Protecting Your Wealth from Long-Term Care Costs Video from Savant Wealth Management

Download our complimentary guide books, checklists, and other useful financial resources at savantwealth.com/guides. Welcome to today’s Savant live webinar. Thank you for joining us. My name is Jeff Neavor. I’m financial adviser in our Peoria, Illinois office. Today, we’re excited to discuss how to protect your wealth from long-term care costs. This is a big part of spending and retirement and really deserves some consideration. Joining me today is Danny Hutcherson. Having Danny join us is a special treat as he has a master’s degree in gerontology and spends a lot of his time working with people as they age and how they [clears throat] understand many of the challenges that come with that. Welcome Danny. We’re glad to have you. Thanks Jeff and it’s great to be here. And for our audience’s benefit, in addition to being a certified financial planner professional, Jeff has many years as a teacher and a band director. So, the unique lens that he brings to this conversation, the skill of coordinating ensembles to achieve a goal is especially relevant. While my academic training in gerontology and public health certainly inform my comments today, I’m also a former family caregiver, which makes this as personal for me as I’m sure it is for many of you in our audience today. Jeff, what’s on our agenda for today’s call?

For today’s agenda, these are the topics that we’ll cover. What is long-term care? So, what are the needs and services that fall under the umbrella of long-term care? And what triggers a long-term care need. Where can care happen? We’ll discuss where long-term care takes place from the home to a facility. The location can vary greatly depending upon the case. Why does it matter? We’ll look into why long-term care is such an important topic to explore and plan for. We’ll look at the spectrum of care planning. There are three major phases of long-term care planning and we’ll discuss the importance of each of those topics. We’ll look into building the foundation. This will be a deep dive into the first phase of planning and we’ll look at building a team, building a plan, saving for the future, and protecting against future risks. We’ll describe who we need on the team, the major plans we need to build, and what are the best vehicles for saving and protecting our future goals. The next phase, preparing for the future. During this phase, we’ll explore planning and how education becomes critical. We’ll cover the differences between Medicare and Medicaid. We’ll also look at the importance of maintaining and updating our estate planning and wealth transfer documents as well as positioning our resources in a strategic way. Implementing and adapting the plan. In the third phase of planning, we focus on quality of life and the need to position and transition as we work through the last phase of the spectrum of care planning. Finally, we’ll discuss how health influences wealth and wealth influences health. Taking care of yourself today helps lead to better outcomes in the future. Sound planning also allows us for greater options in the future. Finally, we’ll end with a Q&A session.

So, what is long-term care?

Long-term care or LTC refers to a broad range of paid and unpaid services designed to help people who can no longer perform activities of daily living independently because of either aging, chronic illness, injury, disability, or cognitive impairment. Often you’ll hear people refer to the activities of daily living as triggering for long-term care insurance events. Long-term care may include assistance with medication management, transportation to and from appointments, meal preparation. It could include household tasks such as cleaning. It could be bathing, dressing, eating, and mobility or supervision related to dementia or cognitive impairment. Often when we look at the activities of daily living, the cognitive or mental portion is a separate qualifier for long-term care where care happens. Three in 10 care recipients live alone. This means they don’t have a spouse or other person within the home that can help them with activities of daily living. In those cases, those people typically end up in a facility outside of their home unless they can have some sort of service that comes into their home to provide care. Needs and resources generally determine the care setting. If you own your own home, family or caregiver, they could have a home that could provide you care as well. So, you may go to live with another member of your family. Another option is if there’s a person that brings you into their home that’s not a family member that can provide you care. The next option would be to move to an assisted living community or independent living or retirement community. Nursing home care and long-term care facilities are the final option when care cannot be provided by someone within the family or a person outside of one of those facilities. The costs of long-term care vary greatly depending upon your location. So, while the national average for home health aid is $80,80, we look to Chicago, which is just 2 and a half hours from where we’re located and the average is $84,656.

