The 3rd Decade Podcast

Long-Term Care Planning: Is It For Me?

3rd Decade Season 2 Episode 58

In this Episode, Nikita welcomes Co-founder & CEO of Waterlily, Lily Vittayarukskul, on to discuss the need for Long-Term Care Planning. Lily's professional path was redirected after she experienced first-hand the financial and familial stress that long-term care costs put on her family when her family member became ill. In this episode, they discuss what average costs are for care, what types of care may be needed in old age, why it matters, and ways to plan for its potential financial impact.

Lily's company uses AI to help analyze your own likelihood for needing care, and which type of insurance policy may be most suitable for you. 


Resources:

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Third Decade Podcast, where we believe every young adult deserves the confidence to take control of their financial future. Whether you're just getting started or you're well on your way towards financial independence, we're here to give you the tools and guidance you need to build a life that aligns with your dreams. Let's turn financial uncertainty into opportunity. Together.

SPEAKER_01:

Hi, Third Decade community. I'm your host, Nikita Wolf. And today I am joined by Lily Vitaya Rookschool, the co-founder and CEO of Water Lily. Thanks so much for joining me today, Lily.

SPEAKER_02:

It's wonderful to be here.

SPEAKER_01:

I would love it if you would take a moment just to give a little bit of your own professional background, what brought you here and what Water Lily does.

SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. So in a prior career, I was actually very fascinated by aerospace engineering, was doing some work with like NASA 12 to 16, ultimately interned at JPL, the robotic side of NASA, and was on a fast track directory there. Also went to college early, again, just really ambitious on that topic. But when I was 16, my aunt was diagnosed with terminal stage colon cancer. And what came with that was post chemotherapy. She was so incredibly frail that we had to navigate two and a half years of her daily long-term care needs, such as bathing, dressing, eating, getting in and out of bed, needs that we might be already familiar with when we think of our grandparents or about our aging parents, and that's something we're worried about. So it wiped us out financially, and it really tore my family apart to navigate this topic without any plan in place. So there's an entire extended side of our family that we haven't spoken to in over a decade since this has happened, and that is what that was the impetus for Water Lily, which is how can we get ahead of that devastation, not only financially, but also in our family legacy and our family relationships by using AI to predict what that trajectory looks like and getting ahead of those decisions.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Wow. I'm so sorry you had to experience that, but I think it really goes to show that all of us are susceptible to the unexpected consequences uh nature of long-term care needs and in some ways i think people think oftentimes uh just like the cost of it but they might not think about like if they need to be the care taker there's not just like potential costs for needing to hire someone in if you can't work your job and you have to be there for a family member there's a loss in your income which is you know that has long-term impacts too on just your career um and and that sort of thing so Thanks for sharing some of that story and the history of what brought you to where you are today. So what does Waterlily focus on doing now to address that issue?

SPEAKER_02:

That's a really fantastic question. So essentially what we built out is AI that predicts for any individual over the age of 40. So this might be really relevant when our audience wants to think about planning for their parents or their parents are in the thick of planning for their grandparents. Essentially, we have a three-minute intake form where we ask basic socio-demographic information, medical information, and financial information, and we look at our data that we pulled from over half a billion data points of families that we've been following for nearly 30 years. And we built AI that looks at the lookalike families to yours based on that intake form to tell you what is the likelihood of having that long-term care need, when it'll onset, what is that duration of time and that family burden and the associated costs with that event.

SPEAKER_01:

That is super interesting. And really, I'd say creative use of AI. So that's amazing. that you kind of dreamt up this thing and it's making like a real world wonderful impact to people in their personal lives now. I know one of the stats is that something like 70% of people over the age of 65 are going to need long-term care at some point. Would you say that that's about right?

SPEAKER_02:

