September 23, 2026
You’ve Worked a Lifetime to Build It. Have You Planned to Protect It?
Labor Day is a celebration of the contributions American workers have made to our country. It can also be a fitting time to reflect on what a lifetime of work has made possible—and how we plan to protect it.
Over the course of a career, we work toward many things: a home, savings, retirement accounts, investments, financial security for a spouse, and perhaps an inheritance or legacy for children and grandchildren. Eventually, those years of earning, saving and planning become the resources we expect to support the life we’ve worked hard to create.
But there’s an important question that can easily be overlooked in retirement planning:
If you need care someday because of a serious accident, chronic illness or memory loss, how much of what you’ve accumulated are you prepared to use to pay for it?
There isn’t one right answer, but there should be an answer.
Long-Term Care Is More Than a Healthcare Question
When people hear “long-term care,” they may picture a nursing home late in life. In reality, long-term care refers to assistance someone may need when a physical or cognitive condition makes it difficult to manage everyday activities independently.
That need can arise gradually or unexpectedly. Care may be provided in a person’s own home, an assisted living community, an adult day setting or a skilled nursing facility, depending on the circumstances.
This distinction matters because health insurance and Medicare were not designed to pay indefinitely for the ongoing custodial assistance that can make up a significant portion of extended care. As a result, understanding how to pay for long-term care can be an important part of retirement planning.
Long-term care costs can vary considerably depending on the type of care needed, where it is provided and how long it is required. Planning for future care means considering where those dollars would come from before a need arises and how using them could affect the rest of your financial plan.
What Is Your Plan Today?
Most people already have a long-term care plan—even if they’ve never intentionally created one. Without another source of funding, the default plan may be personal income and assets.
For some individuals and families, self-funding long-term care can be a reasonable and deliberate choice. They have accumulated sufficient resources, understand the potential financial exposure and are comfortable retaining that risk themselves.
The key word is deliberately. There’s an important difference between deciding to self-fund after evaluating your resources and simply assuming, “We’ll figure it out if it happens.”
Consider what those same assets may already be expected to accomplish. They may need to provide retirement income for two people for decades, support a surviving spouse, fund travel or other retirement goals, provide for charitable giving or an inheritance, and serve as a financial cushion against other unexpected expenses.
Using those assets for care doesn’t necessarily mean a plan has failed. However, significant long-term care costs can mean that money originally intended for one purpose must instead be redirected to another.
That’s one reason people consider long-term care planning as part of a broader strategy to protect retirement assets and preserve their intended purpose.
The real planning question, then, isn’t simply, “Can I afford self-funding long-term care?” A more useful question may be:
“How much of this risk do I want my retirement assets to carry?”
You Can Retain the Risk—or Shift Some of It
Long-term care planning isn’t synonymous with buying one particular type of insurance. At its core, it’s about deciding how you want to address the financial risk associated with needing care.
One option is to retain the risk through self-funding long-term care, using your own income, savings or other assets to pay expenses if care is needed. Another is to transfer some of the financial risk to an insurance company.
Depending on your age, health, financial circumstances and objectives, solutions may include traditional long-term care insurance, life insurance with long-term care benefits, hybrid or asset-based long-term care solutions, or certain annuity-based strategies designed to provide additional resources for qualifying care.
For some people, the appropriate approach may be a combination—retaining part of the risk while transferring another portion. The goal isn’t necessarily to insure every possible dollar of future care. Instead, the goal is to understand the potential exposure and make an informed decision about how much of that risk you are comfortable keeping.
Protecting What You’ve Built Is About More Than Money
There’s another part of long-term care planning that doesn’t appear on a financial statement: Who will help if you need care?
Without a plan, spouses and adult children often become part of the solution by default. They may coordinate appointments, manage medications, arrange professional care, provide transportation, handle finances or step in personally to provide day-to-day assistance.
Families frequently want to help, but wanting to help and being prepared to assume responsibility for someone’s care are two very different things. Adult children may be raising families of their own, managing careers and financial responsibilities, or living hundreds or thousands of miles away. A spouse may have health or physical limitations of their own.
Financial planning cannot eliminate the emotional realities of caregiving. However, having resources and a plan can provide families with more choices about who provides care, where it is provided and how it is paid for.
In that sense, efforts to protect retirement assets aren’t only about preserving an investment account. Planning can help protect a spouse’s financial security and the retirement lifestyle you’ve planned together. It can also help preserve choices about where and how you receive care while reducing the likelihood that your children automatically become the care plan.
Planning Earlier Can Mean Having More Choices
One of the challenges of planning for future care is that it’s easy to postpone. When we’re healthy and independent, the need for care can seem far away. Once health begins to change, however, some planning options may become more limited or unavailable because insurance-based solutions generally involve health qualification.
That’s why the most useful time to have the conversation is often before there’s a crisis. Long-term care planning doesn’t require predicting whether you’ll need care, exactly what kind you’ll need, or for how long. It means asking important questions while you still have time to consider the answers:
- How would I prefer to receive care?
- Who would I expect to help me?
- What resources would I use to pay for it?
- How much of the financial risk am I comfortable assuming myself
- What assets or income do I want to protect for my spouse or family?
- Would transferring some of the risk help me accomplish those goals?
These are planning questions—not simply insurance questions.
A Lifetime of Work Deserves an Intentional Plan
Labor Day gives us an opportunity to appreciate the value of work and everything those working years can make possible. If you’ve spent decades building financial security, preparing for retirement and creating something you hope to enjoy—and perhaps leave behind—consider adding one more question to your financial planning conversations:
What is my plan if I need extended care?
You may ultimately decide that self-funding long-term care is right for you. You may decide that transferring some of the financial risk makes sense, or that a combination of strategies better fits your circumstances. What’s important is that the decision is intentional.
A long-term care planning specialist can help you understand the choices available, evaluate how they fit with your existing resources and determine which approach best supports your priorities.
After a lifetime spent building what matters to you, having a plan can help give you and your family something equally valuable: choices.
Denise Gott, MBA, CLTC®, is CEO of ACSIA Partners LLC, the nation’s largest independent brokerage and industry leader with over 50 years’ experience specializing in long-term care insurance dedicated to helping families navigate the complexities of long-term care planning. Contact us for more information about protecting your retirement and preserving your peace of mind.