a carrier that still offers lifetime benefits. We don't see a lot of it, but it's possible to have that for the person who wants to take the risk completely off the table. I was just looking at a solution for a client. They were around 60 years old. They did a shared pool, a shared policy, and they put lifetime benefits on it.

(25:53)
They were going to transfer $15,000 a year for 20 years, and in their 80s they'd have about $150,000 tax-free annually, for as long as either one of them ever needed it. So that was the risk. Go ahead, Fenn.

Fenn Giles (26:12):
I'm debating whether to come back to this when we're all done, but I'll give a little insight now. This is one I like a lot. The big risk with long-term care is how long it will last. If we all knew it would only last two or three years, two things would happen. One, we could potentially self-insure. The other is that we'd know how much in assets to put away for it. Some of the other models just pay a benefit for three years. If you knew you put X amount of dollars in, and that at most you'd get X in benefits for a term-certain period, you could run your internal rate of return on that and see how long it's good for.

(27:06)
Now, the big thing for us in our industry is the unknown, where the cost could run six, seven, or eight years. That's where the life insurance product underneath gives you a lot of flexibility. It potentially gives you some money back if you don't use it, but your internal rate of return can no longer be calculated, because you don't know how long it'll pay the benefit or how much in benefits you'll get back. If it pays you for 10 years, you're making a great return over the insurance company. If you get it for a year, maybe you don't get all your benefits, but you get something back in the death benefit. So maybe we'll come back to that, but I really like the lifetime coverage, because I think that's the big risk for a lot of our clients.

(27:58)
It's not the two or three years; it's the seven or eight years of care.

Steve Brinkman (28:03):
And I think, generally speaking, the clients who gravitate toward these, or who these are appropriate for, aren't overly concerned about an 18-month event. But regardless of how much money you have and your ability to pay, if you had to come up with, say, $300,000 a year for five or six years, that's a significant amount of money, and somebody's probably going to ask questions somewhere along the line. The question could just be, "Was there a better way?" So having that conversation is what's key. Also, a lot of these are funded through a repositioning of assets. That's how we like to think of it: they're repositioning a bucket. One of the most common ways is that somebody has existing life insurance cash value and doesn't feel they need the death benefit anymore.

(28:59)
That's an asset, and they can potentially reposition it. At the bottom of the screen, you'll see "indemnity." Long-term care benefits are paid one of two ways. The first is reimbursement: you go on claim, incur the expenses, and get reimbursed by the carrier. The indemnity approach is becoming much more common with carriers. Indemnity essentially means you go on claim, you qualify, and once benefits start, you get a check in your checking account. You can spend it on whatever you want.

(29:36)
If you don't use all of it, you just bank it in your checking account. These are becoming more and more common, especially for people who have assets and want control over their long-term care situation and where that money goes. With those funds, you can pay for what we call informal care. A neighbor might come over and watch a spouse, or a mom or dad, in the early stages of dementia. You don't need a qualified, skilled person to come in. So those are the two primary ways benefits are paid, and that's often part of the discussion as we talk through the different solutions available.

(30:21)
Here's an example: a 60-year-old male, where this is that repositioning of an asset. We took $100,000, ideally a low-interest-bearing asset, and turned it into a benefit that, at age 80, was about $900,000 of access at about $9,100 per month. And if they never used it, they'd get the $100,000 back as a tax-free death benefit. So in my mind, the cost here isn't really the $100,000. It's what you were doing with that $100,000. Was it in a CD? Was it in a money market account? That ends up being the cost of the risk transfer, because you're going to get the $100,000 back. This visual shows what happens. As I mentioned before, they use your money first.

(31:19)
When you go on claim, they take from this $100,000 first, then you access this other $800,000. And as Fenn mentioned, once you get deep into this extension, that's where you're really in the carrier's pocket as far as the risk transfer. But that's why you're doing it: if I do have a long-duration event, I've got some leverage here, and it's all tax-free dollars as well.

(31:48)
This next type of solution is in a very similar world, for people who have the ability to fund a long-term care event. It tends to appeal more to people in their 70s, because as we age, we may have more health issues, or...

Fenn Giles (32:08):
So it's hard to qualify for the...

Steve Brinkman (32:09):
Yes. There are fewer qualification questions. The other situation is that people have what I call a dead asset. I'll give you an example. I had a client in Florida, working with the advisor, who was what we'd call more affluent. He had a $10 million net worth, and he had a non-qualified annuity he was going to pass on to his kids. He was never going to use it for income. There are some tax limitations on what you pass to your kids at death with a non-qualified annuity. We were able to take that $400,000 non-qualified annuity, which had a large taxable gain in it, and turn it into a million-dollar pool. We added his wife so she could also access long-term care benefits.

(33:10)
Most importantly, it all came out tax-free. In his situation, he had the ability to create the income if needed, but he found this to be a more efficient way to create income from what he saw as a very inefficient asset. Now, if he or his wife had a care event, this would be the first asset they'd pull from, and they'd preserve some of the other assets in their portfolio. We see a lot of that with people who have non-qualified annuities that have built up significant value. They say, "That's a dead asset to me. I don't plan to use it while I'm alive." That's where we see a lot of this activity: again, people in their late 60s and early 70s. And that's what we do when we work with Fenn and Ryan.

