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How Long Term Care Insurance Can Help Ohioans in Retirement

Planning for retirement means more than just scheduling your free time and figuring out whether you’ll spend your days at the beach or in the city. As nice as it sounds, there is much more to retirement than lounging around without a care in the world.

Financial Planning

Planning for retirement involves a wide variety of working parts that come together to finely tune your financial plan and ensure it is working properly throughout all of your golden years. Long Term Care Insurance is one of the moving parts that you should consider if you are looking to preserve your assets and pass a legacy onto your family. Fortunately for Ohioans, there is a statewide program that helps you specifically plan for those costs.

Ohio Partnership for Long Term Care Insurance

The Ohio Partnership for Long Term Care Insurance helps individuals in Ohio prepare for the
expenses that long term care so often brings. Long term care can be wildly expensive, especially if you need facility care rather than home care, and if you haven’t developed a specific strategy to pay for those costs, you may be stuck spending all of your assets on that care. Long-term care is for individuals who need assistance with basic daily tasks such as dressing, bathing, and eating. Whether it is from recent surgery, a bad fall, or a chronic disease, long-term care is not an uncommon occurrence.

It is estimated that 70% of all Americans over the age of 65 will need long term care at some point in their lives. That is an extraordinarily high risk when thinking about the need for insurance, especially when compared to the risk of an automobile accident or a house fire, both of which have a risk of less than 1%, but both of which we all plan for diligently.

Planning for long term care makes financial sense in the context of retirement planning. Because care is expensive, and unfortunately, so few people are planning for care, it’s not uncommon for someone who needs care to turn to their loved one for care or be forced to spend down their assets to qualify for Medicaid. The Ohio Partnership for Long Term Care Insurance can help you avoid doing either of those.

How Does It Work?

The partnership program works like this: you purchase a qualifying Long Term Care Insurance policy in the state of Ohio and by doing so, you not only create a separate pool of wealth to pay for that care later down the road, but you also create a second safeguard for your finances. Should you happen to need care for longer than your policy period specifies, you will not have to spend down your assets in order to enroll in Medicaid, which is the standard procedure. The program exists to encourage Ohio residents to plan for the cost of long term care in order to help reduce the crippling burden on the state government, who, along with the federal government, currently picks up most of the tab for long term care expenses.

In order to obtain a qualifying policy, it’s best that you work with an independent Long Term Care Insurance agent. In order to be eligible for the partnership program, your insurance policy must contain the rider of Inflation Protection, which helps grow the value of your benefits to keep pace with inflation. This helps ensure that your policy won’t be worthless 20 or 30 years down the road when you actually need care.

Long Term Care Insurance can provide an invaluable benefit during retirement and waiting, or failing, to plan for the cost of long term care can quickly devastate your finances and leave you wondering where you went wrong. To learn more about the Ohio Partnership for Long Term Care Insurance, visit the state’s website here. You can learn just how much long term care costs in Ohio here.

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