Now, when you look at assisted living, the national average is lower, but the Chicago average is much higher, 88,200. Skilled nursing home on average nationally 129,000 and again much higher, 155,000 for Chicago, Illinois. So, the annual cost of care for someone in Chicago could be 16 to 44% higher than someone living in Birmingham, Alabama. As of the 2025 figures. So, why does this matter? Many of us will need long-term care. Approximately 70% of adults who reach age 65 will need some form of long-term care services or support during their lifetime. Most of the care is provided in their home. This has a major impact as we look at how medical costs have inflated over time. It’s been a much higher rate than what we’ve seen with other expenses. So, it’s not kept up with the normal pace of inflation and it becomes a very big part of your financial plan. Family members remain the primary source of care, but many people, as we discussed, three and 10, don’t have someone in the home with them. The likelihood of needing care increases substantially after age 75. Care is often a long-term need, so average duration for long-term care is approximately 3 years. Women typically require longer than men. They average 3.7 years versus 2.2 years. And approximately 20% of older adults will need care for more than 5 years. One big burden that this places is we see how it impacts the health of the surviving spouse. For example, if a man goes into a long-term care need and the spouse takes care of him, we also see how that impacts their overall health. Moving forward, long-term care is about more than just healthcare. It’s about protecting your independence, your ability to make decisions for yourself, your ability to maintain your quality of life to reduce the burdens on a spouse or partner. As we discussed before, it can have a very negative impact on a partner or spouse to be the sole provider of long-term care for their loved one. This also helps us to preserve family relationships and also protect retirement assets and legacy. If [snorts] we don’t plan for a long-term care event and we drastically reduce those retirement assets, it could lead to a failure of our plan to meet our goals. Or if there was a desire to pass on a legacy to our heirs or to charity, we could really utilize those assets for the long-term care and they wouldn’t provide the goal that we initially want in our plan. So, ensuring your wishes are honored are also an important part to make sure that your family knows what’s important to you and that they can be prepared for that. Thank you, Jeff. Now, as a quick review, we’ve established three important realities. First, that long-term care is not rare. Many of us will need some kind of help with daily life as we age or as our health circumstances change. Second, care usually begins closer to home than people expect, whether it’s our own home or the home of a caregiver. And third, when care is needed, the financial impact can be large. So, the natural question is, as Jeff left us with, what can we do about it? What should we do about it? And how do we protect wealth from long-term care costs without letting uncertainty lead to inaction? Now, the answer is not simply to buy product, create a trust, or hope that state Medicaid will just pay for everything for us. None of those are complete solutions by themselves. Long-term care planning is better understood, we found, as a spectrum. It changes over time as our health and family circumstances, financial resources, and personal wishes change. Planning gives us a way to move from awareness to action and hopefully helps us avoid having to treat care as a crisis management issue that begins only after a fall, a diagnosis, or an urgent phone call. The goal then is to make care planning part of the broader financial planning process while there’s still time to preserve choice. Here we see the three broad phases we’ll use for the rest of our time together. Saving and planning, planning and positioning and transitioning. The age ranges are intentionally approximate. They aren’t rules because of course life and health changes sure don’t follow those. Some families will need to address these issues earlier and others may have more time and the phases overlap because real life does not manifest in clean planning categories or timelines. So, this first phase saving and planning is about creating flexibility. It’s also about creating financial capacity. And this is when you’re building the resources, building your team, relationships, documents, habits, and resilience that can hopefully enable more choices later in life. The second phase, planning and positioning, is when education becomes more important. This is where we need to begin asking more specific questions. What does Medicare cover? What does Medicaid cover? What are the differences? Where would I want care? And who would make decisions when I can’t make them for myself. The third phase, positioning and transitioning, is where planning becomes more operational. At this stage, decisions become less theoretical. Families may be pricing in specific care options. You might have had a diagnosis, documenting and refining care preferences often happens here, and coordinating professional support. The important point is that there is no single solution to long-term care planning and the right strategy is the one that evolves over time with your needs. So, as we think about building the foundation of a long-term care plan, in this first section, saving and planning, I would encourage you to think more broadly. Long-term care planning does not begin when someone needs care. It begins hopefully much earlier when we’re creating the conditions that make future care decisions easier, more affordable, and hopefully more aligned with our wishes. The best planning creates options. Options about where you live, about who provides care, about how much responsibility falls on your spouse, partner, family, children, other loved ones. Options about whether you can remain home safely, or whether another care setting makes more sense. For many families, this phase is also where health and wealth first really come together in a practical way.

