Long Term Care, A Caregiver's Story

Hello, this is Matt Slick from the Matt Slick Live Podcast, where I defend the Christian faith and lay out our foundations of the truth of God's Word. 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 well, including discussions on managing social security, Medicare, IRAs, long-term care, life insurance, investments, and taxes. Now let's get started with Finishing Wealth.

Oh, what a treat we have for you today on Finishing Wealth. I just am kind of blown away with the latest video that was done on long-term care, a caregiver story, but in that, they described this letter that we should write under some different circumstances, and there were four categories, you know, and how critical it would be for those that we love to be in a position to know exactly what we wanted under these different circumstances. So those categories were what now, Hans? So where you're both living and you're both cognitively strong, the second scenario is the surviving spouse, so only one of you remains, but yet you're cognitively strong, the one that remains. And then the third category is both living, but one of us is not cognitively strong. And then the fourth category is the surviving spouse who is not cognitively strong, and then it just describes, you describe if you use this template as to what you would like to have happen with your care.

Yeah, it's just genius, in my opinion, as I thought about it. And again, we're going to get into all the practical care aspects of that, but I thought, you know, under these different scenarios, you would probably want your kids to know something about your situation spiritually, not just for you, but for them, right? And so here is a letter from you, and you're not cognitive at this point in time, you know, what would you want to know that your children, your family, or those that care for you knew about either your testimony or things that were important to you spiritually about what would happen, you know, again, with your assets and all these kind of different things. You know, what an opportunity we all have as we think about finishing well, and that's the name of the show. And to me, this letter is just what a genius idea to finish well for my loved ones to know these pieces of information, even if I wasn't cognitive and even if I, you know, had been, you know, essentially the last one in my family to be able to share it.

So, Hans, take it from there. Yeah, so this lady, Angela, she was, I was speaking at a meeting which I attended, and she was just phenomenal. And she, I was taking notes, and I've been able to go back and review the video, and the gist of her presentation is just selling people long-term care insurances. She's asking the question, is that really enough? And the answer to her question was, no, it's not, is that we really need to get a sense of what these people are facing if they need care and if they need long-term care. And then that led to writing this letter, which she helps and she gives to her clients. She insisted her clients buy long-term care insurance.

I mean, it's just more than just recommending it. I mean, she insists that they buy it, just because she's lived through so many experiences that, where they haven't. And part of her whole deal is she had this template for this letter. She actually had a copy of a letter, the real letter, with the names taken out that somebody had written, and I turned it into a template.

But I could give you an example or give all of you an example. Under the both living and cognitively strong, it has five bullet points. And so this is me talking to, me and my wife and I, talking to our adult children.

And this is assuming that we're both living, we start to need care, and we're cognitively strong. It says, number one, we prefer to stay at home as long as possible and utilize home health care. And then number two, it says, we prefer not to be each other's caregiver and to protect the quality of life for both of us. So this is me talking to my future self and my kids and saying, I don't really, I prefer not to have my wife taking care of me or me taking care of my wife.

I would prefer to have professionals. We prefer professional caregivers versus family members to attend to continents in highly private matters. Number four, if we are no longer mobile, we are willing to relocate near our children, grandchildren who are willing to help. It's very important to us that we are not a burden to our children or grandchildren, but can be surrounded by family who can visit us and help manage the administration of our care.

So it's just expressing a desire to move. And then number five, it's our preference to pay for care is to use funds in this order. Number one is long-term care insurance. Number two is cash flow from all income sources minus funds supporting our lifestyle. And number three is remaining IRAs. And then number four is non-qualified assets. So I'm not really, she's not telling you how to write your letter.

These are just suggestions. You could be in a different place than the person that wrote the template of this letter, but it just covers all the grounds for you to put your wishes down. And I just love what you added, Robbie, which I'm going to add to mine is to put our spiritual preferences, our spiritual things that are important to us to pass along to our kids so that if we're in a situation where we're not cognitive, we can't communicate with our kids anymore, they're going to have this in writing just where we stand.