So with the recent HSS report that came out in 2022, there's actually two statistics that are thrown around a lot. There is that 70% of individuals where it's a real statistic of who will have some form of long-term care need, but that usually refers to just needing help with like even one of those activities I just mentioned, like maybe help with just bathing, but not everything else. And you might pass quickly afterwards. But the statistic that I think is more relevant is actually from HSS 2020, uh, 2022, which is 56% of individuals over the age of 65 are going to have at least two activities of, of daily living, which I mentioned as like bathing, dressing, eating, toiling, transferring, getting in and out of bed. So you'll need help with at least two of those because that represents a serious form of long-term care need where it's not as simple as just, you know, getting by and it's a little bit harder, but that's where you actually do need help from family members. That's where you might need help from, uh, uh, care professionals and that costs money. There's There's the cost and there's the cost. There's either the cost on the children or the audience in this case and their time and time away from their career or the cost of paying out of pocket. Who's going to pay for that? Is it going to be our audience because their parents didn't save anything for this event or is it going to be the parents themselves which could affect that generational wealth transfer as well if this isn't planned appropriately?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I was even talking to a family friend earlier this week while discussing the upcoming recording of this podcast. And they were saying that they went through this with their own mother who's now passed away and that they, you know, while they were able to be there and be the caretaker, there's a sense of dignity, I think, for some parents not necessarily wanting their children to have to be the one that bathes them. And that being something to plan for ahead of time so that you can outsource that and not have that burden hit the family, even if financially they could afford it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And what's been so fascinating for us through the system is when we make that prediction of how family members may step in, we first ask that client, like, do you, we ask that person walking through, do you want to age at the home or do you want to go into facility-based care? And if you want to age at the home, which over 90% of individuals in our system do want to do that. And I think that's pretty representative of the US pop the population as well. They want to be comfortable at home. Once they start needing help and growing older and more frail, then from there, we actually predict how much would the spouse step in by default, how much would the children and other family members. And so we predict the weekly commitment that is expected based on lookalike families that already went through this. And it's sparking the most fascinating conversations for folks where they might say, wait, logistically, how am I supposed to do that? I'm halfway across the country from my parents. Am I expected to then move in? And the truth is, yes, kids actually do feel that pressure and that guilt to go and move closer to their parents when you don't have this conversation and you go and take on that care because your parents want you to do that. I think if they're afraid in the state, they're frail, sometimes they want to rely on the children the most, their spouse the most, whether or not they actually can take that on. And so having that conversation throughout actively allows for more, I think, psychological resilience on this topic to realize I'm okay with a professional taking this on because I don't like the trade-off of my kids taking it on or my spouse who might also be frail to take this on.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, with this being something that I think all of us know we're going to get old and at some point less capable of doing things on our own, knowing that still, it seems like this is such an overlooked part of financial well-being. Why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_02:

It is... I believe the American cultural fear of death, I think. I think in many other cultures, there's a celebration of death. In U.S. culture in particular, there is a fear of mortality. I think that's why our healthcare system is set up so that automatically, if you don't share your preferences ahead of time, they're going to try to keep you alive for as long as possible, not necessarily as healthy as possible, just as long as we've prolonged your life. And so you see this not only in the healthcare system, you see that in everyday social settings as well and in marketing, which is we try to show the best version of ourselves. What does that look like? That's the most useful, youthful. That is like the richest. That is things that are the opposite of being vulnerable, really. and really about like status and just looking strong all the time. And so I think there is a huge gap in like American culture where we actually focus on how do we build out more of these meaningful conversations such as this one here, where we give the space to talk about something that's really vulnerable, which is, I'm really afraid of passing. I'm really afraid of relying on my family members if I can't financially afford it or if, because I didn't think about it ahead of time. So I think we're, in a new generation where we have more information than we ever have. And I think more originality of thought of just like, you know, I What is my personal identity? What are my personal values? What do I care about? Do I understand my parents? Can I bring that dialogue to them? And so I think that this is a fantastic opportunity to not really feel, you could feel scared. I think that's if you're reactive about it, or you could feel really empowered to realize this is a topic. This is how people normally feel about it. Here's a baseline. How do we, like, I want to maybe change that baseline because that would be meaningful to me.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and just to know that there's a tool that you can use to help make this less burdensome for you down the road. So I would like if we could maybe pivot and talk about just some of the basic definitions of long-term care, like what different forms that can take. I know you already mentioned a lot of that being based around like how much assistance you need with daily living, illness, disability, and all of that, but what are the types of long-term care needed?

