Family in Crisis: Long-Term Care, Who's Gonna Pay?

Hey, this is Jim Graham from the Masculine Journey Podcast where we explore relationship instead of religion every week. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds. Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network.

This is the Truth Network. Welcome to Finishing Wealth, brought to you by cardinalguide.com, with certified financial planner, Hans Scheil, best-selling author and financial planner helping families finish well for over 40 years. On Finishing Wealth, we'll examine both biblical and practical knowledge to assist families in finishing wealth, including discussions on managing social security, Medicare, IRAs, long-term care, life insurance, investments, and taxes. Now let's get started with Finishing Wealth. Finishing Wealth is a general discussion and education of the issues facing retirees. cardinalguide.com, Cardinal Advisors, and Hans Scheil CFP sell insurance. This show does not offer investment products or investment advice.

Boy, are we in for a treat today on Finishing Wealth. If you're like me and wondering about some of these things and how can I make sure that my life finishes well, I think you're going to be more than blessed by how God has given us this wonderful new asset here at the Truth Network, Hans Scheil. And Hans is a certified financial planner, but more than that, Hans, God had you at a specific place and time in some people's lives when it comes to this topic of long-term care where you got to see, you know, God, what have you got for me here? Hans Scheil Yeah, I mean, in my book, the very first chapter talks about my whole journey of kind of what brought me here and established my voice in specifically dealing with my mother in 2011. I was dealing with her before that and with her Alzheimer's and her care. But my sister passed away, who was her primary caregiver suddenly in 2011. And we were left with a mom that lived six, 700 miles away, still lived independently, relied on my sister, and she's now deceased. And so then I became, along with my sister, her primary caregivers, and she lives 700 miles away. And so we learned a lot about Alzheimer's, and we learned a lot about people with dementia, and we learned a lot about caring for them, providing for them, providing for their medical needs, their physical needs. Anyhow, we relocated my mom through a lot of resistance from her, because she was happy retired in the community she was in and had her friends there.

We brought her back to Cary, North Carolina, and just really responsible for her care. And, you know, we're going to talk today when we're opening up with the discussion of long term care, which is one chapter in the book, and it's not the first chapter. And so but we're going to start there. And then we're going to bounce around the book a little bit. And my mother's story is through this, is really in this book throughout. But we're also going to talk about client stories and real clients. And that's, that's something that you got to put a face on these issues, because it's one thing to say, wow, do you have long term care? You think you're going to live forever?

Do you think you're going to end up needing this? But when you actually see the face of it, it looks like this, and you felt God kind of nugging on, tugging on you when these things were happening. Is there a story like that that comes to mind, huh? Dr. Darrell Bock Well, there is, like Michael and Christina in the book.

You know, they're clients, I've changed their names, but they're real people and over in Cary and Raleigh area. And Michael was, in a very bad way, he had trouble with alcoholism. And his, his second wife, who was not the mother of Christina, had died like three years prior.

And my guess is, she probably helped keep Michael somewhat together. And he deteriorated quite a bit after her death. And he didn't, literally didn't open his mail. He didn't manage his money. You know, unfortunately, there was some money there and some assets and some income coming in.

It was all on direct deposit. But Christina came into the picture with him when somebody from the bar or somebody that knew him through his only social network, which was the neighborhood bar that he walked to, found her, because he was just, he was passed out and incapable, incapable of taking care of himself. So she went down there, rescued him, got him in a assisted living, got him situated. She couldn't even bring her into her own house where she has four daughters.

And, but I hadn't met her yet. And she got to some other professionals to try to get him, you know, a lawyer, a CPA, a person that specializes in veterans benefits. So he was a veteran? He was a veteran.

Yes. He served in Vietnam. He was at the time, I believe, 71. And she was after that veteran's aid and attendance, which she had only learned about from the facility. Didn't really know what it was and led her to this guy that did this for her.