(34:04)
We talk about the client's goals and priorities, what their asset situation looks like, and what makes the most sense if they were to transfer that risk.

(34:18)
The final one, which we see a lot of in the industry, is really the other extreme from traditional long-term care. Here, I get a permanent insurance product, like a whole life or universal life policy, and say my death benefit is $500,000. I add a rider to that policy, typically for an additional cost. That $500,000 will obviously pay as a death benefit if I die, but the rider lets me access the money early if I need it for long-term care or a chronic illness while I'm alive, to help pay for that care. It tends to be much more expensive per unit of long-term care, because the life insurance component gets very expensive for somebody in their 60s and 70s.

(35:18)
So we see this where somebody is buying the policy for the life insurance and is willing to pay some additional money for the flexibility to access the benefit while they're alive. That's usually the key in my conversations: they need or prefer the death benefit, and the long-term care is secondary. Okay?

(35:50)
Fenn, Ryan, do you have anything you'd like to add?

Fenn Giles (35:56):
I'm going to have Ryan chime in here, but for the presentation, I'd echo three really important things I always take away. I even wrote them down. First, when you're looking at a policy, is it indemnity or reimbursement? We've seen both, and we find our clients much prefer indemnity. Make sure you understand what your policy is. Second, and I hate to say it, what we'd call the dead asset review. As you were saying, maybe you have a life insurance policy or annuity. What we don't want to do is transfer an asset just because you think you have no use for it or it wasn't part of your plan. When we get into these reviews, Ryan and I really try to make sure we're not taking an asset that actually has a purpose in your financial plan.

(36:50)
Maybe you weren't aware of it, or maybe it was forgotten, but if you have an old life insurance policy or annuity and you're not sure how it fits into your plan, let's review it, because there's probably a reason you bought it. There might be a reason to keep it, but if not, maybe you can leverage or maximize it in a better way. The third thing is the longevity of what you're choosing. Is it a two-year benefit payout or a lifetime benefit payout? I'm a little biased because of what I've seen: I really like the lifetime payout. That would be my recap, Steve, of the important things you discussed that we hear about most frequently.

Steve Brinkman (37:36):
Yes, I'd agree. Whether it's long-term care, life insurance, or whatever it might be, I'm a big fan of understanding what you have, why you have it, and where it fits in your overall plan. The more you can have those conversations, the better everybody feels, and the more confident they are about why they have what they have. That's the key. Can I share one personal story?

(38:07)
I think it resonates very well. My grandfather just turned 91, and he was actually in the insurance industry, so they've done all kinds of planning. It's a second marriage, though they've been married for over 40 years. He had a health event after going to the gym; he still goes to the YMCA. It was super hot up here in Indiana, right before the Fourth of July holiday, and when he came back, he collapsed. His wife wasn't able to help him. It was a week before his birthday, so he was 90 years old, and she's 90 as well. He ended up being okay. A neighbor was able to call for help, and he spent a few days in the hospital. But because they were both living independently, that opened Pandora's box: she had been having some cognitive situations that he'd been dealing with without saying anything.

(39:10)
He has his plan and she has hers; that's how they've done it, and those are their choices. They already had plans for what happens if one of them passed and where they would go. I don't know that they'd specifically talked about a situation where they're both alive. She has two sons who live about 45 minutes away, so she went there to stay at a facility and get some testing. Her daughter-in-law is actually a medical director at the facility. Once my grandfather came out of the hospital, he decided it wasn't safe for her to be at home, because he wouldn't be able to pick her up. A lot of thought went into it. So now she's in a facility 45 minutes away from him. They're still married and still together. He travels there once a week or so, whenever he's able, to see her. It changed their situation dramatically, even though they have very specific estate plans.

(40:13)
He has five kids, and she has two. So the question was, would he want to come up here and live with her? And they said no, because then he'd be moving away from all of his kids.

(40:26)
So it's very important to communicate some of these things and make sure everybody's on the same page, so you don't put that burden on the kids. Like I said, my mom and her siblings weren't burdened with a decision. He made it, because he's in a great cognitive situation. But his wife is in a situation where she has to do what others tell her she's going to do. So it's very important.

Fenn Giles (40:53):
Well, thanks for sharing that.

Ryan Chard (40:56):
Thanks for sharing. We'll wrap up here. To everyone attending, we want to thank you for being here. We're available for questions afterward. You can email me; most of you have my email, but if you don't, it's rchard@wealthadvtb.com. You can also give me a ring on my personal line. I'll facilitate the questions afterward, make sure I get them in front of Fenn, and we'll loop in Steve when necessary to use his expertise. So please reach out to Fenn and me and let us know. Steve, thank you for hosting this with us. We love having you as a partner, and we always appreciate what you and Ash Brokerage bring to the table. Thank you very much for being here with us today.

Steve Brinkman (41:45):
Thank you both.

Fenn Giles (41:46):
Thank you, Steve.

Ryan Chard (41:48):
Thank you, everyone. Bye now.