SPEAKER_02:

So, I love that question because when you actually talk to most older individuals and just without our system today, many people get overwhelmed with the topic of long-term care. They think it's really complex. There's a nursing home sometimes, there's aging at home, there's maybe people stuff, and there's all these different variables. And what we've done in the system is we've flattened that and we linearized it where we break up long-term care into three basic care phases, three progressing care phases, which we call early care, moderate care, and long-term care. care and full care and essentially with early care that refers to needing help with one to two of those activities of daily living which income like activities daily living are the definition of you know long-term care events where as I mentioned it's bathing dressing eating transferring toileting getting in and out of bed and incontinence like you can't use the bathroom so the way you intuitively think about these activities is you're able to do this, we take it for granted, and it allows us to stay independent. But when you have a long-term care event, you start to become dependent because you can't do some of these fundamental activities that keep you independent. And so we break up those six activities into sort of three phases of like needing help with one to two of them for how long? Then you kind of graduate to needing help with three to four of them because usually you just have growing needs as you become more frail, you have more chronic conditions, et cetera. And the third phase of care, which is five to six, you need help with all those activities, which most folks know as nursing home level care. So we break that into three basic care phases and we associate, you know, what is a care resource that you could use in each of those three care phases that best meet your need of having these needing help with either one to two or three to four or five to six. So we automatically help you make a sort of give you two options per each care phase of like, okay, what is the care resource you want to use? Do you want to age at the home with care professionals or do you want to go into independent living again for this particular phase? And we show you the cost breakdown. So that way, folks that go through our system, they're like, okay, here's my likelihood. Here's my age in which I'll start losing my independence. And here's that progression into three care phases. But here's where I want to be, which has care resources. And oh, I guess that has that cost associated with it. So that's how we think about that long-term care event logistically, as well as financially.

SPEAKER_01:

It's really interesting. I haven't necessarily thought about the progression of like, maybe needing to ramp up from one to the next, which I guess, just because I haven't had to live it yet. But I am familiar with income in home care, assisted living, or I guess you said independent living, I think assisted living would be a little bit above that, right?

SPEAKER_02:

That is correct.

SPEAKER_01:

And then it would go to like adult daycare nursing homes that about the correct sequence.

SPEAKER_02:

So with adult daycare that's more focused on if someone is at the home and we have like a caregiver let's just say it's someone in our audience that is like taking care of like mom or dad or their grandparents in some way and they're just becoming so exhausted and they're like I can't like I can't do this like in the home like I need some respite and so that's where you have adult daycare where you can actually you know help it's it help watch you know your loved one in this kind of like day facility that would manage all their care needs while you kind of take the respite that you're looking for. So that's Yeah, so that's adult daycare, but you have it perfectly right, where if you wanted to go in a non-home environment, then usually the progression of what we call facility-based care, again, on those three care phases is independent living, assisted living, and what we call full care facility. So that is usually nursing home level care, but sometimes some other facilities can kind of step up to that kind of intensity of care need if that needs to happen.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, thanks for kind of explaining those differences. So What would be an example of something that people might think is long-term care, but it's not long-term care, like wouldn't count under the umbrella of long-term care planning?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, I think that's actually a really fantastic question. I think, for example, when someone's a lot older, they're, you know, you know over 65 for example like we're thinking of our parents in this case or our grandparents and um you know they're on medicare and uh let's just say they have a um elective surgery like they get done and and uh whether just some elective surgery that they don't like actually like need to do and then you know they might not now go home and they might have gotten like a full uh kind of sort of they decided, I want to proactively get a full total knee replacement in some way, for example. And when you do that, you're going to need help with some of these activities of daily living for a very short amount of time, for either several weeks or a short few months. And that doesn't represent a true long-term care event. You do lose your independence. But what we're talking about is more chronic underlying conditions, whether you're just so incredibly frail that every single day you just need help with it, or you have chronic medical conditions that also affect your ability to be physically healthy enough to actually do those activities over a prolonged period of time. So a lot of people mistake long-term care as, oh, if you need help with any of these activities, that's a long-term care event. Long-term care usually refers to a much more chronic set of care needs that happen over the span of several months into several years.

SPEAKER_01:

So would something more on the short-term end be covered under more like a short-term disability policy instead of like a long-term care insurance policy?