And then, you know, I don't go into a lot of detail about, let's just put it that these people really didn't do right by her. And you can read about it in the book, the whole story. But the book, by the way, I should tell you is the planning for the Cardinal complete guide, the complete Cardinal guide, I'll get it right.

The complete Cardinal guide to planning for living in retirement, which is, you know, there at cardinalguide.com, which we'll talk about throughout the show. But again, so he's 71. He's a veteran, he's there. How did Christine end up coming to you? Well, actually, the guy with the veterans didn't really know how to move any money around. I mean, he always would send his clients back to their financial advisor, their parents' financial advisor, the person that was managing the money, it was kind of hard to do with him, because he'd been AWOL from anybody for years. So he called me over there to just, well, she was in there, and they were middle of a problem is that they now needed to start moving her money around.

And he thought he had an idea of like, where it all ought to go for this veterans planning. But I just met her right there in a bit of conflict, where the attorney was there. And these people that, like I said, hadn't necessarily done her right, hadn't totally done her wrong either.

I mean, it just, they had sat on stuff, and they weren't all communicating well. In any case, I got introduced to her. And then I realized to, I just invited her over to my office the next day, I said, Can you bring dad over there, because we're going to need him.

She said, I'd love to, you know, and so she brought her dad over to my office the next day, and all this mountain of paperwork. And what the gist of it is, is that if you have an older person or any person that quits communicate, they quit opening their mail, okay, they, mail gets returned, there's certain signals that they're going to lock the account up. I mean, they have a status for it, I can't come up with a word now. But, you know, a financial institution like, like Fidelity, or Charles Schwab, or someplace like that, which is where it was parked.

It wasn't either one of those. That's their procedure is they just lock it down. So and eventually, they're going to turn the money over to the state. And you have this problem with people with dementia, that really have been handling all things themselves through their older ages.

And then it got to a point where they just weren't able, and they just kind of quit doing things. So I got him over to my office. And we started looking, we had the power of attorney, so she's power of attorney, so she now has the right to do things with this.

We got him there. But they wouldn't even talk to her at the financial institution on the phone, because it was locked down, they needed to talk to him. And of course, to verify his social security number, all the same things, they ask you for your full name and what your mother's maiden name is, and you know, that kind of stuff.

And so we took one shot at that, and it didn't work very well. So we put all that stuff on flash cards for him, we rehearsed it, and then we called back because he he was very congenial. And just long story short, we, we we got through that screen, and he gave him his address, he gave him his thing.

And then, then he said that it's going to be okay to talk to me and talk to her. And then we faxed him the power of attorney. And now we're in control of the money.

So now we can actually see what's there, other than the statement, what's been done. By the way, this guy hadn't filed tax returns in 10 years either. Okay, so and then when you're applying for Veterans Aid and Attendance, I was naive enough at that point to think that you got to have the last two years or three years tax returns.

I later learned that was incorrect. There's a lot of stuff like this that you run across in families. And how do we make sure this isn't going on? Well, I'm just gonna tell you, it's a little bit worse than that. People haven't paid their insurance premiums. I mean, there's all kinds of things. They haven't paid their taxes, like property taxes.

And it's just we missed it one year. And then we didn't open the mail, and then it quits coming. But what I'm going to tell you is there's a lot of secrecy in families around if you think about it, and you think about your own family is when mom and dad were 65 and 70 and 75. They didn't want to talk to you about their money. That was kind of none of your business.

Okay. And they wanted to be independent, and they were independent. And maybe they'd done something for your brother that they didn't tell you about. And, you know, you're the daughter there that's kind of peering into these things. So this is all set up by the kind of secrecy thing.

Now they're in their 80s. And so you brought up that point is, is it just, you probably have people, a lot of you listeners are probably, you probably have people that just like Robbie is right now going through your mind is I wonder where they are. I kind of have some- There's the neat thing of really thinking about this if you're listening. With many counselors plan succeed, you may have heard that proverb. But to have a professional like yourself, somebody that you really trust to be the inner, because, you know, if I go saying, you know, mom, what happened with this, or dad, what happened with that? You know, it's awkward. But if you've got somebody like yourself, that was what Christine, wasn't that her name? She had you to jump in there and help her. Yeah.