The primary goal in this phase is to create flexibility by building financial capacity and health capacity. And that language is intentional. We’re not saying that a person in their 30s, 40s, or 50s has to know exactly what kind of care they might need decades later. No one can know that with certainty, of course. But what we can do is build a plan that gives you and your family more room to maneuver as things change. So, there are four pieces here. Build your team, then build your plan, save for future care needs, and protect against those future risks. Now, the families that have the most options later in life are usually the families that prepare earlier. They don’t predict the future, of course, but they build resilience. They’ve saved. They’ve insured where appropriate. They’ve documented their preferences, coordinated professional advice, and kept health and well-being in the planning conversation and also in their daily lives. I like to think of this period as where we’re trying to reduce the likelihood that a future health event becomes a financial and family crisis. That does not mean that we can prevent any or every health event, but it does mean that we can reduce the amount of scrambling that happens when something changes, especially if that change is unexpected.

The first part of the foundation is building your team. No one professional can do all of these things and do it well. It’s truly a team event. An estate planning attorney can help draft and update the legal documents that preserve decision-making authority and clarify wishes. A tax planning professional can help evaluate the tax consequences of different strategies. And you’ll note that I said tax planning and not just tax preparation. An insurance specialist can help you determine whether long-term care insurance, life insurance, or hybrid of the two make sense. And healthcare providers help us of course understand current health risks and functional trajectory. And importantly, a well-trained financial adviser can help integrate these conversations, putting it all together with a coherent and comprehensive financial plan. Now, for high net worth families who might think at this point they’re off the hook, coordination becomes even more important, not less. Multiple accounts, multiple asset custodians, properties, business interests, financial dependence, family dynamics can all become much harder to manage during a health crisis. Wealth can solve a lot of problems for sure, but it can also add complexity when the plan isn’t coordinated. So, the second component is to build the plan itself. A comprehensive financial plan is the starting point because it helps answer the broader question, will our resources support the life we want, including the possibility of care. You’ll also need a retirement income plan. Where will the cash flow come from if care costs rise? Which assets would and should be used first? How could the market affect your ability to pay for care? You need an estate plan. Who has the authority to act on your behalf? Are your documents current? Are the right people named? And are those the same people who will be willing and able to serve when you need care in the future? You need a risk management plan. That includes insurance, but also often includes liquidity and emergency reserves and planning for the risk that maybe one person needs care, but the other remains healthy and still needs to be financially protected and supported. And ideally, putting on my public health hat here, you need a health and well-being plan, which is just which is one of Savant’s 10 key planning areas for a reason. Health is not just a personal issue. Health is a financial planning issue. The longer we can preserve mobility, cognition, strength, and independence, the more choices we may have in later life. Now, many families are disciplined about saving for retirement. But far fewer in our experience intentionally save for care. That’s understandable because care needs feel uncertain and distant, especially if you’re younger, until they aren’t. But if we look at the probability and the potential duration of care, it becomes clear that future care costs deserve a place in your financial plan. Now, there’s several ways to approach this. Retirement savings may ultimately be used to pay for care needs, but that should be modeled intentionally. In many cases, retirement savings happens on a pre-tax basis, unless you’ve saved in a Roth. Health savings accounts contributions can be powerful for those who are eligible and who’ve saved during their working years and haven’t spent their HSA balances on current needs, as they go. Some families may create dedicated care reserves, especially if they prefer to self-fund, while others may use long-term care insurance or hybrid insurance, which is a hybrid of life and long-term care insurance when appropriate and if they qualify. So, the right answer really depends on age, health, insurability, assets, cash flow, family support, and your personal preferences. And the important planning question is not simply you know if all else fails, should I just buy long-term care insurance? The better question is if care is needed or when care is needed, what’s the funding strategy? How are we going to pay for that? Sometimes the answer is insurance, but sometimes it’s a combination of assets, income, home equity, and family support. The point is to identify the strategy before care begins. Now, health savings accounts deserve some special