Beyond Retirement: Essential Conversations About Long-Term Care and Family Planning

Join us on the Wealth Wise Women Podcast with our special guest Tank, the French bulldog! In this eye-opening episode, we explore why traditional retirement planning at 65 no longer works with today's extended lifespans. Women especially face unique challenges as primary caregivers while needing to fund potentially 30+ years of retirement. This isn't just financial planning—it's the conversation your family needs now to prevent future stress and uncertainty. 

We break down why standardized approaches fail and how to structure the conversation your family needs now about aging with dignity. Whether you're approaching retirement or have aging parents, this episode provides practical guidance for initiating the conversation your family needs now before crisis forces difficult decisions. 

Learn how to approach "life's fourth quarter" with both financial security and emotional peace.

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Transcript

>> Wes Cuprill: 0:00

Hello, I'm certified financial planner Wes Cuprill and this is Wealthwise Women, the show that's rewriting the narrative that personal finance in investing are just for men and just for insiders. Because whether or not the rest of my industry realizes it, the future of wealth in the United States is female. And I aim to foster that future. One episode, at a time. So join me every week as I attempt to add humor and entertainment to the otherwise snooze feest that is personal finance, addressing various topics along the way from the lens of how they affect women in particular. And if you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe to our channel and our newsletter, the link to which you can find on the screen or. In the details below. That being said, let's get to this week's episode. Welcome back to the Wealthwise Women podcast. This week I have a bit of a special guest with me. you can see back here that is Tank. He is my 3 year old French bulldog. Normally he is sitting in a chair off camera over here, but today I thought I'd spoil him and let him sleep on my desk. So if you see some ears poking out over my shoulder, that would be Tank. But this week I want to have another sort of commentary conversation, this time again on the topic of long term care. But I don't want it to just be a conversation around long term care insurance. I think that's commonly what's thought of when we discuss ltc. However, I really just want to talk about care in general and I think it's a good conversation to accompany an episode a couple weeks ago with Corinne Amman around just the overall topic of care. Now to backtrack a little bit here and set the stage for the conversation. The concept of retirement is relatively very, very new in the history of the world, if you will. The idea of pensions is very ancient. You can go back to the Roman Empire when it comes to pensions and pensions for military service. But the idea of just the common civilian retiring is not an old concept. And typically people worked pretty much until they were either dead or they just couldn't really move anymore. And if that was the case, then they often went and just lived with family. They didn't have a pension or savings to live off of independently. In fact, Social Security isn't even 100 years old. It started in the 19, 30s and then after that the first retirement programs that came into place, at least the private retirement programs, were pensions. So it's an even newer concept. The idea of self funded retirements through the use of accounts like IRAs, 400 ones, etc. So if retirement is a new concept, then the concept of long term care is an even newer concept. So when we have all of these things that are new, you have to stand back and remember that trying to come up with standardized systems for these things, they don't exist yet. As much as human beings, we like to have the standardization of things to be able to say, okay, I know how to approach this because a whole bunch of people have done it before. I'm just going to fit into that model and approach it the same way and set it on autopilot. Yeah, we want that security in life. But when it comes to retirement planning and then care for the later stages of life, the more and more that I'm in this job, I realize that standardization doesn't exist yet. Yes, there is plenty written about retirement and more and more being written about long term care, but in terms?ard of how it fits for individual cases, we cannot sit back and just say, okay, yeah, let's put you into this model. Yeah, we'd love to just invest all of our money in one etf, have it grow exponentially and then never have to worry about money again. That doesn't exist. Everybody's life is unique and their circumstances are very unique and planning for that requires a much deeper conversation. I realize it sounds very self serving saying that as a financial advisor, you know, it's hey, go seek out the experts and sit down and create a customized plan for them. But I realize why that is necessary. If we just approach things with a cookie cutter viewpoint, it's m going to work for some, but for the vast majority of people, they are either not going to fully optimize their retirement or the retirement