Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The fix? She had to give up any food with cholesterol, including the small amount of boneless chicken and fish she ate. She adopted a whole foods plant based diet. In a few months, her total was down to the 150's, no statins.
Back in the 70's I was on the Pritikin Diet which is essentially a vegan one.
My wife and I got our cholesterol tested back then. Mine was 108, and hers was 97. I believe that babies are born with a cholesterol of about 85. The doctor at the time said they'd never seen ones that low and simply did understand how we could have that low a C. Now we are Vegan largely because of acid reflux. Vegans don't get acid reflux because we don't eat anything that requires acid to digest. After awhile your body realizes that this is the case and no longer produces stomach acid except in extreme situations.
I don't even bother with that kind of thing now. I've been a Vegan for almost 10 years. While I can still remember the smell and taste of bacon, I've actually moved on. Every once a in a great while I will have a tiny little bit of cheese, and now and then I will have some cookies that were made with eggs.
A good book to read on Plant diets is: HOW NOT TO DIE.
The poor/indigent will get Medicaid, sometimes on top of Medicare if they are that badly off. Meanwhile the better off/wealthy will do what they have always done; self finance any sort of LTC required.
That leaves really just the middle and perhaps working classes that have to worry about financing LTC. Even there many will do what has been done for years; spend down/arrange their (or parent, or whomever) finances so they can get Medicaid.
How good Medicaid is varies by state, but for those who never had much and or have few alternatives it will do.
The issue I see with buying LTC insurance is that you don't know what future premiums will be.
You can sign up for the insurance in your 50's, then the premium keeps increasing as you get moved into higher and higher risk groups, then 30 years later you need to go into LTC facility or need home care, but you canceled the policy a few years earlier because the premiums became unaffordable. You wasted 25+ years of premium payments and then still have no insurance when you need it.
Here we go again with the fallacy that self-insure is not an option. There's zero data to support that.
I've posted many times here my experience with several family members, only one (my mom) of whom had LTCi.
DH's mom, aunt & uncle, and my aunt all were lower middle class folks who successfully self-insured, i.e. their retirement income flows covered their LTC costs.
DH's mom's modest income flow (SS+rental income on her house+ VA A&A) to this day covers her LTC costs. DH's aunt & uncle (he was a US postal employee, she a county government employee) cobbled together SS, pension, and income from house sale to cover their 3+ year LTC costs, with money left over for their heirs.
My mom had LTCi that paid out but didn't come close to covering the premiums she had paid in for 20+ years. The policy gave her a weird peace of mind so I was ok with that.
For the most part, folks who can afford increasingly extravagant LTCi premiums can also afford to self-insure. LTCi is just one more option, it's not a one size fits all.
I never said you can't self insure , i said most folks who say they will make no plan for doing soo.
anyone with some money left can self insure and pay for things . Key word is money left. Depending where you are a snf can run 120k a year. It does where we live.
How long would most folks be able to sustain that from the pile of money allocated to producing income without choking off the income stream tovthe stay at home spouse.
How about if you needed care in 2009 and your portfolio was 30% less and we didn't recover so fast.
So I never said you can't self insure . What i said most folks fail at having a plan to self insure. To really do it right you need to set that money a side where it is not counted as part of the income money where it can be spend down if you have poor sequencing and returns..
It needs to be a seperate fund isolated on its own in a CONSERVATIVE INVESTMENT where it can be counted on to be there.
Our estate attorney is one of the biggest in nyc. He was telling us how a good part of the business is folks who planned to self insure.
Now that their spouse went in to a facility they are realizing that their expenses depended on that portfolio being in place and with the 100k plus a year to pay they are realizing that if this extends out their own income will have to take a nasty hit and they can't afford that hit.
They made the classic mistake of making their insurance money part of the goose laying the golden eggs of their income stream not realizing now they have to kill a bunch of those geese.
So how they want help as the stay at home spouse goes in to survival mode.
So i am saying , if you are going to self insure then do it. Get that money out of the main stream investments where it can be greatly reduced in times of poor markets and Don't count on it for generating part of you income since it may not be there.
My feeling is if i had to take a big chunk of money and set it a side invested conservatively , i was better off leaving it more aggressively invested and with a piece of the higher return pay the policy premium.
The idea behind a safe withdrawal rate is that it counts on spending down principal if need be to even zero if it has to is something folks either forget or don't know .
You can't really self insure when that money is part of the income stream unless you need so little of it for living that for all purposes you really are not spending it down.
