My Article Published by Fortune

Four years ago, my wife called me in a panic, telling me her mother had collapsed at home. I rushed to the house to find my mother-in-law prone on the floor. She appeared to be in great pain. The paramedics took her to the hospital, but she never made it back to her own home, instead moving from the hospital to a rehabilitation facility to a nursing facility for Alzheimer’s patients where she eventually succumbed to her disease.

My mother-in-law’s fall affected everyone in our family. Her husband suddenly has less money to live on than he anticipated due to medical bills, and her children not only carried the grief of losing their mother and the burden of caring for their father, but the financial strain meant less inheritance for them and their own children. Fortunately, with the help of an elder law attorney, the family has put into place an irrevocable trust that helped protect my father-in-law’s assets and qualified him to receive veteran’s long-term care benefits.

People often bristle at purchasing long-term care insurance, but the decision can safeguard you both financially and emotionally in the future. It is like purchasing fire insurance or auto insurance. You hate paying the premium and hope you never have to use it, but have the peace of mind knowing that you can handle disasters without ruining your financial security. Today, there are several excellent methods to obtain long-term care coverage. There are life insurance policies that allow an insured person to access the death benefit for long-term care needs, and many annuity policies can be purchased with a rider that provides for a death benefit greater than the cash value of the policy.

Long-term care policies can be purchased with a return of premium option if the insured elects to discontinue coverage at a future date. Many consumers have been unwilling to purchase long-term care insurance because they fear they are throwing their money away if they don’t use the benefits of the policy. Many new life insurance policies, annuities, and long-term care policies eliminate this objection because many of them provide access to all or a portion of the money paid into the policy. With this assurance of access to policy cash values, it makes sense for individuals to divert a small portion of their cash assets to protect the rest of their assets and their future retirement income.

Planning to pay for long-term care needs using these new policies certainly wouldn’t have eliminated the grief associated with my mother-in-law’s illness and subsequent death, but it may have gone a long way in assuring that the retirement assets of those left behind wouldn’t be lost, or that a family legacy wouldn’t be squandered.