is just straight up going to fail. So we need to sit down and plan for the future. Going back to that conversation that I had with Corinne, planning for the later stages of life is crucially important, but it's not enough to just plan for yourself. It is a multi generational family wide conversation. And I'm bringing all of this up again because I was doing some reading recently where the topic of women being the caregivers came up again. And statistically speaking, the duty of caring for others often falls on women more than it does men. This includes childcare and then caring for aging parents. And that means not just time and stress for women. It also means financial strain, both in the form of opportunity cost and then also just actual cost. So it's time away from work Caring for children in aging parents, and then it's money spent on that care. But then on top of that, what about the care for yourself, ladies? You live longer than men on average. And with life expectancies continuously increasing, and I would imagine they're going to exponentially increase, we have to sit back and go, wait a second, we don't have a blueprint for this. Again, this is very, very new, the concept of living longer and longer and needing our money to last us longer. We're still using frameworks that were started in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. I mean, the retirement age has barely changed since Social Security first came out. If I'm not mistaken, I believe it started at 62. Now full retirement age is only 67. Meanwhile, life expectancies have gone from about 60 to now in the 70s. And I wouldn't be shocked over the next decade or so, average life expectancies reaching into the 80s. So none of these things match up. And yet, as human beings, we want patterns in life. We want to be able to have structure and goal lines that say, okay, this is what I need to aspire to. I need to reach 65. I can retire. Everything's going to be great. But what we haven't said is, okay, yeah, 65 can be retirement age. But did you account for the fact that now you're going to live 20 years longer than they did 20 years ago? So all of this comes down to the fact that we need to have conversations not just with ourselves, not just with our spouses, but with our overall family. Hey there. Before we get to the rest of the episode, I wanted to take a quick second to tell you about the Wealth Wise Women newsletter. I'll be the first to admit there is no shortage of financial publications out there. And there's definitely no shortage of, free information and financial advice that you can find on the Internet. But in my opinion, a lot of it misses the mark. It's either incredibly dry, or it's full of industry jargon, or it just simply isn't geared towards women. That's why I decided to start the Wealthwise Women newsletter to provide a source of information that is geared towards women. It's easy to understand without all of the industry jargon. And above all, it's what I like to call info ting. And best of all, it's free. To subscribe, simply go to mcwealthwisewomen m.substack.com and enter your email. That's it. Again, that is mcwealthwisewomen.substack.com. all right, let's get back to the episode. You have to sit down and say, okay, realistically, when can I retire? But also realistically, how long can I expect to live? And you can't just shortchange yourself. It might be easy to say, well, family history is bad, so maybe I'll only have 10 years. You need to look at it and say, there's a good likelihood I'll reach 90, 95 years old. So am I prepared then? Or rather, is my money prepared to last me for 30 years? And if you're sitting there thinking about it, let's say you started working at 22, you retired at 65. Your money then needs to last nearly as long as you spent working. So there's a huge math equation that comes into play and you have to be realistic about the numbers that fit into that equation. We can't just optimistically say 8% every year. Your money's going to grow and you can maintain your existing lifestyle and everything's going to be okay. But then also you need to sit down and go, all right, as I get older and older and care for myself is going to become more and more of a necessity because let's face it, statistically speaking, it's likely you will need long term care at some point. Who's going to provide that care? Are you going to move into an assisted living facility? Are you open to that? Have you explored what those options look like? I am not a fan of Medicaid asset protection for many, many reasons. But then, you know, how are you going to fund your care outside of Medicaid? Is family going to take care of you? Do they know that they're going to be taking care of you? Do they have an understanding of what that looks like? Are they prepared for the possibility that this care could extend beyond two, three, four years? Because while the average stay in a long term care facility is about two years, that's just the average people live longer than those two years. So you have to have these conversations. And more and more I'm realizing what I do is not just the number crunching. It is a very therapy based profession where I have to sit down and have conversations and really ask deep questions that get people thinking. And