Clear Money Guide
What this guide covers
A quick view of the questions and evidence developed below.
Guides › Long-Term Care Planning
Updated July 31, 2026. Quick answer: there are three bands. Below a modest asset level, Medicaid is the de facto insurer and premiums buy little. At the top, care is survivable arithmetic and a policy is optional. The band in between — enough assets to lose, not enough to shrug off a $600,000–$900,000 care bill — is the band the product exists for, and it is exactly where most readers of this site sit.
The honest test
Compute the ring-fence: the pot you would need to set aside today so that, growing at your investment return, it covers your projected care bill when it arrives. The breakeven calculator produces that number from the 2025 cost medians and your own assumptions. Then ask two questions of it.
Would ring-fencing that pot dent the rest of your plan? If the answer is no — the money exists, it is liquid, and walling it off changes nothing about your income or your heirs — you can self-insure, and the case for paying premiums is mostly about the long tail. If ring-fencing it would consume most of your liquid assets, you are not self-insuring — you are hoping. That is the middle band.
Will the pot actually be there? Self-insurance fails quietly: the earmarked money gets spent, gifted to children, or is down 30% in the year care begins. A premium is a commitment device as much as a transfer of risk.
If you are in Washington, part of the answer is already decided for you. The state programme pays a capped benefit, and how much of it you can actually reach depends on a vesting rule most people never see — the three WA Cares vesting pathways. For anyone holding a private-insurance exemption, that arithmetic is the whole of the rescind decision.
Self-insuring makes the withdrawal order the whole problem — what to ask about funding care.
The part nobody prices: you may not be allowed to change your mind
Industry decline-rate data is blunt: roughly 17% of applicants in their 50s are declined, 24% in their 60s, and 45% in their 70s (AALTCI reporting). Self-insuring is a decision you can reverse only while your health still passes underwriting. Waiting is not keeping the option open — it is letting the option expire.
What the two paths cost side by side: 2026 premiums by age. If you do self-fund: the self-funder’s playbook.
The band question is really a portfolio question.
Whether the ring-fence dents your plan depends on everything else in it — income needs, taxes, legacy. The matching service below introduces you to advisers who pay to meet you. Ask them to stress-test the self-insure case against your actual balance sheet.
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 page.
Two doors most people are never shown: reduced paid-up keeps a smaller policy with no further premiums, and since 2010 a policy can be exchanged tax-free for long-term care coverage — though that one only opens in one direction.
More Long-Term Care guides: see the full 61-page index.