Long-term Care: The Retirement Wildcard

The end of the year is always a good time to take stock of your finances and make sure your savings and investments align with your long- and short-term goals. Even when you’ve been a diligent saver and invested wisely, the wildcard for nearly everyone is how to finance long-term care.

It’s impossible to know whether you’ll need minimal care and be able to age at home or if you’ll need hands-on care in a nursing home. Given the conditions in many nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people have lost their appetite for long-term care in institutional settings. If you’re over age 50, it’s worth considering what you may need for living expenses, exploring the funding options, and factoring them into your 2022 financial plan and beyond. After all, it’s always a nagging worry that no matter how well you save, long-term care could wipe out your resources. And quickly.

The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has been looking at aging care in a three-part series of briefs on the topic. In the first two, CRR explored (https://bit.ly/31y3zqL) how likely it would be that retirees would need support and the intensity and duration of that support and the second (https://bit.ly/3GOVnCD) looked at what’s available in terms of caregivers and financial resources. The briefs may bring both comfort and alarm.

This information is from the December 2021 Senior Real Estate Specialists (SRES) Newsletter:

December 2021_SRES Newsletter_12-1-2021_US

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