I mean, she had a whole pile of stuff too. I mean, they've gotten to the point where you really need to follow wherever mom and dad go to answer one of those questions, like what happened to this? Or where is this? Or where's that insurance policy? They're going to go to somewhere back at that file cabinet or the desk in the back room or somewhere. You need to go with them.

And you just need to look at that. And what I really need you to do, if you're going to come in and see me, is I need you to take the whole stack, pack it up, and bring mom and dad, or if they can't make it in because of their health situation, that maybe a health situation has brought it on, then you need to get their approval to just bring it in. And then the first thing we're going to do is get you over to the attorney and get a power of attorney done. We may have to come call on mom and dad.

Maybe you already have that. But my point is, is that this is not usually that simple of just holding up the flashcards. There's a whole stack of papers, 80% of which are useless, and then 20% that we need to serve them. So you're listening to, if you're just tuning in, you're thinking, what am I hearing?

What you're hearing is Hans Schile, a new show, Finishing Well. And it's brought to you by cardinalguide.com. Of course, we want to let you know that we have got some really cool resources at their website, which is, as you might guess, cardinalguide.com, including these books, Planning for and Living in Retirement, and an accompanying workbook. And as we're talking about long-term care this week, you can go to their website right there. And there's this list of seven worries. And when you see long-term care, you can click on that. And as you go down on the form, you'll see there's a free PDF. You can check out that workbook and think about some of the things that you might find out about your family and these questions that obviously affect us as we are facing these issues of long-term care. Again, the show is Finishing Well, Hans Schile certified financial planner.

But what a cool thing to bring biblical principles, biblical wisdom to this very touchy subject of family. So we'll be back in just a moment. We're so glad you tuned in and we're looking forward to seeing you on the other side of the break.

That's cardinalguide.com. Welcome back to Finishing Well. And if you're just tuning in, we have been talking about a story of a family that found themselves in a crisis, right, that they hadn't been opening their mail, they hadn't been checking this, that the story was that here was this need for long-term care.

And somebody had the resources to do it, but trying to unwind that was a bit messy. But before we go much further in the story of Christina, tell us a little bit, Hans, about what do you mean by long-term care? Because I'm 62 and I'm thinking, whoa, is that a nursing home?

What is that? I mean, that's the first thing you think is nursing home. And it certainly is where all this was birthed. But today's day and time, you're going to spend your first year or two of a long-term care event at home. But I've been offering long-term care insurance for 30 years. The prevalence of home health care is just so much greater now. We're also talking about assisted living, which, you know, it really is a modern-day nursing home.

The people there are happy. They're getting cared for well. You're like in that position where, you know, some of us have parents that are there, some of us are there, and we won't go there. But anyway, how do you suggest that kids approach their parents on that subject? Usually the parents are fully aware that this could be happening sometime between now and when they finish their life, okay? That between now and the end, and many times you've just got one parent left, the other parent went through this.

So there's more awareness of the probability or possibility of a person needing care. And these are discussions that people need to have. Their kids need to raise them with their parents because the burden is going to fall upon them. And it's in the Bible. I sent you the quotes that I'm going to leave a lot of that to you, Robbie, to help as the pastor here that can state that we have a responsibility to look after our parents, just like Christina did.

And what I can provide you is the education and then the tools to actually do that. Right. And there's all sorts of resources along these lines that we don't necessarily connect to long-term care. But there's aspects of Medicare, Social Security, all those things that connect to that, right? Well, absolutely. I mean, the whole business of retirement in the United States of America is about government programs, whether you're rich, poor, or in between.