attention here because they can be one of the most tax efficient accounts available under the tax code. The power of an HSA comes from its triple tax advantage. Contributions may be tax deductible, growth can be tax deferred, and withdrawals can be tax-free when used for qualified medical expenses. That combination is unusual. Most accounts like an employer retirement plan or an IRA give you a tax benefit on the way in or on the way out, but not usually both. HSAs can be especially helpful for people who are still working, who are eligible to contribute, and who have the cash flow to allow the account to grow rather than using it immediately for current health expenses. From a long-term care perspective, the HSA is not likely a complete solution. And we’ll look here in a minute at what the limitations are. It’s not going to solve the amount that you can save in an HSA is not going to solve every health care cost problem. But for eligible households can absolutely become a dedicated tax advantage pool of resources for your future health needs. So, there are several features of HSAs that make them especially attractive in planning for care. First, the funds can be invested for long-term growth. That’s key because health care expenses are rising pretty rapidly, more than general inflation, and unused balances carry it forward. This is not a use it or lose it account like other kinds of flexible savings accounts. If you don’t spend the balance in your HSA this year, it generally remains available for future years. There are no required minimum distributions like in a retirement account. So, right now at age 73, if you have a balance in a pre-tax savings in a pre-tax retirement account, you have to begin taking required minimum distributions. HSAs are not subject to that. HSAs are also portable. They’re not tied forever to one employer. So, if you change employers and you have an HSA, you can either leave it where it was or you can roll it into your new plan. And finally, HSAs can reimburse future health care expenses and in some case help fund Medicare premiums and certain long-term care insurance premiums subject to the rules of course and limits that apply. Now, the 2026 limits are shown here. And it’s important to remember that employer contributions also count toward these limits. So, this is an area where planning with an adviser and a tax adviser really matters. The broader point is that if you’re eligible, an HSA become can become more than just like a medical checking account. It can absolutely become part of a long-term health and care planning strategy. I’ll mention a few quick points on eligibility because that’s something that, you know, not everyone on this call may be eligible to contribute to an HSA. You generally need to be covered by an HSA eligible eye deductible health plan. You can’t have disqualifying health coverage, which in most cases means eligible for more than one health plan, or be enrolled in Medicare. And you also can’t be claimed as a dependent on someone else’s tax return. That might be relevant to some of our younger callers. That Medicare point is especially important for people approaching retirement. So, on the other end of the spectrum, you know, people don’t people don’t realize that, let’s say if you’re claiming a parent because you’re taking care of their health needs, maybe they, you know, they’re not quite let’s say they get an early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or something like that and you’re caring for them and you’re deducting them on their tax return. You know, if they’re winding down employment, you have to be really careful on the timing of you know, HSA contributions and Medicare eligibility. And just yet, whether or not you have a health condition, Medicare, HSA contribution eligibility ends when Medicare enrollment begins. Now, you don’t lose the account. Existing HSA dollars can still be used for qualified expenses. But the ability to contribute changes. So, for those of you in your late 50s and early 60s, this is often a strategic window. If you’re eligible, if you have cash flow, and if you can afford to let the account grow, it may be worth making HSA contributions a priority. But as with all tax related planning, the details really matter here. So, this is an area to coordinate with your financial adviser and your tax professional. Now we move to the next phase, planning and positioning, which is all about preparing for future care. By this point, the care conversation often becomes more concrete. The process of aging more noticeable. Adult children may be asking questions. Health may be changing. You or a spouse may have had a diagnosis. Or the family may simply recognize that later life decisions need more clarity. Maybe you’ve just gone through an estate planning conversation and preparing your wills, trusts, etc. This is the phase where silence can really become the most problematic. Parents, we find often want to avoid becoming a burden. Adult children often fear overstepping. And those long held family roles can create kind of an independence paradox where everyone wants to protect everyone else, but no one says enough out loud. And that’s where care informed financial planning can help bring everyone together and bridge that gap. It gives families a way to talk about these difficult topics through the framework of planning and talking about your values and then putting in place practical next steps rather than leading with fear and uncertainty.