Oh, it's again, and I, you know, the thing is I listen to the video, which goes right along with this. Again, if you go to Cardinal Advisors, that's your YouTube channel, that's where you'll see the video or you can go to cardinalguide.com and you can click on the Seven Warriors tab under long-term care and find these, this template and this video. But as I watched it, the sense I had, which I think is absolutely beautiful, is this, the idea of this letter is it's really just not about me, you know, that the poor people that are left to take care of me or, you know, try to make decisions would be so much, you know, more at ease and, you know, feel like they're doing the right thing if they already know, like, man, would it have been helpful for me and my dad, you know, when I think about my own situation, Hans. Knowing what I know now, we never should have allowed him to go into the rehab center. We could have done all that rehab at home and his attitude never would have slipped the way it did because he was in that rehab center. There's no doubt in my mind that that just wasn't a good thing for him and that's going to be in my letter. I can assure you that if at all possible, you know, there's a whole lot of rehabbing that can be done at home as you're actually experiencing right now. Well, yeah. I mean, to be taken care of at home, I've got, my knee got blown out and I have a, had a tear to my quadriceps tendon from a fall while I was out of all things playing golf.

I mean, golf is not something you think you're going to get injuries from. But my wife has taken care of me and I've even suggested, I have insurance for this and she said, I don't think we need them. But I can imagine at 85, 20 years from now, we're in this situation, she'd probably still be saying the same thing. And it would be nice to have my wishes in writing or our wishes in writing so that our kids can kind of call up the insurance company and send in the care people.

So I thought I'd go over the last category. Surviving spouse is not cognitively strong. So this is, which wherever one my wife or I that lives the longest and the other one's gone and now we're the survivor and then we're not cognitively strong. And it just says, number one, I prefer to go into a care facility for the health, well-being, and safety of the whole family. So she, you know, the person is just making the statement that, look, trying to take care of a person that has dementia and is not cognitively strong is not good for anybody trying to take care of them where they're roaming around at night and getting injured and that kind of thing. So just stating clear, I want to go into a care facility. Let me tell you, I have a dear friend and their mother was the most beautiful, wonderful woman you'd ever meet until she got dementia.

Then she became mean as, I mean, horribly mean and did horrible things. But again, because they didn't have that kind of letter, you know, they attempted to care for her in her home for a period of time and it was a nightmare, right? So she's just making the statement, if I'm not cognitively strong, I want the pros to take care of me, okay? And then number two, I don't have a preference of location of the care facility. It's important that I'm not a burden to my children or grandchildren, which is the wishes of a lot of people. It's the wishes of me. I don't want to be a burden to my kids when they're in their 50s and their kids are coming of age and graduating from college and starting their jobs and all that.

I want them to be around me and care for me and have a relationship, but I don't, you know, like I said, it's to be surrounded by them so they can visit and help manage my care, but I don't necessarily want that to be a burden on anybody. And then, you know, again, it has my preference to pay for here is to use these funds in this order and it says long-term care insurance, cash flow from all income sources first and then remaining IRAs and then non-qualified assets. And it just tells them, use my money to pay for what I'm asking for here to protect all of us. Yeah, that's just absolutely, you know, to me, it's genius and so helpful to, you know, help structure your own situation and your assets, which is, you know, again, a big worry. That's why it's on the seven worries tab is, you know, how are we going to pay for this? And that's a big part of what working this out with you guys and finishing well is it's critical to the whole equation, right?

Well, it is. And I just want to give the credit. Her name was Angela Kennedy Robinson who spoke at this event and she was brilliant and she's been through this. And so we're going to start using this with our clients.

Yeah, absolutely. And we want to remind you again, the show is brought to you by cardinalguide.com, but that's where you can get the template to this letter, which is really easy to get. You just go to cardinalguide.com and then you click on the seven worries tabs, which this is the long-term care worry, and there you're going to see the video. It's called caregiver story, which in those show notes is where that copy of that letter is for, again, the caregiver story video under long-term care. And there you just click on the show notes and you'll find the letter. You can download your copy of it, you know, or you obviously can contact Hans there at the contact page at cardinalguide.com and help them work with you on that because to me, the template's wonderful, but now we got to figure out these assets and exactly how are we going to pay for this long-term care and of course, we're going to get into a lot of that in the second half of this show, but it's all there at cardinalguide.com as well as Hans' book, The Complete Cardinal Guide to Planning for and Living in Retirement.

And we'll be right back with a whole lot more on today's caregiver story. Investment Advisory Services offered through Brookstone Capital Management LLC, abbreviated BCM, a registered investment advisor. BCM and Cardinal Advisors are independent of each other.