It is. And, you know, with long-term care, you really don't have much in government programs for the common ordinary people other than Medicaid. You know, and we'll talk about that in a sec. But I think what you're referring to in Michael and Christina's story is Veterans Aid and Attendance. I mean, ultimately, that's what we helped Michael get. And it's paying him $1,700 a month in change, tax-free, and has been for probably two and a half years.

He's really a young person on that program in his low 70s. And it's much-needed money. And it's paying for some of the care. And we, you know, after my mother got qualified on that, and I really was a student during that process, I decided to go in the business of helping people do this.

And you really, you know, it's suggested that you get some resources other than the people at the Veterans. I mean, that you and we have that program is it wouldn't matter his outside resources at all. He's still qualified for that regardless, right?

He is after he does some financial planning with us. So they do still have an income test. They have an asset test. And they have the Veterans I'm speaking of.

And they also have a service requirement. So, but it's very easy to do financial planning. I mean, it's very, very easy for us to set their finances up in such a way through the use of the children that they completely legally qualify for this. I mean, we did it for my mother. We've done it for, you know, let's not say 100 clients yet, but somewhere short of that.

We've done it for a lot of them. And this is where that CFP thing kind of comes in, which would be a good point to talk about that. It's really cool that you have the other aspects like, you know, Medicare and Social Security, whatever, but then that the financial planning goes along with it has to do with that essentially certification. And can you share with our listeners a little bit about that? Well, yeah, when you're a CFP, there's 80,000 of us in the United States. So I don't know how that relates to the whole financial.

So there's plenty of us around. In every zip code that I'm speaking to, you can go online, you find that stuff in my books, and you can find a CFP. I'm a CFP with a specialization in working with seniors and retired folks and people of older ages. Typically, all my clients aren't like Michael, they're just going into a nursing home. Many of them are 60, 65, 70, and they're just going on Medicare. And they're more planning for this, financially planning for it, that if this happens to me, how am I going to pay for it?

And really, more importantly than how are you going to pay for it? How are you going to access resources that are suitable to you and suitably your family? You know, it's your children that are going to bear the burden of this. And people become keenly aware of that, because if you're the one getting the care, you're not going to be doing the management. That's the interesting thing to me is that the family aspect of it, that, you know, when we start to run out of ways to care for ourselves, right, and we don't even necessarily, like in this case, even open our mail or whatever, because we've become disabled. It's the family that ends up, you know, being the one to step in and try to take care of you.

But you do this for that ahead of time. You do this planning for your kids, or your spouse, because it's also the spouse. A lot of times, those are women.

That's the healthy spouse, because the man gets sick before the woman does. And then, you know, but it's the whole family, as people age, and the children. And a lot of times, it might be just one kid. There might be one adult child who's right there proximate, or a couple of them, or they're financially able to take the time to do this. And so we get involved in the care a little bit, but we're all about the money. I mean, we've got to take all the resources and put them down. And, you know, they all become at risk when this happens. And then even if you have sufficient resources, then it's a question of which ones do you tap? How do you shop for care?

Do you have the proper legal documents in place? And like getting this veterans, I don't do that. I mean, we have a veterans accredited attorney that we're affiliated with, works right in my business. And she's the one that actually knows the veterans. I'm the CFP, certified financial planner, that's looking at the whole picture and arranging a plan.

She's doing the veterans part of it and the legal documents part of it. It's interesting, and I can't help but relate to things as a car salesman, but the truth sets you free, so to speak. And so many families have been hiding their financial truth from their kids or their spouse or whatever the situation may be. But at this point in time, what would seem prudent to keep, you know, close to the vest, so to speak, turns out to be an absolute nightmare if you don't have somebody in the between helping you get to the truth of all these things. Yeah, I mean, a big part of mine is a counselor to sit down with that child. A lot of times only one of them is going to come in. The other one lives in a different city and they're not as interested. A lot of times it's a daughter, not always.