So, the primary goal in this phase is to increase preparedness and to protect your autonomy before a health event occurs. That word autonomy is really important. Long-term care planning is not only about protecting assets. It’s about protecting your ability to have a say in what happens next or what happens now. So, in this phase we think about education, reviewing and updating planning documents and making sure that your wishes you know for protecting your independence and choice are memorialized in those documents. Positioning resources strategically and recognizing that health and well-being can truly be protective. Now I might say that even more directly again putting the public health hat back on. You know, maintaining health is a strategy for preserving independence and reducing the potential costs of long-term care. Mobility, strength, nutrition, sleep, social engagement, chronic disease management, and fall prevention all have financial consequences because they can influence how soon care is needed, how intense care becomes, and where care could be provided. So, we’re not waiting for a crisis to happen. We’re asking in this phase what can be clarified, what can be funded, what can be documented and con and communicated. Now, so I mentioned education. Education is really essential here because without it, you know, we could make care decisions based on assumptions that are not accurate. And the most common example we see is confusion about Medicare and Medicaid, which we’ll cover a little bit more on the next slide. But there are other areas where education matters. Long-term care insurance can be helpful, but it may not be available or appropriate for everyone. Family caregiving can also be deeply meaningful, especially for the person receiving care, but it can also create physical, emotional, career, and financial strain. Now, retirement communities vary widely in your local area and what they offer in terms of services, the cost for those services and the levels of care that those [clears throat] communities provide and care costs where you live as Jeff mentioned or maybe where you want to live in the future may look very different from the national averages. And we find that when families understand what is covered, what is not covered, and what care options exist for them, and how much they cost, they can make decisions with greater confidence.

So, Medicare and Medicaid sound similar, but they’re very different programs. Medicare is a federal health insurance program based primarily on age or disability. It covers acute medical care and it’s extremely important. But generally speaking, Medicare does not pay for long-term custodial care. That means it does not usually cover the ongoing costs of help whether it’s in your home or in a care facility with bathing, dressing, eating, mobility, and the other daily needs that Jeff mentioned. Medicaid, by contrast, is a needs-based program administered by the states. It’s not a federal program. It’s funded by the federal government, but it is administered by the states. It does cover many long-term care services. And this is Medicaid is the primary public payer of long-term care in the US, but only as a last resort generally when your resources, your financial resources are largely depleted. So, income and asset rules apply, and those rules do vary by state. So, it’s important to get additional support here. But many people mistaken believe that Medicare will cover long-term care. And that’s a misunderstanding that can create a major planning gap. Legal documents should also evolve as life evolves. And we cover this topic in much more depth on other Savant webinars available on our website and also on our YouTube channel. Many families have estate documents, but those documents may be out of, inaccessible, incomplete, or perhaps even inconsistent with current wishes. Sometimes those documents were drafted when children were younger, relationships were different, assets were simpler, or health concerns were not yet present. So, the documents listed here are important because they determine who can act, who can act on your behalf, how decisions will be made, and whether your wishes will be honored or can be honored when you can’t speak for yourself. So, one practical point on behalf of your loved ones that we found certainly in my family’s case u and particularly when my father was recently hospitalized, documents are only useful if the right people know they exist and can access them when needed. In emergencies, family members often can’t find the documents they need or maybe they find that there are gaps in the documents at the worst possible time. So, and often in those scenarios, emotions can be high and time can be compressed. So, reviewing your estate documents is not just a legal task. It’s truly an act of care for the people who may one day have to step in on your behalf.

This slide really gets to the heart of care centered planning. Where would I want to receive care? Who would make decisions for me? What resources should we or they use first? What level of family caregiving burden is acceptable to me and to them? When I need care, what should my caregivers know about me and my wishes? So, these are not easy questions. They are fundamentally humane. They are fundamentally human and they honor not only the person who may need care but also the family members who may someday be asked to help. Without this guidance, adult children or other caregivers could be forced to make really high stakes decisions without knowing what you or a loved one would have wanted. And for the person who needs care for you, not having a plan can mean losing control over your own narrative or wishes. So, in the most extreme cases, it can mean losing decision-making rights altogether. So, the goal here is not just better documents or better financial strategies. The goal is creating a framework for caring conversations that respects your independence, your interdependence with your family and those providing care and your right to self- agency. So, once your preferences are clear, resources can be positioned more strategically to align with them. Housing decisions are often top of this list. Is your current home safe and realistic for aging in place? Would modifications improve safety or allow you to stay longer? Are there stairs, bathroom, lighting, entrances, layout issues that could increase a fall risk or make caregiving harder? Liquid reserves