SPEAKER_02:

That's a really great point. Anything that's short-term, I guess it depends on... Well, I guess when it comes to short-term care, we think of if someone... we think that you naturally immediately talked about, well, what's the coverage for that? There sometimes may or may not actually be coverage. For example, someone like fell down, broke their hip and essentially got surgery for that. And they went into like a skilled nursing facility to kind of get supervised to make sure they're stable again. Medicare could cover up to 100 days of that sort of, like, skilled care. And again, there's, like, a whole progression of, like, you need to be at the hospital a certain amount of time and then go into that skilled nursing facility, and then they might support at the home under, you know, certain, like, physician rules. But Outside of that, you know, 100 days, 100 qualified days, the rest of that cost is on your own in some ways. So unless you have a long-term care insurance policy, now if you're still, you know, have chronic needs that surpass 100 days that go more into like a year or two years, that's either out of pocket or that's taken on by a long-term care insurance policy. I think when it comes to disability, again, that's not where I'm really the expert. I'm more of an expert in like the long-term care space. That's more focused on folks that get a disability either through like while they're still employed usually. Yeah. So I'll kind of just pause there if that

SPEAKER_01:

is helpful. Totally. Yeah. Sorry for kind of throwing an outside of your realm question.

SPEAKER_02:

It was such a good question. I'm just like, oh, how do people misinterpret it? And, you know, if you go like past that time, like, you know, what's covered? It's out of out-of-pocket or it's, you know, if you own a long-term care insurance policy, but if you pay out-of-pocket, I'll just throw the statistic out there, which is on average a long-term care event, which again, happens in a serious way to 56% of individuals over the age of 65, if you look at this statistically, what we see is every single household is going to go through a serious form of long-term care event, whether they're prepared or not prepared for that. And then when it happens, it costs quarter of a million dollars out of pocket on average for a single individual, not even for both parents. So it really is one of the leading reasons why many retired individuals bankrupt themselves and then have to rely on their children or have to go on medicaid as the uh safety net or final resort which no one really wants to do that

SPEAKER_01:

yeah i mean that can wipe out the majority of someone's retirement portfolio depending on where they're living um or their financial circumstances that's an immense amount of money um

SPEAKER_02:

and that's just today's cost not taking into account um how there's health care inflation that you need to add on top of that. So what we see with CMS is actuarial tables. If you want to make that projection of a quarter of a million dollars because you don't need care today, if that's the average, you have to compound then 5.4% every single year up until your predicted care age date. So for someone who's in their 20s or 30s, that represents you know, close to three to four million dollars in retirement that they're going to have to spend on long term care if you don't consider an insurance policy or if you don't do that sort of financial planning ahead of time, even right now about, you know, OK, what assets do I want to, you know, allow to grow and not touch? Because if anything were to happen to me, I wanted to come out of this bucket of money.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Now, what age is like the appropriate time frame to start looking into instating one of these policies?

SPEAKER_02:

So what's actually really fascinating is a lot of, so the main policy that is used to actually cover a long-term care event is called long-term care insurance. There's different types right now, but the most popular type is a hybrid policy that is a combination of a permanent life insurance policy in addition to a pool of money for long-term care or an additional pool of money. And so with younger individuals, we do see that individuals in their 30s are purchasing a long-term care insurance policy through their employer. So their employer might have a really small policy that they could purchase into pretty easily, but the historical way in which the conversation was done, these products were offered was usually through a financial professional, such as a wealth advisor or financial advisor. So something that our audience's parents or grandparents may actually have. And so and so that's where the way you pay for it looks a little bit different. But usually the age in which most people today are looking into, you know, how do I cover for my future long term care is when they're on the precipice of retiring or they just retired. So folks in their 60s are doing this. And even then, the leverage that you have there when you wait until you're 60 is so much lower than if you did it in your 50s is so much lower than you did it in your 40s.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I think maybe something important to call out too, is this is going to vary depending on the state you live in as well. So when we're talking averages, I'm guessing that's national averages, right?

UNKNOWN:

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01:

There is a tool called Genworth's Cost of Care Survey that I'll make sure to link in our show notes. People can go on there and actually look by location what year they would anticipate the need. So it kind of does some inflation adjustments as well as the type of care. It kind of gives you some ballparks there as well. So I think that can be a useful tool.

SPEAKER_02:

Generally, there's a fantastic zip code calculator to what you just shared. I also share in the Waterloo system, when you fill out the intake form and we predict what your future cost is, we take into account your localized cost. So we actually use a similar calculator as well to give you that comprehensive set of factors that affect most likely what your cost is going to look like in the future. So I think that that's a fantastic resource to get started.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, thank you. So could we talk maybe about some misconceptions around long-term care? What are some common ones that you see in your work?

