Long Term Care Insurance
There may come a day when you can no longer take care of yourself and will require long term care. It’s not something any person really wants to think about because it can be a frightening prospect. That’s not even taking the costs into consideration because it’s expensive and can eat away at your assets fast.
The current average annual cost of a nursing home stay is over $70,000, the cost for assisted living is about half that, and like regular healthcare, it’s rising at a faster rate than inflation. And don’t think that you can just rely on Medicare or Medicaid either because even if your lucky at the most they might cover about 50% of the cost and if you’ve read some of my previous articles then you know by now that those two programs aren’t exactly financially stable.
When planning for your retirement nowadays, you need to consider long term care insurance. While most people will have health insurance not all of them will purchase long term care insurance. It’s something you need to think about sooner rather than later because the older you get, the more expensive the premiums will become.
A healthy individual in their 50’s can expect to pay somewhere between $2,000-$3,000 a year in premiums with prices almost doubling every decade after that. Also keep in mind that costs can vary from state to state since insurance isn’t regulated at the federal level.
Even though the insurance isn’t exactly cheap, it’s a lot less than if you had to pay for long term care out of your own pocket. Also with the huge influx of baby boomers about to hit retirement age, who knows what that will due to the future cost of long term care.