Insurance products and services are not offered through BCM, but are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed agents. Cardinal Advisors is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration or any other government agency. Darrell Bock Welcome back to Finishing Well with certified financial planner, Hans Scheil. Today's show, we're talking about a caregiver story and really more specifically, this letter that to me is just what an opportunity, a practical way to really begin to think through and pray through and plan through what you're going to do under these different circumstances in order to finish well. And so Hans, let's kind of review that. Hans Scheil Yeah, so the letter is, you know, what I have up on the website and behind the video in the show notes is a template for you to write a letter. And so it's highly specific about the preferences.

You don't have to put down the same preferences as I have or somebody that wrote the template, but you need to address each one of these areas for your kids so that this thing has a chance of playing out the way you'd like it to happen. And the letter has for a couple, four scenarios. It has where we're both living and we're both cognitively strong. And then it has where one of us is deceased, one of us is a surviving spouse, and we're cognitively strong. That survivor is cognitively strong. Then the third category is, we're both living, but one of us is not cognitively strong.

And then the fourth one is the surviving spouse, one of us is deceased, the person who survived is not cognitively strong. And under these, it just has bullet points of how you'd like the care that you receive to be played out. And what we suggested and what Robbie brought to the equation is, we need to put in here our spiritual preferences and our spiritual communication to the next generation and the generation after that. It could be relatively short, but clear. I think this thing, it really impacted me and that's why I made the video about it. And I could tell when I talked to you, Robbie, just getting ready for the show, that this impacted you as well. Oh, absolutely. Believe me, I'm going to get to work on mine, because it really, how wonderful it would have been for either my parents or my mother-in-law to have this stuff clearly how they wanted it, because in each case, we got to that point where they weren't cognitively strong.

We got to that point where they were the only one left and what are you going to do? Yeah. So the next part of the video, and it was actually the beginning, so we went over the last first, which is the letter, is what she had talked about in her presentation is just offering the insurance and selling the insurance to people to pay for long-term care.

Is that enough? And from her perspective and from the advisor's perspective, which is me, no, it's not. I mean, we need to provide a whole solution because this whole family unit is going to face a whole bunch of stuff they're not prepared for and we need to help them through it. And so what I found helpful is this visual aid of all the different types of, you can call it long-term care or care that people need, and I even left some of them out, but I'm just going to go through those. I mean, we're going to start with physical care, which is pretty obvious and it's what people think about is somebody helping you in and out of a wheelchair, getting out of bed and moving to a chair.

It's helping you with a bath and helping you with just the basic activities of daily living. And then it has custodial care, which is what I just described. And then family care, and family care is having care, offering care, providing care to the whole family unit in terms of them taking care of themselves and then them dealing with the crisis so that they can take care of you. Financial care, and unfortunately, when the finances haven't been well planned and prepared and people don't have long-term care insurance or a plan in place, unfortunately, financial care becomes the whole topic of the thing, because the whole topic of discussion is everybody's talking about the money and how we're going to pay for this. And by planning that well, they can just get the financial care.

You can worry about actually taking care of the person. Coordinating care, and that's just a matter of setting it all up, and that's often underlooked the role. And that's something that the adult children can provide, even from afar, where they can vet the people and the home health care agencies, the facilities, the plan of care, just being the coordinator of all of that. Safety care, which is something that I've been facing just with the injury that I've had and walking around with a walker and a cane and stairs and stuff laying on the floor. I mean, there's things you need to do to your house, even for a person that's 65 that's going through some troubles that in terms of making the house safe and choosing the stairs we're going to use, how we're going to use them, that kind of thing. Mental care, that's overlooked a lot. Residence care, and that can mean a lot of things, but I'm reading it as if you're getting home health care and you're living in the residence, the residence itself needs to be cared for.

The lawn needs to be mowed. The home needs to be clean. The supplies need to be replenished. Things need to be fixed.

The taxes are paid, that yada, yada, yada. And that can even be when you're in a facility because you're going to be worrying about your house. So you need to have a plan for that. Progressive care, relational care, emotional care, legal care, that's often overlooked. And you just, man, you need to have those documents in place that different than the letter. I mean, you need that letter that we talked about early in the show, but you need to have the powers of attorney.

You need to be clear on who's in charge and of your money, of your well-being, of your care facility, and you need to have the right documents in place. And it's going to stop some of the infighting that can happen with kids. And if you say, well, my family won't do that, well, stick around. I mean, it happens. And it happened in my family.