SPEAKER_02:

Easily, the number one misconception is, oh, Medicare is going to pay for this. When I turn 65, I don't have to worry about this because I'm going to go on Medicare or have Medicare Advantage, and that's going to pay for all of my health care needs. Long-term care is not covered by that need. And then there's also folks that say, well, long-term care is so expensive in the US. I'm thinking about moving outside of the country by the time I retire, and I want to go to Brazil instead, or I want to go to France. Even in socialized health care systems, where majority of developed countries have a socialized health care system, long-term care still sits outside of that. So it's still an out-of-pocket cost, unless you want that Medicaid equivalent of care there, which, again, no one is looking for. And the last misconception I'll share here is a lot of people say, well, oh, I could just self-fund for this event, which is why I love this podcast, because everyone says, I could just self-fund it. What you mean is you want all of your assets to be at risk. You're not going to do any planning, but if you do planning ahead of time, that's where you can actually cover this future$1 million cost,$2 million cost, actually just a fraction of like, you know, with$100,000 instead, or like$50,000, depending on how early you start and allow that money to be leveraged over time.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Now, how do we see the premiums for these policies differ from male to female? And roughly, what would you estimate? Let's start with a 55-year-old person, or if you have a different number you'd like to start with, what could someone expect to pay for one of these policies annually?

SPEAKER_02:

So it depends on what type of policy you'd like to have. So for a, I'll just say for a 55 year old male versus 55 year old female, the female is going to just be more expensive or going to have like more constrained, you know, benefits because statistically women are more inclined to have a long-term care event than men. We could talk about that. That's, that's a whole kind of situation of expectations that are put on, you know, women on just like the fact that they take care of their husbands and, you know, the fact that they're, also on average living longer, but not necessarily healthier because of factors. But so in terms of premiums, usually it's going to be more expensive for a 55 year old female compared to a 55 year old male. However, that's where, you know, things get interesting where depending on which carrier you're looking at, the premiums could be drastically different from one person for that same person. If they were to look at carrier A or carrier B who may have the same type of product, like a traditional long-term care insurance product. Now there's two main types of products that I'll just mention here that are the most popular to consider paying for long-term care. One is a traditional long-term care insurance policy, which is monthly premiums up until of time in which you need that care. And the other one, so most people know that as use it or lose it sort of policy. And there's a new type of policy that came out that is called the hybrid policy, like I mentioned, where there is a permanent life insurance benefit and usually an additional pool of benefit for long-term care. So when you have a long-term care event, you first start tapping into that death benefit pool first. And if you run out of that, then you also then start tapping into that additional pool of benefits for long-term care. But if you were to never have a long-term care event you still have that death benefit so most people know that as a not a use it or lose it sort of um policy the price difference between traditional policy versus a hybrid policy is what i roughly see is, and this is actually a hard question for me to answer in terms of what the monthly premiums is going to look like, because that affects what your coverage is going to look like. So I usually see that for an annual premium of like two to three K that may cover on average, like roughly 20 to 30% of someone's future long-term care needs. But again, there's a lot of caveats there that we simplify in our system. And the second one is around hybrid policies. Usually the way those are sold is like 100k sort of lump sum either you pay 100k you know right now or you pay 10k over 10 years and that would also roughly cover um i think sometimes the 20 to 30 of your future need if not higher than that um because and it depends on that carry because what we do in particular is we actually allow you to upload any product from any carrier, any type of product that I just mentioned or other types. And in under a minute, we actually use AI to automatically read through that document in real time and extract all the key policy terms that tells us how you're paying into it, how you're paying out. And we line that up to that predicted care scenario and your preferences that you planned prior. And so then instead of hypothetical tables of hypothetically how much it'll pay out or the hypothetical max, which you may not hit, realistically, we tell you Actually, based on your scenario, here's how much you're putting in, and here's how much it's most likely going to pay out for you under your trajectory.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, again, that is such an interesting use of artificial intelligence. So very cool business idea that you have come up with and implemented. I know a couple other options that are available for people to use if they wanted to as a form of covering these costs would be a health savings account, just saving and investing with long-term care in mind. And obviously we've stated some of those numbers are, they are significant if you want to take that risk on yourself and just invest a lot to help cover the possibility of that. You can do that. Another thing which we're not a huge fan of with our audience at Third Decade, but using annuities, we're a little more hesitant on that, but essentially paying a lump sum up front that guarantees you a benefit for life that can help with some of the cost of that as well. Do you have anything else you would add to that list?

