I’m Greg McIntyre and this is the elder law report. I have a crowded studio this morning, my special guest is Jason Winn of Winn Insurance and we will be talking about how you can avoid losing it all.
If you want to talk about the dream team, you have that with your insurance professional and your elder law and estate planning attorney working together, that team can protect you over all. We are going to do a whole show based around that today.
We are going to talk about the new world of long term care insurance which has been totally revamped. I call that the unicorn right now because it’s rare and when I have a client who has long term care insurance, it makes my planning job a lot easier. I tell them I don’t provide as many services to them because they don’t need as much, they have some bases covered. If something happens to them or their spouse, they have it paid for, they can stay at home.
How many people want to go to a long-term care facility after all?
No-one wants to go. People want to stay at home and be taken care of in their own house, if it comes to that. Statistics show that seventy percent (70%) of seniors over sixty-five years of age will need some type of long term care, be it in-home, assisted living or nursing home care. Those are better, or worse, depending on how you look at it than Vegas odds.
HS: Vegas takes the money and leaves you with empty pockets. That’s why I don’t gamble in Vegas.
GM: That’s right, so why would you gamble your entire life to accumulate wealth, or to pay off your mortgage on your house over thirty years only to risk losing it in the last few years of your life. That is my mission and the reason I do what I do. I can’t stand the idea that people will work their whole live to lose it all in the end.
I would also like to introduce Taylor, she has been with McIntyre Elder Law for a while now, and I wanted to introduce her to our audience. She will be a guest on the show at some time. She is Hayden’s protégé.
HS: Yes, and sometimes I might not be here.
GM: Which brings us to Hayden’s happy place. What have you got for us?
HS: I was looking at a picture of my grandson proposing to his fiancé, and he did it at the top of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and it got me thinking, that is the tallest building in the world, but what are the others?
GM: Is it still called the Burj Khalifa because it used to be the Burj Dubai? You want to talk about a huge building, I want to say it’s about two and half Empire State buildings on top of one another. It is unreal how tall it is.
HS: It is two thousand, seven hundred and twenty three (2723) feet high. It’s half a mile high. The future tallest building is going to be the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia which will be three thousand two hundred and eighty one (3281) feet high and will be completed in 2019.
GM: When I was in the Navy, I spent quite a bit of time in Dubai. I was brought up between Shelby and Boiling Springs and my world view of the middle east was that it was just dirt camels, but no, there is this future city in the middle of the desert. A lot of oil money, money coming out of the ground over there.
HS: The United States had the tallest building until the Burj was built, which was the World Trade Center. Now, the biggest building in the world is the New Century Global Center, we’re talking eighteen million two hundred and ninety eight thousand six hundred and forty eight square feet (18,298,648 sq ft) and it’s in China. The longest bridge in the world is the Danyang Kunshan Grand bridge in China and is one hundred and two point four miles (102.4 miles) long.
GM: There are a lot of big things out there and the biggest one seniors and their families face, is losing everything they have worked for. I certainly don’t want to lose everything I am currently building up just because I didn’t plan.
So, Jason, why did you get in to insurance?
JW: Well, twenty years ago my mother passed away at the age of forty-two, so the distribution and the preservation of life she never knew. She was in the middle of that accumulation phase. My dad was a banker but my mom owned her own business. She moved her business in to the house after cancer ravaged her body. At her funeral, Fred Hamrick came through the line, not with a bucket of chicken, but with an actual check. I will never forget that. We didn’t have to move. One of the most traumatic things for folks beyond losing a parent or a child or a loved one, is having to move schools and their home. Imagine the compounding effect that happens when people pass away. So, we didn’t have to move, my sister and I had a little starter fund.
GM: He was your insurance agent?
JW: Yes, Fred Hamrick, Maxwell B Hamrick insurance. They’re a good organization, they are competitors of ours but we do some different things. That small amount that mom had the foresight to purchase at thirty-eight years old was just a miracle to us. So, I am a proponent of that and I go out and preach that. Everyone can afford life insurance, get it young, get it early. It has now moved so far, it hits all three phases of life. As you do elder law planning with seniors, if they have the proper insurances in place, then they don’t have to worry about some of the crisis planning.
GM: Then they don’t have to worry about spending hundreds of thousands out on their spouse, and all their life savings are going to be gone, and we might lose the house in the end.
JW: Then they can put that worry in the rear-view window and move on.
GM: Exactly, because they have a long-term care policy that’s kicking in and paying.
JW: If they have that, I call it winning the game. To me, at the end of life, in the preservation phase of life, to leave a legacy, as you would say, if you are going to have a legacy, you need something besides just memories.
