Trending
Opening a conversation with a client about a plan for long-term care can be tough. Financial Advisors often ask us:
- “Where do I begin?”
- “How do I bring up such a sensitive topic?”
- “How do I avoid common objections and misconceptions?”
Long-term care planning conversations seem to be laced with land mines, possibly threatening your relationship with your client. But once you master our tried-and-true way to start these conversations, the rest flows easily.
The #1 goal is to listen.
One crucial tactic for beginning these conversations on the right foot is to always put your agenda aside; remove thoughts of products, sales goals, etc. from your mind. Get your clients talking about their own needs and fears. Ask open-ended questions and then sit back and listen.
Understand that any long-term care planning discussion is likely to extend over a few meetings, or might even be a conversation you bookmark for follow-up in a year or more. The bottom line is the client needs to be in the right emotional place to seriously discuss their long-term care plan and how they will fund it. If they aren’t, you will likely go nowhere and encounter a lot of frustration along the way.
Create a personal connection
Rattling off statistics and costs of care rarely moves a client to take steps to plan for long-term care. Without an emotional, personal connection, clients will likely present objections and roadblocks and insist that they’re the exception to the statistics.
Action comes from a personal connection on the topic. You want to find out if your client:
- Has ever been a caregiver
- Knows someone who currently is or was a caregiver
- Knows a care recipient
If your client has personally witnessed the emotional, financial, and physical stress that comes from providing or needing care, they will tap into all of the emotions necessary for proper consideration of their own potential future needs.
This is borne out by multiple studies over the years including a 2022 study sponsored by The Certification for Long-Term Care (CLTC), Home Instead, and TCARE. It found that while 70% of caregivers surveyed said they would have enough money to live on comfortably in retirement, 84% said they were concerned that long-term care needs could derail their retirement financial plans.
As caregivers themselves, in other words, they understood personally how their retirement plans could be turned inside out by long-term care needs.
Additionally, the survey reported these caregivers understood that they are at least somewhat likely to need their own care at some point in the future. Almost 90% said they were influenced to plan for their own care, which suggests that if you don’t help them plan, they’ll find someone else who will.
Get started by asking a simple question
Knowing this, we come back to the original question: “How do you get the long-term care planning conversation started?”
A great way to do so is by asking your client a simple question:
“Have you ever been a caregiver or known someone who has? Or someone who has needed care themselves?”
It’s important to describe what you mean by caregiving, i.e. providing help with things like shopping, preparing meals, paying bills, or getting to and from appointments.
Make sure your client understands that needing help with chores and travel may progress to needing help with daily activities like bathing, dressing, using the toilet, or moving independently from one room to another. And touch on how beyond physical mobility issues, cognitive problems can jeopardize the person’s ability to live safely on their own on many levels.
If they nod their head, that yes, they have had this experience or observed others go through it, ask them to share their story with you.
If they don’t, ask them if they would mind you sharing a story of your own (come prepared).
And if that doesn’t resonate, ask this
Another way to get the conversation going is to ask your client if they plan to live a long life. Most do—that’s why you are working with them! After all, if they don’t plan to live well into their retirement years, then they really don’t need your planning services.
Most will answer “yes” to this question. And when they do, you have the perfect opportunity to ask, “During that long life, do you think it’s reasonable to expect you might need help maintaining your independence due to the effects of aging?”
Once again, ask them if they know someone who has experienced this. Ask them to describe what kind of care their friend or family member needed. Once they share their story, ask them “Do you think you might need care like that some day?”
Whether you engage their emotional connection by asking about a caregiver experience or by asking the longevity question, your client will naturally start to visualize the possibility of their own long-term care. The door is now wide open for you to ask your client, “Do you have a plan?”
Related: How Digitalization Is Redefining Lead Generation for Financial Advisors