Long Term Care Insurance PricesLong Term Care Insurance Prices: As with any insurance costs, people want to know what their costs will be with Long Term Care Insurance. But also as is usually the case with insurance, people don't consider what the costs will be if they are without their insurance coverage. Long term care insurance prices cover all or most of the costs of nursing home care, assisted living facility care, or in-home specialized nursing care. This might seem like a non-issue to many people who aren't yet into their "silver" years. But, here's another trait of all insurance of all types that doesn't change: the greater a risk you pose to requiring the company to pay out, the higher your premiums. In the case of LTCI, that means age and health status at the time of application figure heavily into how much you pay. The great news is that once you have your policy and are paying your premiums, continued aging and, if it happens to you, deterioration of health don't affect what you pay out in premiums. So, the best thing you can do is buy LTCI when you are young(er) and healthy. For many people, this means buying it between age 50 and 64. But long term care insurance policies through most companies set the minimum age of eligibility at 40, and if you can afford to buy it in your 40s you'll be even farther ahead of the game. Jesse Slome, Executive Director of the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance, says "Long-term care insurance prices is directly linked to interest rates, the anticipated likelihood of claims as well as care costs. When interest rates decline as they have in recent years, insurers need to increase premium costs. And as our society ages, more people will be needing long-term care that becomes more costly each year. People often ask what is the best age to buy long-term care insurance protection and the honest answer: a month or two before a change in your health." Well, let's say that you don't buy LTCI--for it's not super-cheap no matter how young you are or how healthy you are when you buy it. What might you end up being nailed with later on in life for you savings today? Well, right now, the national average for one year's stay in a nursing home is $77,380--that is, $212 per day. And if you live in an expensive, affluent area of the nation, the cost could well be more than $140,000 per year, or nearly $400 for a single day's stay. And the average stay-period in a nursing home or assisted living facility for the average elderly person who goes into one is 2.5 years. And there's more: as terrible as it is to think about spending some of your golden sunset years in such a place, the reality is that over 25% of men and over one-third of women do so. And (yes, another and), if we keep on extending our average lifespans, those percentages will increase. In fact, even today, senior citizens in America have a 70% chance of needing some level of long term care. Long term care insurance prices are high....But things can be even more catastrophic--without the insurance. Consider the real-life case of one man who decided to buy LTCI at one of the earliest possible ages he could: age 42. He paid only about $75 per month in premiums. That "only $75 per month" might seem expensive to some until they learn that nine years later at age 51 he was diagnosed with Early-Onset Parkinson's Disease. Now, assuming he lives until a man's life expectancy age--which right now is 74 years, and which is very realistic for those with EOPD--while he paid out less than $9,000 in premiums his insurance company will pay nearly $2.2 million in benefits to him. Now, given the average duration times for those who really need long term care, if you are very, very sure that you have at least $250,000 socked away that can be dedicated to these types of expenses, then you frankly may not need any policy at all and should consult a financial planning professional about it. But there's always the "what if" factor.
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