Folks with good pensions may be in that position.
You may want to make sure that money is just about guaranteed to be there as well for staying out of a snf facility and being able to modify your home if needed. So it can cost a pile of money to stay out of an snf too modifying that home and having in home care
Last edited by mathjak107; 07-12-2016 at 03:06 AM..
Self insuring is a plan as long as you are setting that money aside to account for that. It also means that the money you set aside for self insurance is money you cannot use for something else.
Yes the possibility exists that premiums will rise. Well health care costs rise so not taking the inflation adjustment premiums could leave you short but.... it will even if you do not take it still cover X dollars that will not have to come out of your nest egg.
There are many options out there that it warrants looking into it. No one is saying not to self insure or to buy into it. These articles are suggesting investigating it. It is hard to imagine it sometimes if you have no pension that provides a steady income. But there are options there as well.
Exactly my point . Self insuring means doing just that and that money should not be part of anything else.
Not only that but what happens when you need care before being fully funded. As i mentioned previously my coworker age 55 was painting . He fell off the ladder , broke his hip and had a stroke during hip surgery . He is paralyzed .This was a reminder that crap happens not just in old age.
This is a year and a half now he is in a home in long island and his wife and son are in terrible financial shape between the loss of income and the expenses of the snf.
They were not prepared for anything like this at this point . This only happens to old people they thought.
My mom had LTCi that paid out but didn't come close to covering the premiums she had paid in for 20+ years.
This is so true, and one reason why I don't bother with insurance of most types. I self-insure.
I dislike insurance companies on principle. They are a private, profit-making enterprise that we are often forced into doing business with. They do not have our best interests in mind, only the company bottom line. The sales agents have to make their commissions, and most people would be shocked to know just how much of their premiums go into the pockets of insurance sales agents.
I realize that many people cannot afford to self-insure, but they may be ignorant of how much they'd actually save if they did. The LTC bills will get paid one way or another, but how many realize that it's their own money paying those bills (not the insurance company's money)?
You could go with one of those linked benefit policy's but the problem is most are not inflation adjusted. They just provide 2x the death benefit for ltc.
20 years from now that may be useless as an amount . Then you also have the same issue with tying up a huge lump sum of money at low return in the policy.
If anyone remembers the story money magazine did on us about 10 years ago i was all for self insuring. But when i went head to head with money mags team of pro's they were at odds with that idea.
In the end i realized that they were right. Trying to self insure while trying to preserve and protect assets have to many variables that all have to coincide.
Even trying to self insure over the look back period can be tough. They can change that time frame again just as they already did when they went from 3 to 5 years.
What happens when you set a side 5 years of money and now it is 7 years or 10 years.
This is so true, and one reason why I don't bother with insurance of most types. I self-insure.
I dislike insurance companies on principle. They are a private, profit-making enterprise that we are often forced into doing business with. They do not have our best interests in mind, only the company bottom line. The sales agents have to make their commissions, and most people would be shocked to know just how much of their premiums go into the pockets of insurance sales agents.
I realize that many people cannot afford to self-insure, but they may be ignorant of how much they'd actually save if they did. The LTC bills will get paid one way or another, but how many realize that it's their own money paying those bills (not the insurance company's money)?
It depends on your state and what they offer as perks after the insurance runs out.
I was more interested in the perks after the 3 years insurance runs out then the 3 years coverage.
We need no asset shifting , no trusts and no additional planning and all assets are protected forever. Once the insurance runs out , which covers 3 years in a snf or 6 years in home and assisted living as long as the facility takes medicaid the state agrees to pay the bills.
But even more important , even if you used trusts to protect your assets the income to the stay at home spouse is restricted to what could be impoverishment levels if medicaid is used .
The agreement with ny is they would like us to contribute 25% of whatever the income is towards the spouse in the home's care but it isn't mandatory.
Even 25% less is a great deal considering how low medicaid income allowed can be to a stay at home spouse.
All well and good you preserved a million in assets , now try living on the income. Typically you can't ,they take it.
So these perks after the insurance can be very valuable. If it was just insurance coverage i am not certain i would have bought the policy but those perks really made it worth it.
More and more states do not want their seniors impoverished because we have a bad long term care system. They give us the tools and rules to help us not become impoverished but like our tax system they leave it to you to figure out what to do .
As a now famous judge in Ct said he didn't want both the stay at home spouse and the spouse in a home on public assistance because the medicaid system left them both close to broke.
Last edited by mathjak107; 07-12-2016 at 05:19 AM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