so the value is really in being a mediator for people in these situations. So I ask you, have you actually sat down and had a long conversation with your family? We call this the family meeting. It is an extensive meeting with all members of the family where it's not Just looking at the assets of mom and dad and then the kids and how that fits into the overall conversation. But it also discusses long term care, long term legacy planning, etc. We've developed the system system where we sit down and really dig deep and make sure that no stone has been left unturned. Because we know experiences where families can be negatively impacted by not having these conversations. It's not to say that we've had those issues. A lot of our system helps alleviate all of that. But we know that they exist because hope is not a strategy as much as human beings were wired to hope for the best and hope we never have to deal with crises or getting older or dying. But unfortunately, there are two certainties in life. Taxes and death. And knowing that and knowing getting older. As much as we would love to be spry and mentally aware and then die overnight in our sleep, the likelihood of that happening is very, very low. So instead, we have to be willing to have those tough conversations. And then it's my job as an advisor to say, okay, you may be willing to, but I'm going to be the one who really asks those tough questions and sits down and says, all right, you know, you may not want to discuss this or that, but we have to. So again, this is kind of a, commentary, off the cuff discussion, but it's a question that I want to raise to you. Have you thought truly about what the fourth quarter, as I call it, of life looks like? Have you really taken into account the consideration that, retirement being 65 has been the case since Social Security and retirement came into existence. But that doesn't take into account the fact that human beings are living longer and longer. So you need to be prepared to possibly work longer, or you need to be prepared to adjust your current saving strategies to save more money. And then on top of that, you need to say, okay, because I'm living longer. What does that look like in retirement? You may only be looking at the first 10 years and going, oh man, I can't wait to do all of these things in retirement that I didn't have the time to. Certainly. And we love the honeymoon period of retirement. We want people when they have the physical and mental capacity to do the things on their bucket list. But what happens when you slow down? Do you have a plan in place for that? Are you going to stay in your home? Are you going to move to another state? Are you going to move into a long term care facility? Or are you going to move in with children? What is the plan? Have you asked yourself that question? And then if you have asked yourself that question, have you put the pieces into place to properly answer it? If you haven't, it doesn't matter how old you are, now is the time to have that conversation. And if you're listening to this and you know that you have a parent who's aging who hasn't had this conversation, then you need to bring it up with them as well. Because what you don't want is stress for that person and yourself as they aging. This is a conversation for everybody, not just those who are entering life's scoreth quarter, but for those who know family members who are entering life's fourth quarter and may end up being the caregivers for that person. It is a very lengthy conversation. It is not something that only happens once and then you file a little away. It might require multiple different meanings and it might require a dynamic plan that changes over time as circumstances change because there's variables in place. Some people die before others, you know, one spouse before another. But what happens if the other spouse dies before the other? These are just things that come into play. And you know, it's often beneficial to have a sounding board, to have an ah, independent third party intermediary. So if this is something that concerns you, if it's something that you haven't thought of before, or if you have and you realize, okay, now is s the time to have the conversation, book a call with me. Just go to visitwithm.com. no pressure, this is not a sales pitch or anything like that. But if you have concerns, I would love to discuss how we might be able to help you. Whether it's your own long term care or a family member's long term care. Let's sit down and discuss your situation. Where are you now, what have you discussed and what are your goals for the future? Let's really untangle this mess in give you some clarity about the future. Not just financial but emotional clarity. Because we don't want you to be stress free when it comes to money. We want you to be stress free when it comes to your emotions as well. We want everybody to not only retire and age with financial grace, but emotional and just grace in their overall lives. So like I said, go to visitwith mc.com, book a day and time that works best for you or shoot me an email. WesApril moneyinclarity.com. that being said, I hope this was a helpful conversation for anybody who's got questions about overall aging and I'll see you next week in the next episode. Thanks.