GM: I know Hayden has some questions about long term care insurance?
HS: Well, yes, I have two term policies, one hundred thousand dollars each. I think when I got them they were twenty-six dollars each. I think they have gone up a bit since then as I’ve got older, but they are meant for young families to cover emergencies and things like that.
JW: Well, you know, life insurance, just like an automobile has gone through many changes. When our grandfathers were buying their first automobile, there was no power steering, or door locks, or automatic windows, or defrosters, or heated seats, the kind of things we’re used to now, and my point is, life insurance used to be only whole life insurance, term insurance, then there was something called universal life, but as time moved forward, they advance it. So, if you had term insurance, the first step would be to contact that company and see if it’s convertible to a permanent policy. You mentioned whole life, it’s an older product, been around for one hundred and fifty plus years but there are newer products on the market. If they will convert that, you may not have to go through underwriting and they might even include a long-term care rider with just minimal underwriting.
Life insurance has radically changed, so if you have a belief system that said life insurance is bad because once it was bad, just like used car salesmen, bad doctors or bad lawyers, long term care has radically changed. Stand-alone long-term care is moving to the wayside, there are few companies that offer it. People still think of that just as they think of long term care as a nursing home that smells of urine, no, not anymore. It is stay at home, have your family take care of you and have a bucket of money to pull out of to refurbish the bathroom, or put in hardwood floors instead of carpet. All those things that you want to do as a senior or for a loved one you can do now.
GM: Or put in a roll-in shower?
JW: Exactly. Who wants to lift their one hundred and fifty pound husband in to the tub? You are not going to be able to do it, or you will end up needing long term care yourself.
HS: It’s something people don’t think about. The products are so different. You have Taylor who has a young child, people like me who have grandchildren, and some my age who might need what they should have bought years earlier, that their children could buy now.
JW: A great example is that Taylor should buy term insurance that is convertible to permanent. When she gets to my age and Greg’s age, she should convert that, because now we have more disposable income unless you have nineteen children like Greg. You should be able to afford the conversion. When you get to a certain point in life you begin to think about it.
My grandparents passed in 2015 but both had alzheimers and stayed at hospice, or at a care facility that was seven thousand dollars ($7000) a month.
GM: Those places love when you have insurance because then they don’t have to scramble trying to find how you are going to pay for those services, or if this is going to be a short or long term thing. You’re in there and they can take care of you and you don’t have to worry about the money, your family doesn’t have to worry about it. Getting insurance is an unselfish thing to do because it takes the financial burden off your kids and off your spouse, it really does.
Speaking of grandparents, you have an office in Boiling Springs on Main Street which is an old home place.
JW: My great grandmother and great grandfather lived there, and I live I Boiling Springs with my family and we love it there.
GM: People need to think, how am I going to replace income, how am I going to send my child to college, how would my wife survive if I suddenly passed away, how would he or she send the kids to school.
TY: You don’t think about those things until you have kids.
HS: You can’t assume it won’t happen. I’ve had six wrecks in two years, none of them were bad but it could happen at any time.
GM: Six wrecks in two years? The whole point for me is, I see people all the time losing assets because of a tragic health care situation. With the revolutionary changes in life insurance and long term care, if you have those things in place, they will pay off far more than you invest in them. They are also beneficiary assets that allows you to pass them to the kids and grandkids if you don’t use them, tax free. So, there is multiple benefits. A lot of people I meet do have money in insurance, in whole life policies or 401K’s, or a checking account.
JW: Those are sleeping assets. It’s not about use it or lose it anymore.
HS: It used to be though?
JW: That’s exactly right. Now, you use it or keep it.
GM: If people want to contact you and set up a meeting, do they have to come to your office, or will you go to them? How does that work?
JW: One thing I recommend is, they call McIntyre elder law, you have a wonderful process where you evaluate all the things in their life, their needs in life, and you package that up and then that document with their permission can be sent to me. We’ll set up an appointment and then we’ll meet. If they want to find out more information about me, Facebook is the best way, so Facebook WinnInsurance, that is the best way to get ahold of us.
HS: If they don’t have access to Facebook how else can they get in touch with you?
JW: My number is 704-482-7746. When you call that number, you will talk to one of my fantastic staff, Elisha, Lisa or Jody.
GM: I want to thank you for being on the show today Jason.
If you have any questions you can call me at 704-343-6933, or at 828-398-0181. I or my staff will be glad to talk to you and schedule an appointment.
Contact me if you have any questions. Elder Law is what we do!
greg@mcelderlaw.com
Elder Law Attorney
McIntyre Elder Law
123 W. Marion Street
Shelby, NC 28150
704–259–7040