SPEAKER_02:

I would say you could actually model those two in our system to be very concrete about what the numbers are actually going to look like. So for the health savings account, you can add that in. One is you could actually use that sort of tax advantage accounts. And I love that's like a triple tax advantage account. You can actually use that to pay for premiums instead of using your standard salary and like the standard tax deductions to pay for a premium for a long term care insurance policy. Or you could use a health savings account to just pay for the expenses themselves. Usually you'll find is when you find the right insurance policy, it is dramatically better. We usually see anywhere between a 4 to 7x efficiency of vehicle usage if you consider the right policy, again, which you can help analyze our system. And the second one around annuities, we see the ROI be usually dramatically lower than self-funding, dramatically lower than insurance. So to your point of you don't like you know recommending that or even like you know offering that as like a really good option is because it's true the math oftentimes doesn't work out nicely um where um and it's more of like someone that just wants that peace of mind of like guaranteed income that's more of the benefit of that sort of feature

SPEAKER_01:

yeah so one of the things that we might recommend in you know long-term care planning and maybe when to start it as well would be to assess your own family health history i know that helps maybe in some ways determine your likelihood of needing care. Maybe not perfectly, but if you know that everyone in your family has developed a chronic disease by the time they were 16, that's probably a good indicator that that might be something that you're impacted by as well. What are some other key planning steps you might recommend for somebody?

SPEAKER_02:

Honestly, The main thing I'll share, and I'll share this because I think it's helpful to this audience, what we've seen to be predictive of someone's future long-term care needs, the intensity, how family members step in. We ask questions like socio-demographic questions because those are highly predictive of your future trajectory, your financial means as well. So your net worth, your annual income, those are predictive factors. In addition to largely to what you talked about, your mental health as well as your physical health and getting ahead of that. And so, and then what we ask is like, that adds 15% higher accuracy on top of like, you know, what we already have is questions around family history, questions around your education, you know, level as well. So those are some variables that you would take into account, but that's hard to understand. Well, how does that affect my risk in some way? Unless you ran it through our system, since we're a first mover in this space to kind of grab all those, make a prediction on your care needs. And if you joined our waitlist today, we do take people off our waitlist free of charge because right now our system is being used very successfully with financial professionals and other care professionals, but we really want to understand how do we build really for that consumer and make it easy for them to understand. And so we do take off people off the wait list when they're a good fit and just run the system with them free of charge. So I want to offer that just as a resource.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's amazing. I'll again, make sure to include that in our show notes. Do you have anything you wanted to cover before i uh anything else to add i guess before we wrap up this episode i

SPEAKER_02:

i think just the final um message i want to share with water lily is you know we've we've raised a lot of money on this topic we raised nearly 10 million dollars actually on our venture to act to make long-term care more accessible to the average american just because we see such low usage of of the the topic and of existing like products and as a result A lot of folks do nothing on this topic. They rely on Medicaid. Medicaid is fundamentally not set up to take the dependent demand that we're expecting from just the events going to happen to our grandparents, our parents, and to ourselves. And anyone that's relying on that as a form of planning we see a really worrying trend of just folks who assume they're going to go on Medicaid if they run out of money would actually end up on a wait list. So they're not going to have access to either the housing resources or they're going to go to additional re-hospitalization. So just for the sake of the individual that's listening to this, um, you know, show launching pairs of very real risk. We're spending a lot of money building up that educational aspect because we want to make sure that we could get ahead of very preventable outcomes that could happen to you, your financial situation, um, or your family relationships.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And I would say this is probably a newer need because, you know, our parents, parents did not live quite as long medicine was not where it is today whereas now like you were mentioning earlier it's like even if you're not in good care we're very good at prolonging people's lives or sorry in good health we're very good at prolonging people's lives and it might mean that today in 2025 when we're recording this people are in need of long-term care that where in the past that was not so much a thing. So this is very, it's new and what you're doing is innovative. I love it. Thank you for coming on and sharing with our audience and developing such an amazing tool.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01:

All right. Well, for our listeners, if you want to check our show notes, I'll, as always, include resources, what we've talked about, as well as some additional things. Really, if you have anything else you want to send my way, I'll include it in there as well. But thank you for sharing this and appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you for joining us on the Third Decade Podcast. Remember, building your financial future isn't just about dollars and cents. It's about empowering yourself to live the life you want. If today's episode gave you new insights or inspired you to take action, we'd love for you to share it with someone who could benefit. Together, we can turn financial uncertainty into opportunity. Until next time, let's continue to embrace the journey ahead and take control of your financial future.