matter because care decisions often require quick decisions and quick payments. Having a readily available cash reserve or flexible income sources are really important because care costs may come unexpectedly and certainly they you know can rise quickly. So, make sure you have enough. Trust planning and asset ownership reviews may matter depending on your goals, family circumstances, state rules, and the possibility of future Medicaid planning. If care costs are likely to consume most of your financial resources, it’s really important to make sure that you have a sense of whether or not your assets are substantial enough to support your care needs over time. And this is really where care planning becomes very personal. You know, for one family, the right strategy on positioning assets may be to invest in aging and aging in place modifications, but for another it may be moving closer to adult children or it might be evaluating a continuing care retirement community. The point is that positioning assets is not just about protecting money. It’s also about extending your independence and supporting your preferred care options. So, now we move into the third and final stage implementing and adapting the plan. At this stage in positioning and transitioning, planning becomes operational. Hypothetical discussions become real world decisions. The family may be responding to a diagnosis, a fall, cognitive changes, caregiver burnout, or the realization that living completely independent is maybe not realistic. This is often where families feel the emotional weight the most too. And decisions, you know, may involve a spouse or partner, adult children, siblings, health care providers, attorneys or advisers can also weigh in. And of course your health care professionals themselves. The purpose of the earlier planning phases is to make this stage less chaotic, less forced. It’s not easy of course but the goal is to reduce uncertainty. If wishes had been discussed, if documents are current, if resources are positioned well and the professional team is in place, the family can focus more on your care and less on crisis management. The primary goal here is quality of life. In this phase, success is not measured only by investment performance, tax efficiency, or the size of your estate. Those are all important, yes, but they serve a larger objective. Helping you live as well as possible while protecting the people who love and support you. So, the priorities here are to operationalize the strategy, position financial resources, evaluate actual care scenarios and what your options are to match resources to those needs and recognize that health and well-being increasingly drive health outcomes and life outcomes. The tools themselves that we use to do that are not the objectives. Trusts, caregiver agreements, insurance, life estates, liquidity plans, and legal documents. Those are all important tools for care planning. But the objective is to preserve dignity, preserve autonomy, family stability, and ultimately your quality of life. At this stage, health and wealth really become inseparable. Health affects what care is needed. Wealth affects what care is available. This phase of planning really helps bring the two together.

Operationalizing the strategy means making the plan usable. You’ve put this plan together for years hopefully and this is the phase where you really need it. So, you want to make sure that your written preferences are still updated. Family communication plan is coordinated. Things like who has all the numbers for people you’d want to notify if something happens. Care budgets hopefully are funded and reviewed regularly. Potential care settings are evaluated. Transition plans are contemplated, meaning who will help go through the house and pack, how much time is needed. What items are most meaningful to you to keep or to set aside for certain people. This is where vague intentions need to become actionable guidance and you have the power to do that. A person may say, “I want to stay at home as long as possible.” Well, that’s a good starting point, but it needs to be translated into planning questions. What would make staying home unsafe? How many hours of paid care would be affordable? Who would coordinate care? What happens if my primary caregiver becomes exhausted? And what are the signs that maybe another setting should be considered? Families ultimately cannot follow wishes that haven’t been communicated. And the goal is to reduce uncertainty for everyone involved.

So, we’ve covered much of this before and at this phase of life the questions matter more than before. So, which assets matter most? Are the beneficiaries correct? Is there enough cash or income available? For some families liquidity is the most important resource because it gives you speed and choice. For others, protecting a spouse or partner may be the central concern. Or there might be a focus on fairness among the children. Protection may be of a family home. That’s important. Business continuity or even getting charitable contributions done before something else happens. This is why professional support matters and small decisions about ownership, gifting, beneficiary decisions, or other commitments can have really large consequences when care needs emerge. So, as care and care needs become more specific, the planning should become more specific too. Aging in place, informal care, do you want to consider paid in-home care, adult day programs, assisted living, skilled nursing, and memory care? Those are all very different scenarios and as Jeff showed us, they differ in cost and location in the level of support, family involvement, availability and honestly the emotional impact on you and everyone else. So, care needs will also affect you know spouses or partners. If one spouse becomes the primary caregiver, the planning question is not only can we afford care, it’s also can the caregiver remain healthy because the evidence shows us that the burden of caregiving is not just financial, there’s also a physical and emotional toll. Can the caregiver continue to work to socialize and maintain their own financial security? This is where the real cost of care is broader than the invoice maybe from in-home care, a care agency or a care facility. You know, there might be transportation costs, home modifications, moving costs, time away from work for the caregiver, you know, decluttering and relocating responsibilities.