There's some guys, but it's just one of them. And then we got to get mom sitting down in there and dad and, you know, we kind of have a little, we got to tell it all, you know, and we got to just, you know, and I've become very adept of that of starting small. We got to find all the things, like dad prepared his will and he lent, you know, brother or son some money to solve a problem for him that he got into. And he never told anybody about that. And now he's got something in his will that says that that son gets less. So it gets equalized in the inheritance and dad's dead. Okay, dad's gone.

His will's already been probated. And mom's sitting here telling y'all about that, or not telling you about it. And we just got to get all that kind of stuff out. And that's what I do in, especially when things become a crisis.

That's why it's so important at a younger age to really sit down and talk about these things with somebody that's knowledgeable. And that's what our business is. Darrell Bock And that's the word finishing well, which is the new show we have here on the Truth Network with Hans Scheil. He's a certified financial planner. Again, this is brought to you by cardinalguide.com, where you can find his phenomenal resources. If you go to cardinalguide.com, here's the book, which is really inexpensive. How much is it, Hans? Hans Scheil Well, it's on Amazon. I mean, you can get it for $1.99, each of them, the ebook. And you can buy the paper book for $7.99, free shipping.

Darrell Bock So $1.99 if you got a Kindle, and you can go to cardinalguide.com right there and click on that link. And next thing you know, you've got all this information on all these seven worries that this book is kind of described around. And we've been talking about long-term care.

And we told you that there's a PDF just on this item. But tell our listeners what the seven worries are and what they'll see there at the website. Hans Scheil Well, they kind of go in the order they happen to you in the book, Social Security, when are you going to start it, how are spousal issues, Medicare, how are you going to understand it, we're going to educate you on it, what should you do about it? How should you plan for it?

It's like alphabet soup. And I've been working with it for 40 years, and we demystify that. Long-term care, which we've been talking about on this show, is the third area. IRAs, we talk about IRAs, and there's some things specific to IRAs that you need to plan, which is now you've got to live off your IRA in retirement. And then there's estate planning issues with IRAs and beneficiaries.

There's minimum distributions when you get into your 70s. I'm going to show you perhaps how to donate money to your church and get a real benefit out of it if you're over 70 and a half. Next subject is going to be investments, which would include the IRA, but more of an investment return and how you're set up and what kind of risk you're taking. Then we've got estate planning and life insurance, and to talk about that and assess what your current situation is. And then the book is going to get into that.

It's going to tell some stories that are in there about real clients. And then the workbook is going to give you some more facts and figures and that kind of thing that isn't quite as interesting. And then the workbook is and then the last worry is income taxes for the 62 plus. So we go through those seven things. And they're confusing in their own right.

But all this stuff is interacting with each other like soup. I mean, it just your social security affects your long term care affects your investments affects your IRA. So we do financial planning to try to set people right and help them finish well. Yeah, and finishing well, as you can tell from listing today's show has so much to do with family.

Think about it, as you begin, you know, those last years of your life, you know, what, what happens with your family, your, you know, what happens financially with all the things that you set aside and all those all has to do with what with many counselors plan succeed. You know, again, we're a resource for you there. You go to cardinal guide.com.

You can see all those things. And we hope you'll turn in next week is we're going to have more of this finishing well with Hans Shyle. Thank you so much.

We had a great time today. Thank you. Finishing well is a general discussion and education of the issues facing retirees. Cardinal guide.com cardinal advisors and Hans Shyle CFP.

So insurance this show does not offer investment products or investment advice. We hope you enjoyed finishing well brought to you by cardinal guide.com. Visit cardinal guide.com for free downloads of this show or previous shows on topics such as social security, Medicare, IRAs, long-term care, life insurance, investments and taxes, as well as Hans best-selling book, the complete cardinal guide to planning for and living in retirement and the workbook. Once again, for dozens of free resources, past shows, or to get Hans book, go to cardinal guide.com. If you have a question, comment or suggestion for future shows, click on the finishing well radio show on the website and send us a word. Once again, that's cardinal guide.com. Cardinal guide.com. This is the truth network.