When should I buy long-term care insurance?
It's usually in your late forties, early fifties. But it could be any time; when you first have an experience with a relative, family member or a friend who has a long term care problem. Someone will tell you one day, for sure, "Oh my goodness, my father, or my mother or my brother is in a long term care facility, or in an assisted living facility and we're paying eight thousand a month. We thought we were going to inherit the house, but guess what? We had to sell the house to pay the costs of this long term care. My mother who is still in good health, she thought that all this money that they had saved over a lifetime was going to be there for her retirement as well. Now we're decimating the retirement and we maybe as the children are going to have to start taking care of our mom's expenses because the money is going to be dissipated overtime." It's an emotional purchase for the purchase of long term care insurance. The day that you realize someone is really burden with the cost of long term care is a day that you start thinking about it. Young people never think about it because they don't have very man friends who need long term care. As you get older, it starts becoming more prevalent and you start being nervous that you don't have that type of insurance. I would say that the average time for most of my clients buying long term insurance is about fifty-two, fifty-four, fifty-five. I do sell long term care insurance even to people in their seventies or eighties, but the cost is unbelievable. And also, people are not necessarily in good health and can't qualify for it. Several months ago I was at a client's house- the husband and wife both wanted long term care insurance. And I noticed that the husband didn't talk very much. The wife was very aphetic that they buy long term care insurance. I was amazed that this policy on the husband was not approved though, by the insurance company, and when I found out why- it was because the person had a very severe memory problem. And when he was interviewed by the people on the telephone, he couldn't remember anything. And I realized afterwards that the fact was that his wife was aware that sooner or later her husband was going to either be in a facility of some sort or she's going to have to hire around the clock nursing.