Ultimately, planning has to connect resources to all of those needs. And that means projecting care costs, assessing affordability, evaluating tradeoffs, preserving spousal security, and protecting family relationships. Now, those trade-offs are inevitable. Paying for care may preserve family relationships and caregiver health, but it may also reduce assets available for legacy goals. Staying at home to receive care at home may preserve familiarity and autonomy, but it may require more paid support or home modifications. As we saw in one of the first slides that Jeff showed us, in-home care can be more expensive than assisted living. Moving to a care community may feel difficult emotionally, but it may also provide safety, social connection, and relief for family caregivers. The point is that there’s rarely a perfect answer, but there’s usually a better informed answer to the questions that matter most when care is needed. So, how do we support the person who needs care? How do we support the person who’s providing care? How do we preserve reasonable financial security and honor the values that matter most? So, by this stage, health and well-being become determinative because they increasingly drive the financial outcomes. Health directly affects financial outcomes. A fall, a stroke, dementia, mobility loss, and caregiver burnout can change spending patterns very quickly. Financial resources also directly affect health outcomes. Resources can affect access to home care, therapy, transportation, nutrition, safer housing, care coordination, and the care setting that you prefer most. And that’s why health is not separate from wealth at Savant. It’s one of the major variables that we use to determine how wealth will be used and what kind of life that it can support. And this leads us to the final section which is all about these the intersection of I’m going to go back sorry and this leads us to the final section health and wealth. We often think about these as separate domains. Health belongs to doctors and wealth belongs to financial advisers. But in real life they are deeply connected. Health affects how long we work, how much we save, how much we spend, when we retire when we can retire, and how much care we need, how much independence we can retain. Wealth affects where we live, what care we can access, how much support we can purchase, whether or not a spouse is financially protected, and whether family caregivers can receive relief. So, the question is not whether health belongs in financial planning. The question is whether your financial plan is complete if it ignores health. So, good health is one of the most valuable assets that most people will ever possess. Better health can delay care needs, can preserve independence, can reduce care costs, and extend both health span, the number of years you live in good health, and in some cases, lifespan. Now, the cheapest long-term care claim is the one that never happens, right? Or the one that’s delayed because strength, mobility, and preventative care helped preserve independence longer. But the relationship works in the other direction, too. Better planning can protect autonomy. Support loved ones, preserve assets, and yes, improve the quality of life. This is not about blaming anyone for health conditions. Many of those factors are outside of our control. But it’s about recognizing that we often have more agency than we think and that small daily health decisions and thoughtful financial decisions and planning can accumulate over time. That is the heart of the health and wealth connection. So, if there’s one takeaway from this webinar, I hope it’s this. The goal is not simply to pay for care. The goal is to plan to preserve independence, autonomy, and self- agency. It’s to protect the ones you love. It’s to align financial resources with your wishes. And it’s to maximize quality of life through the aging process. Paying for care is important, but it’s not the whole objective. A plan that pays for care, but ignores family caregiving burden, personal wishes, caregiver well-being, document access, or quality of life, that plan would be incomplete. The better question is, what would successful care planning look like for your family? Is it aging in place for as long as you can or preserving assets for a loved one? Is it reducing caregiving burden on family? Or is it maintaining your privacy and dignity and your control over decisions? The right plan should reflect your ideal future, the life you want, the people you love, and the values that you want honored.