Everybody's got their own ideas. And personal possession care, I can tell you when I'm experiencing this with my mom and with other people that I would talk with and converse with in the facility, people are worried about their stuff that's maybe back at their house or in somebody else's house, or maybe it's even gone. But to have somebody looking after your personal possessions and then survivor's care. So that's kind of a mouthful, Robbie.

Oh, it is. And, you know, some things I thought about, you know, when it comes to your stuff, you know, what my dad was most concerned about and my mother-in-law and some other people I know is their pets. Like, what are we going to do with Ruffy, you know, or whatever the situation may be, you know, that's kind of a big, big deal. And the safety thing, like, oh, my goodness, that changed so radically and so quickly, you know, based on what's going on with their health. And, you know, we ended up with bed alarms. And there's lots of neat things that are out there if they want to stay in the home, right? And so, you know, those are all, man, I just think that, again, all those items and sitting there with that whole idea of being able to plan this out with you guys or somebody that really has got some experience in this is so helpful.

Yeah. I mean, you think about the safety care. We have a nice large walk-in closet in our home in our master bedroom or master suite and off the bathroom. And the floor is littered with boxes and shelves. There's just room for a person feet straight walking forward in and out. It doesn't work very well with a walker, okay? If I'm going in there to pick out a few items, I mean, I could just, there's things that need to be done to a house when my mother used to call somebody like me a cripple, which is not politically correct now, but she was a nurse.

But when you're manipulating a walker around the place, there are certain things you need to do or you need to clean up. Oh, absolutely. And so, that's the, you know, to me, this is just a really great place to start the conversation, begin to think of and, you know, really engage your family because, as I said earlier, I just, this is not so much about me as helping the people that are left trying to deal with me. You know, they got enough problems without, you know, having it clear what, you know, what does dad want?

You know, what does my uncle want? You know, and there it's all written out like, boom, here you go. Well, to me, when I thought about this after reading and reviewing your presentation where she was saying, is it enough to just sell insurance? And I'm going to turn that around on her a little bit. And I think it's because she's sold the insurance to these people that she can now focus on these other things because a lot of people look at long-term care insurance and then they choose not to buy, okay? And they, or they don't really make that decision and say no. What they do is just say maybe and then they stick it into spinning out and it's one of those undone things.

And if you're in that mode, you can't, you're just worried about whether you should buy it or you should have bought it or, and you don't think of all this other stuff. So the reality is that's the first step is getting the insurance in place. And that can mean that when you get sick and you need care, we're not going to be focused on money because the insurance is going to, we're going to focus on all this other stuff that we brought up today. Right. And there's so many different options, right, of different plans based on your, each individual situation, you know, of all sorts of different financial stuff that's so easy to do really, but it just, you know, I, if I hadn't, I guess, been a caregiver for those folks in my family, it's just it, you know, in everybody's case, it came down to, they really could have used it. Oh, sure. I mean, a few hundred bucks a month will buy you a long-term care policy.

Yeah. I mean, I want to remind you that cardinalguide.com, the seven worries tab and worries tab under long-term care, you're going to find this letter we've been talking about all show under this idea of caregivers stories, the name of the video where you'll find the letter, you'll find the contact information. It's all there at cardinalguide.com. And so Hans, great show. I just want to remind everybody we're in all 50 States and the District of Columbia, we're licensed and we have, we can serve you by Zoom, phone from anywhere. Thanks, Hans.

Thank you and God bless. The opinions expressed by Hans Schile and guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of this radio station. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable, although it should not be relied upon as such.

Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated or not guaranteed. Past performance cannot be used as an indicator to determine future results. Any strategies mentioned may not be suitable for everyone. Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for you. Before acting on any information mentioned, please consult with a qualified tax or investment advisor to determine if it's suitable for your specific situation.

Finishing whale is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject covered. Investment Advisory Services offered through Brookstone Capital Management LLC, abbreviated BCM, a registered investment advisor. BCM and Cardinal Advisors are independent of each other.

Insurance products and services are not offered through BCM but are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed agents. Cardinal Advisors is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Social Security Administration or any other government agency. We hope you enjoyed Finishing Whale, brought to you by CardinalGuide.com. Visit CardinalGuide.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 CardinalGuide.com. If you have a question, comment, or suggestion for future shows, click on the Finishing Whale radio show on the website and send us a word. Once again, that's CardinalGuide.com. CardinalGuide.com. This is the Truth Network.