Genworth Long Term Care Costs
The Genworth Cost of Long Term Care Survey Tool
A tool to help estimate median costs in major cities and all 50 states.
Here’s an overview of how to use Genworth’s Cost of Care Survey tool. Genworth is a Fortune 500 insurance holding company that offers long term care insurance and other financial protection products. Genworth is among the 18 traditional long term care providers including Mass Mutual, Mutual of Omaha, Transamerica and John Hancock to name a few. At The Long Term Care Planning Group, we are able to work with all long term care insurance providers to optimize your long term care planning.
This tool is available to everyone. Let’s walk through an example about how you might consider using this tool for your own planning purposes and our follow up discussion with you.
When you go to the website, there's an interactive map.1 Genworth studies the cost of care for 10 to 12 cities and every state in the United States. When you can enter a city, state or ZIP code. For example, let’s enter Atlanta which shows the cost areas they study. There's a component of the website which displays the monthly median costs.
In this Atlanta example for 2019, you see homemaker services are about $4,000 a month. Adult daycare can be $1,500 a month and a semi-private room in a nursing home is $7,756 a month. And a private room is more expensive at $8,669.
You can look at costs on an hourly, daily, monthly and annual rates. These numbers for Atlanta total $48,000 a year. We can also see the change since 2018 has been 5% which means the estimated cost of care increased.
You can also look at the median costs in Atlanta for the nursing home, a semi-private room. The median cost is $93,000 for 2019. You see that it increased almost 15% since 2018. As you can see, this tool is very useful in helping figure out estimated costs for your long term care.
And it can help you understand the cost of care anywhere in the United States. This is important since some people will decide to move to a different location to be closer to family or because they plan to retire somewhere other than where they are currently living. To help with the location decision, you can compare two areas. Understanding the various costs based on geographic locations helps you put long term care premiums into its proper perspective.
Another important use of this tool is to calculate future costs based on Genworth’s long historical data collection and economic predictions. Using the Atlanta example again, move the marker on the timeline from 2019 to 2029 to see the forecasted median costs for long term care. No surprise, you will see the numbers increase. You can even change the rate of inflation if you don’t agree with their preset rate.
Hopefully, this long term care issue and the associated challenges never present themselves to you or a loved one. But if it does, you must be clear on what the numbers are now and what they could be five, 10, 20 years down the line.
While Atlanta was used in this example and is where The Long Term Care Planning Group office is located, we are able to help people in all fifty states. Using the Genworth tool is a part of our confidential and consultative approach to make a complex process simple for our clients.
As you can see, the Genworth tool offers a lot of reliable information. It's extremely helpful to determine estimated costs as you're building your long term care plan. At the very least, you’ll better understand what costs are involved should the need for long term care present itself to you and your family.
If you purchase long term care insurance, it will provide a stream of income to cover care related expenses in the location and setting of your choosing. If you don't purchase long term care, people end up using funds from their 401k, their IRAs and the equity of their house to defray these costs. Once their finances are depleted to a certain minimum income and asset level as set forth by the state's Medicaid system, long term care expenses are paid for by the individual. To have the most options and get the best premium choices, we highly recommend you do your long term care planning and purchase the insurance when you're younger than 50 and most likely healthier than if you wait until you’re older.
Give us a call to walk you through the Genworth Cost of Long Term Care Survey Tool and talk about your long term care options (678) 814-5088. This is a complimentary, no-obligation conversation.