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Guides › Long-Term Care Planning
Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: whether you can skip long-term care insurance is a number, not a feeling: the pot you would need to ring-fence today to cover your own care, versus what the premiums would grow to if you invested them instead. At the 2025 median cost of assisted living ($6,200/month) and 4% care inflation, a 55-year-old planning for three years of care at 82 is pricing a bill that has nearly tripled by the time it arrives. This calculator computes both paths on your numbers.
What care actually costs (2025 survey medians)
- $129,575/year ($355/day) — nursing home, private room; semi-private $114,975.
- $74,400/year ($6,200/month) — assisted living.
- $80,080/year — in-home care at the $35/hour median, 44 hours/week.
Source: CareScout 2025 Cost of Care Survey (25,000+ provider rates collected July–November 2025, published by Genworth). These are national medians — metro areas run materially higher — and they are the defaults in the calculator below, editable to your area.
The calculator
You just priced the risk. An adviser prices it inside your whole plan.
The ring-fence number above competes with everything else your portfolio must do — income, taxes, inheritance. The matching service below introduces you to advisers who pay to meet you. Bring the number and ask how they would fund it.
This is free to you and there is no obligation to hire anyone — and because the advisers who see your information pay for the introduction, you start the conversation with leverage.
Before you start, what actually happens. The form is run by Kapitalwise, our advisor-matching partner. It asks about nine questions — age, investable assets, location — then your name, email and phone number, and verifies the phone by text.
Kapitalwise sends your details to advisers who pay for the introduction, so expect calls and texts. Clear Money Guide is paid when you submit the form, whether or not you ever hire anyone. Nothing loads and nothing reaches Kapitalwise until you press the button.
Compare fees, scope, conflicts, credentials and fiduciary duty before you hire anyone.
The Kapitalwise form opens here — you stay on this pag
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e.How to read the result
The comparison above is deliberately fair to self-insuring: it credits you the full investment growth on every premium dollar you did not pay. Even so, two things tilt real decisions. First, the average stay is not the risk you are insuring. A two-to-three-year stay is survivable arithmetic for most people with meaningful assets; the five-plus-year dementia tail is what destroys estates, and that tail is exactly where a benefit pool with an inflation rider earns its premiums many times over. Second, self-insuring only works if the pot actually exists. A number on this screen is not a ring-fenced account; money earmarked casually tends to be spent, gifted, or riding the market at the moment it is needed.
The middle path is sizing: insure the tail, self-fund the front. A policy with a long elimination period and a growing pool costs far less than first-dollar coverage, and your ring-fence only has to carry you to the policy.
Related decisions: what coverage costs at each age · who can genuinely self-insure · buying at 55 vs 65 · hybrid vs traditional policies · the self-funder’s playbook.
If you are supporting a parent: two separate tests decide whether you can claim them, and failing the income one still leaves you the deduction for their medical and care costs — which at care prices is usually the larger of the two.
Before you use the 70% statistic: the same government page says a third of 65-year-olds will never need long-term care, 59% of those who do receive unpaid care only, and just 35% ever use a nursing facility. Long-term care statistics, quoted from the source.
Before comparing the two routes — whether it is worth it for you at all.
A life policy’s care rider is a third option again, and the tax section it sits under changes what it pays — 7702B versus 101(g).