As stock prices sink, long-term care insurance may be more appealing. Such insurance can help you preserve your assets if you need expensive care. Protecting what you have might be considered retirement insurance; even people who thought they could pay for care out of their own assets might now recognize the need to reduce the risk of expensive care via insurance.
Long-term care insurance can be costly, though. To make it affordable, you might buy a policy that will pay benefits for three years or five years, rather than a policy with no time limit on benefits. Reducing a policy from a lifetime benefit to a three-year maximum can trim the annual cost by more than 50%.
What’s more, the average need for long-term care lasts for around two years. Therefore, a policy that will pay benefits for up to three years may provide all the coverage you ever need.