Long-term care is the insurance conversation most advisors avoid. It's expensive, emotionally loaded, and there's no clean formula for who needs it.
But ignoring it doesn't make the risk go away. The cost of a nursing home or home health aide can demolish a retirement plan in a few years. If your client hasn't thought about how they'd pay for long-term care, the plan has a hole in it.
How I think about it
I don't push LTC insurance on every client. But I do make sure every client has a strategy, even if that strategy is "self fund."
For clients with significant assets, self-funding might make sense. They have enough to absorb the cost. For clients in the middle (enough assets to protect but not enough to absorb a $100,000+/year care cost indefinitely), insurance or a hybrid product is worth considering. For clients with very few assets, Medicaid may be the backstop.
The point of tracking it in Kerdora isn't to sell a policy. It's to make sure the conversation happened and the strategy is documented.
What you're tracking
For each LTC policy:
Type — Traditional LTC, Hybrid Life/LTC, Hybrid Annuity/LTC, or Other
Owner — who's covered
Daily benefit — how much the policy pays per day of care
Benefit period — how long it pays: 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, or lifetime
Elimination period — the waiting period (in days) before benefits begin
Inflation protection — whether the daily benefit grows over time (None, Simple, or Compound)
Premium — how much they're paying and how often
The numbers
Kerdora calculates a total benefit pool from the daily benefit and benefit period. A $200/day benefit with a 3-year benefit period gives you a pool of about $219,000. That's the total the policy will pay out over the life of the claim.
Annual benefit is daily benefit x 365. Useful for comparing against current care costs in the client's area.
Hybrid policies
Traditional LTC has a reputation problem: you pay premiums for years and if you never need care, that money is gone. Hybrid policies (Life/LTC and Annuity/LTC) address this by combining long-term care benefits with a life insurance death benefit or annuity value. If you don't use the care benefit, your beneficiaries get the death benefit or the annuity.
Kerdora tracks both traditional and hybrid policies. The distinction matters for the planning conversation because the premium structure and benefit mechanics are different.