Page 38 - Growing Old Without a Plan for Long Term Care is not for Sissies_Neat

20 Growing Old Without a Plan for Long Term Care is not for Sissies only or plan for a couple of years in an assisted living facility or nursing home or perhaps 24/7 home health care. If you use your income and/or assets to pay for your care, will your spouse still have enough for his/her living expenses? Speaking of your spouse, do you have enough to pay for care for both of you should you both need it? If you choose to self-fund, are your assets liquid and readily available or are they tied up in real estate or perhaps a farm or family business you want to pass on to your children? If your assets are relatively liquid such as in a 401k, will liq- uidating part or all of your assets to pay for your care reduce the income available for your spouse should s/he live much longer than you do? What will be the tax consequences of taking distributions from your tax qualifed retirement plan in larger amounts than you originally planned to? So, once again, what are signifcant assets or suffcient income? Whatever it takes to accomplish your goal of self-fund. One note of caution! If you do not currently have the assets or income needed to self-fund, don’t plan on just taking the money you would save by not paying Long Term Care Insurance premiums and invest it to pay for your future care. At the end of the chapter is a chart that illustrates the stark reality of that concept. This chart shows that if a sixty year old started saving the $2,472.29 s/he might have paid each year for a Long Term Care Insurance policy, invested it safely at a 6% APR and was in a 25% tax bracket, after 26 years of saving s/he would only have saved enough for six months of nursing home care at the expected cost