How Likely Will Long-Term Care Prices Drop in the Future?
If you’ve been paying attention the last couple of years, you’ve noticed that prices for almost everything have gone up. In some cases, they have significantly increased. That includes long-term care. There are many different types of long-term care available, including home care, assisted living, and nursing home care. The type of elder care a person chooses will depend on numerous factors, including need, preference, and financial resources. Long-term care insurance companies can help you with the discussion of different types of care and their costs.
If you are an average middle-aged American adult, planning for retirement, you need to seriously consider the impact that long-term care could have on your life and your retirement future. That’s because as prices increase, as the cost of services skyrockets, it could have a significant and devastating impact on your ability to remain retired and get the elder care you prefer at some point in the future.
Why are costs rising so rapidly?
When it comes to long-term or any other type of elder care, it’s not just inflationary pressures affecting the market. It’s also supply and demand economics. Keep in mind that the baby boomer generation is now retiring, which means seniors are accounting for an increasing chunk of the overall demographic in this country.
Within the next 10 years, it is estimated that men and women aged 65 and over will account for 20 percent of the entire US population. Plus, when a person reaches their 70s, it is far more likely that they will make it to 80 and that they will require some type of long-term care in the future.
With these factors in place, it is affecting the cost of long-term care. Also, hiring reliable caregivers, visiting nurses, in-home nurses, and much more is becoming more problematic as fewer people are staying in this high-stress environment.
What can you do to protect yourself in the future?
The first thing you can do is consider long-term care insurance. If you have never added this as part of your retirement portfolio or plan, now is the time to do that. It is not an investment, but in some ways it can be viewed as such.
How can it be an investment? It will help to protect your assets in the future. You may not realize it now, but Medicaid is not going to cover long-term care except for nursing home care in most states and only after you have exhausted all your available savings and assets. Some of those assets can include the equity you have in your home or other real estate holdings.
By the time you reach 60, the cost of a long-term care insurance policy may become prohibitive. Depending on your family history and your personal history of health issues, you might not be eligible for coverage, so it’s best to begin looking into long-term care insurance sooner rather than later.
When you start a long-term care insurance policy in your late 40s, early 50s, or at the latest your mid-to-late 50s, you are helping to protect yourself from the inevitable rise of costs associated with this type of elder care. And don’t expect them to drop, either. That is simply not likely to happen at this point.
If you or a loved one are considering Long-Term Care Insurance Companies in Rancho Bernardo CA, please contact Steve Elliott at Capstone Insurance for an honest discussion about your future and your options. Call today at (858) 350-3161.
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