I want to talk to you about longterm care for an elderly parent. To begin with, some of you know me, some of you do not. My name is Gerald Jones. I’m the Founder of Fed Advisors, Inc. We specialize in helping federal employees plan for their retirement and create an estate plan to last over multiple generations. So when we’re working with a family and we’re working with a household, we will do things like help you maximize your employer benefits. We’ll help put together your estate plan. We’ll go over different insurances like life insurance, long term care insurance, your health insurance. We’ll make sure that you have enough income for you to retire on so it will help last you for the rest of your life. We will also look at your retirement income timeline because, when you retire, your income is going to change several times within the first 10 years after you retire, so we will look at that timeline to see exactly, at what age can you expect for your income to change.
We’ll also go over your investments to make sure they’re performing and doing the things that you want them to do. And we also look at your taxes. We help tax plan, make sure that you pay less in taxes, take advantage of all the tax credits, and assist with Roth IRA conversions. And by the way, the taxes will change in 2026, because we have a sunset from our previous administration, and you can expect for tax rates to go up.
Now, with that being said, I’m going to talk to you about longterm care planning. I’m going to talk to you about longterm care for an elderly parent. So a lot of you are planning to retire or you have retired, and in a lot of cases, you’re taking care of an elderly parent, and you have to factor that in to your overall financial plan.
Well, for one, if you’re watching this, you’re someone that cares about your parents. So with that being said, there’s an emotional connection where, in the event your parent needs care, you’re going to emotionally do whatever you need to do to make sure that parent’s taken care of. And what I’m here to tell you is, you want to have that planned and you want to have things done proactively so we’re not depleting our savings accounts, we’re not depleting our 401Ks and our IRAs, we’re not reaching out to different friends and family members to see if they can come in and step in and help out. So how this works, if you’re working and you’re planning to retire, you are just getting all of your affairs together over the last 20, 30, 40 years of your life. Kids, grandkids, assets, insurance policies, you name it, you’re just getting everything taken care of.
When you retire, you’re just transitioning to your second portion of your journey. A lot of retirees will do things such as spend more time with their grandkids. A lot of folks that are accustomed to working with an employer, they’ll pick up a small business. So they’ll start working for themselves, whether that’s maybe real estate or going into working with the family business or different things just to stay active.Just because you’re retired, doesn’t mean you want to sit around and not do anything. You’re going to go do something else. So you most likely will pick up something else to do. You may spend more time with the grandkids. You may travel domestically. So you may go buy a motor home, travel around the U.S.
I have one client that bought a motorcycle. He traveled around the United States through the Northern States, came around to Washington D.C. down to Atlanta. Then came through the Southern States back here to California. You may want to travel domestically or internationally. You’re going to want to do something, so whatever that is, while you are going across this journey that you’re having and you’re living your life, you may have to take care of an elderly parent and that’s fine. So you have to plan for this life changing event. And so the reason why I’m bringing this up is because you don’t want to wait till the last moment. So if you’re out and about living your life, the issue is that you don’t want to have to be inconvenienced where you have to stop your day-to-day to come in and take care of an elderly parent. Now, if you want to come in and take care of an elderly parent, that’s completely fine. There’s no problem with this.
But you may want to have someone come in for half a day, all day, every other day, whichever the case may be. So here’s a few things that you could take with you as you’re planning for this life changing event. One thing that you can do is check to see if they do have longterm insurance. If they do not, they can apply for Longterm care insurance which underwritten through an insurance company. You may be approved or you may be declined, since it’s based on your medical history. If you are approved, you may not need to take the whole monthly benefit amount. So let me give you an example. Let’s say you apply for a longterm care insurance policy and they’re going to give you $4,000 a month for care, for in-home care. Because, ideally, we want to keep elderly parents, even yourself, we want to keep in the home around their normal surroundings.
So let’s say you get a policy for $4,000 a month. You may not need to pay for a policy that’s $4,000 a month. You may only need $1,000 a month. You may have a friend or a family member or a neighbor that would want to come in and help provide care. This goes to making sure that you’re communicating with your loved ones and putting your estate planning team together. So you can use a longterm care insurance policy. You can use friends, family, a neighbor or yourself. You can use money that you have saved in the bank or from your investments or IRAs, or you can use a combination of all three. But what I do not want you to do is wait until the last minute and just start depleting out assets, having to stop your lifestyle, having to travel across multiple states, occurring additional expenses and things of that nature.
We don’t want you to have that inconvenience so we want you to plan now.
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