If today’s discussion raised questions for you, that’s great. Please put them in the chat and we’ll have time to respond to a few questions here in just a moment or use the link to schedule a complimentary 15-minute call with someone on our team. So, we’ll now have time for a few questions that have been submitted throughout today’s presentation. Jeff, I appreciate you taking a few minutes to look at the chat. What is the first question that we have? He asks, “Should I purchase a long-term care policy or self-insure?” That’s a great question. Whether you should buy long-term care insurance or self-insure, it really depends on your age and more of on how a long-term care event would impact your financial plan. Long-term care isn’t designed to make you richer. It’s designed to transfer risk that could otherwise have a significant impact on your retirement assets, your lifestyle, legacy goals. This is where working with a financial adviser becomes critical. As Danny has discussed, self-insuring is often appropriate when we have sufficient assets and income to comfortably absorb a potential long-term care event. When paying for several years of care would not materially affect your spouse’s lifestyle or health. When preserving a specific inheritance is not the primary concern for you or if you’re comfortable accepting the uncertainty of future health care costs. For example, a family with sub substantial investment assets and a stronger retirement income source may decide that setting aside a part of their portfolio for potential care expenses is more attractive than paying insurance premiums for several years. Long-term care insurance is often worth considering when a prolonged care event would significantly reduce those retirement assets would, you know, if we feel like our spouse would not be protected in that particular case without insurance or that may negatively impact their health. We’d also want to make sure that long-term care insurance could also help if someone wants to preserve assets for their heirs. So, if your desire is to leave a legacy or to have charitable goals that you want to meet with your plan, maybe long-term care insurance is the right choice. Another reason would be if you prefer predictable insurance premiums over potentially large healthcare expenses in the future that we don’t know what those will be. Another reason would be if you have concerns about becoming financially dependent on family members in your later years. So, again, this is where, you know, building your team and building your plan, as Danny discussed, is still very important. So, great question. Our next question is, I purchased a long-term care policy years ago. Will it still be enough to cover my needs? This is a very common question, and the answer is maybe, but it’s worth reviewing. That’s where a policy review with an adviser would be needed to answer that question accurately. Many of these long-term care policies were purchased 15, 20, or even 30 years ago where and they were very well designed at the time, but the costs have changed. The challenge is that the long-term care costs have increased significantly over the years, and not all of these policies have kept up with that pace of inflation. So, the key things we’d want to review are your daily or monthly benefit amount, whether the policy includes any inflation protection writers, maximum benefit period or a benefit pool, the elimination or waiting period of the policy, and then what types of care are covered such as home health care, assisted living, nursing home care. Another factor is that many older policies have features that are difficult or expensive to obtain today. Before making any changes, it’s again important to understand exactly what the benefits are of your policy and to you know we it’s part of this review. It’s not to determine whether the policy is good or bad. It’s rather to answer the more important question. If I had a need tomorrow, how much of this cost would be covered by my policy and would there be remaining costs that I need to absorb or plan for? So, a policy review can help you determine whether your existing coverage is likely to meet those needs or whether there are coverage gaps, whether the current policy is still an effective part of your long-term strategy. Danny, do you want to take the next one? Sure. And that’s great advice, Jeff. Yeah, I’d like to tackle this one. So, I’m only 45. When should I begin the planning process for long-term care? The answer is, earlier than most people think, I’d say. Assuming those you’re planning for or that you are in good health. It looks different in your 40s and 50s than in your 60s and 70s. You when health issues are just simply more prevalent in your 30s, 40s and 50s. Planning is about building that capacity we talked about building the team, setting savings and investing goals and al also investing in your health. You know coming up through in your 50s and 60s. So, what’s next for you? You know planning should shift focus to be you positioning the resources that you’ll need. Not just for enjoying retirement which we you know it is great to spend a lot of time focused on that but we also need to make sure to include care for what comes after that. And by the way those things can happen you know at the same time too. Sometimes they happen unexpectedly and out of order. You know, we make these grand plans to retire at age 65, but you know, whether it’s us or an older parent or a spouse needs care right now. And so we do see that sometimes people need to retire sooner. So, having that plan, funding it early, even in your 40s is really important. And if I might you know, there’s one more question. So, what’s the most important thing I can do right now? Yeah, and the answer I guess would be to have a conversation. Have a conversation with your family about what’s important. It’s a great dinner table or, you know, walk after dinner discussion. But also with an adviser about how care fits into your broader financial plan. You know, the question to ask yourself is if something happened to me tomorrow, whether it’s a major health event or the worst case scenario, would the people I love know what matters to me? And I think that creates really the financial planning foundation for every decision that should follow. Jeff, I think that’s all the time we have for questions right now. But if you’re watching this and if your specific question wasn’t answered, please add that to the survey that will pop up after the webinar ends. Thank you all for joining us today. Thanks again. Have a great day. If you enjoyed this webinar, visit savantwealth.com/guides and download our complimentary guide books, checklists, and other useful financial resources.