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Newer hybrid policies come with some interesting features to make them more appealing to consumers.
My 102-year-old friend has been struggling with the prospect of losing her two long-time caregivers. One of them is retiring and moving home to Africa. The other is marrying and moving to the West Coast.
My friend’s children, who are themselves past the age of retirement, are urging her to be more flexible about her care arrangements and consider some combination of in-home help and adult day care. But as her doctor says, “People at this age can be inflexible and have a strong sense of entitlement.” So it’s not easy — nor is it cheap. If you were hoping to reach this age, keep that in mind.
Why is it that more people die when the economy is on the upswing than when times are tougher?
The Center for Retirement Research took on the challenge of answering this question and came up with some really depressing conclusions, released today, that gave me, at least, pause about longevity and retirement planning.
At first blush, researchers proposed that the death rate rises when the economy is good because workers are working longer, sleeping less and eating lots of bad food, such as delivery pizza and burgers. But on closer analysis, people ages 65 and older accounted for 75 percent of the additional deaths. Women older than 65 alone represented 55 percent of the additional deaths.
If you haven’t considered long-term care during the latter stages of retirement, now’s the time, says Sean Kell, CEO of A Place for Mom, the country’s largest senior-living referral service.
Kell says his organization works daily with the families of people in need of care who scramble to find a solution and are shocked by its price tag. The cost for caring for someone with Alzheimer’s is especially high.
Dealing with the realization that they can’t afford the kind of care they want for their parents — or for themselves — is hard to do, Kell says, especially when people are forced to accept an option they feel isn’t suitable.
Buying individual long-term care insurance is getting more difficult — yet another retirement-planning handicap.
Prudential has joined the list of major insurers that have dropped their business. Besides Prudential, these include MetLife and Unum Group, which have eliminated some group policies. All say the cost of offering this retirement protection is too high.
Large long-term care insurers still in the business of selling insurance to individuals include Genworth and John Hancock.
In the meantime, the IRS has increased deductibility levels for long-term care insurance policies purchased in 2012. If you run a small business — even one that you or you and your spouse operate part time — long-term care can be a significant tax deduction.
The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act, or CLASS Act, has been dismissed, but that doesn’t diminish the need to consider long-term care as a part of retirement planning. CLASS was part of the health care reform law. It would have created a national voluntary long-term care insurance program, providing working adults with a
Olympic Gold Medalist Wendy Boglioli, who competed in the 1976 Montreal games and won a gold and a bronze in swimming, has been a spokesperson for long-term care insurer Genworth for the last seven years. At 57, the daughter of a 91-year-old mother, Boglioli speaks from experience. Last year when I talked to Boglioli, she
I talked to my Aunt Thummie today. She’s the last of my mother’s dozen brothers and sisters. At 91, she has outlived them all. Until recently, her retirement was an active one. She was able to drive and travel, then she had some setbacks and she’s moved into an assisted living facility. I called and
Retirement planning gets trickier when some of the things you may have counted on disappear. Class Act, the long-term care provision of the Affordable Care Act, was unceremoniously deep-sized last week because the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services said Class Act couldn’t be made to work under the provision that required it to
Home health care technology for people who are living in retirement ought to be a business opportunity that’s taking off like a rocket, but that apparently isn’t the case. Consultancy McKinsey & Co. analyzed what they saw as an enormous missed opportunity and offered a few insights that might be useful for those of us
