Wednesday

How To Reduce Your Long Term Care Premiums

While long-term care insurance can be a great way to pay for a nursing home stay or a home health care worker, it doesn't come cheap. Annual premiums vary significantly, depending on your age, health, and the type of policy, but policies can run as high as $5,000 per year. In these challenging economic times, people have to make hard choices on their budget and priorities. Here are some ways to reduce your LTC Insurance costs if you need to take a serious look at your own:

Shorter benefit period. The most significant cost-saving step you can take is to not purchase a lifetime policy. Unless you have a family history of a chronic illness, you aren't likely to need coverage for more than five years. In fact a new study from the American Association of Long-term Care Insurance shows that a three-year benefit policy is sufficient for most people. According to the study of in-force long-term care policies, only 8 percent of people needed coverage for more than three years. By purchasing coverage for three, four, or five years instead of a lifetime, you can save thousands of dollars in premiums. If you do have a history of a chronic disease in your family, you may want to purchase coverage for 10 years, which would still be less than purchasing a lifetime policy.


Buy younger. Long-term care insurance premiums rise as you age, so the younger you buy, the cheaper your premiums. Be careful, however, because insurance premiums can, and often do, increase considerably from your initial purchase price. Even if you have a policy that is "guaranteed renewable," your premiums can still increase.

Shared care policy. If both you and your spouse are purchasing long-term care insurance, a shared care policy might be able to give you more coverage for less money. With a shared care policy, you buy a pool of benefits that you can split between you and your spouse. For example, if you buy a five-year policy, you will have a total of 10 years between you and your spouse. If your spouse uses two years of the policy, you will have eight years. A shared care policy may cost more than separate policies with the same benefit period, but it will allow you to buy a shorter policy, knowing that you have a pool of benefits to work with.

Longer elimination period. Most policies have a waiting period before coverage begins, typically 30-90 days. The longer you make this waiting period, the cheaper your premiums. Keep in mind, however, that you will have to pay for your care out of pocket until the waiting period is over and the insurance begins its coverage.
Reduced daily benefit. Instead of purchasing the maximum daily benefit you might need in a nursing home, you can consider paying for a portion of the daily benefit yourself. You can then insure for the maximum daily benefit minus the amount you plan to pay. A lower daily benefit will mean lower premiums.

Inflation protection. Inflation protection increases the value of your benefit to keep up with inflation and is almost always recommended. But you can save on premiums by which method of protection you choose: compound-interest increases or simple-interest increases. If you are purchasing a long-term care policy and are younger than age 62 or 63, you will need to purchase compound inflation protection. This can, however, more than double your premium. If you purchase a policy after age 62 or 63, some experts believe that simple inflation increases should be enough, and you will save on premium costs.

You should also remember that your premiums may be tax-deductible. Premiums for "qualified" long-term care policies will be treated as a medical expense and will be deductible to the extent that they, along with other unreimbursed medical expenses (including "Medigap" insurance premiums), exceed 7.5 percent of the insured's adjusted gross income.

Sunday

Memories of California -It Wasn't All Bad

I'm looking back on our California experience. We have recovered, are moving forward again, and realize what a necessary part it was of our life.

Typical Ranch View

Ranch Bedroom

Ranch yard




View from my ranch bedroom

What an amazing journey. It was a beautiful place.
Sycamore Canyon Rd -- I traveled this road every day to get to the highway to get to work


Ranch Resident


The Ranch where I lived







Entrance to Ranch


My favorite part of the Ranch driveway

Jack and I on a hike

Hiking high above Walnut Creek


Tuesday

Are You Caught in the Caregiving Web?

There are 22 million family caregivers to the elderly in the US. The majority of them are also employed full-time. 5% of them have taken an unpaid leave of absence; 50% have lost time out of work to fulfill their responsibilities.
-National Caregiving Association

Monday

Welcome

Greetings and welcome to the first entry in our elderplanning blog! The purpose of this site is to post up-to-date information on eldercare and elderplanning so that you can have the information you need at your fingertips when you need it. This blog will also allow us to process information directly rather than pestering our webhost who takes care of our Elderplanning website. Of course we just set up this account this evening and wish that we could have everything on display for you pronto - but it will take time. But we are going to do our best to cover lots of bases here --- medical, emotional, financial and otherwise, so please come back again! We've been in business over a decade and I've personally been in the industry for 25 years --- it will take some time to document here what's in my head. But I'll try -- and I'll do it on a regular basis too. So please stay tuned..... Of course if you can't wait and have an issue that is pressing NOW, don't hesitate to contact our office. Please visit our website for contact information.


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