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For more than a century, Labor Day has recognized the contributions American workers make throughout their careers. But by the time retirement arrives, all those years of work have often produced something else worth recognizing: a home, savings, retirement accounts, investments, and the financial security that may have taken decades to build.
Those accomplishments rarely happen overnight. A paid-off home can represent decades of mortgage payments. A retirement account reflects thousands of paychecks and years of saving. Even modest financial security may be the result of countless decisions to work, save, and prepare for a future when earning a paycheck is no longer part of everyday life. Financial security in retirement takes planning and commitment, something the U.S. Department of Labor also emphasizes in its retirement guidance.
This Labor Day, there is another question worth considering: If you spent a lifetime building financial security, have you considered how the cost of long-term care could affect it?
WHAT A LIFETIME OF WORK BUILDS
Retirement planning usually focuses on how much to save, when to retire, how to create reliable income, and how to make those resources last. Long-term care is much easier to leave out of the picture. No one particularly enjoys imagining a future in which they may need substantial help at home, assisted living, or nursing-home care.
Yet the need for care can become one of the most significant financial challenges a family faces, and it may arrive after decades of carefully building the very resources intended to support retirement. The Department of Labor specifically includes long-term care among the needs people should consider as part of retirement planning.
Ruxandra Oprescu, a paralegal with Estate Planning & Elder Law Services, P.C. who has 15 years of experience in estate planning and elder law, regularly works with families navigating these concerns. One of the most common questions she hears is what options families have as long-term care costs continue to rise. She also sees particular concern when one spouse requires care while the other remains at home and needs continued financial security.
Shelly Morell, the firm’s Operations Manager and Paralegal, hears that concern from another angle. Families often come to the firm wondering how they can protect what their parents accumulated over a lifetime from the cost of nursing-home care. For Shelly, helping families navigate difficult planning concerns is part of helping them feel more prepared for what lies ahead.
The concern is not simply how to pay another expense. It is what that expense could mean for the financial foundation someone may have spent an entire working life creating.
THE PART RETIREMENT PLANS CAN MISS
Most of us have some picture of retirement in mind. Perhaps it includes traveling, spending more time with grandchildren, enjoying a cottage, pursuing hobbies, or simply having more freedom over how each day is spent. We save for that version because it is the one we hope to experience.
Planning for long-term care does not mean replacing that optimism with fear. It means recognizing that retirement can unfold differently than expected and considering how your financial and legal planning would respond if it did.
Long-term care also rarely affects only the person receiving it. If one spouse requires significant care, the other may still depend on the home, income, savings, and resources that supported them both. Adult children may suddenly become involved in finding care, managing appointments, understanding benefits, or helping parents make decisions. What began as one person’s care need can quickly reshape an entire family’s financial picture.
After working for decades to reach retirement, it makes sense to consider not only how you want to live during those years, but what may be needed to protect that life if your circumstances change.
WHEN “LATER” BECOMES NOW
Shelly has seen how quickly long-term care planning can become urgent. Families frequently contact the firm after a loved one receives a serious diagnosis and suddenly realize there are legal, financial, and care decisions requiring attention. Her advice to families about avoiding that situation is refreshingly straightforward: “Plan, plan, plan!”
That advice takes on greater meaning when you consider how much preparation goes into everything else, we associate with retirement. People may spend decades contributing to retirement accounts, paying down mortgages, building savings, purchasing insurance, and calculating when they can finally stop working. Yet the possibility of needing long-term care can remain somewhere on the “we’ll deal with that later” list.
When later arrives as a diagnosis, hospitalization, fall, or significant decline, families may be trying to understand what kind of care is needed, where it should be provided, how it will be paid for, what legal planning already exists, and what options may still be available. Starting the conversation earlier does not require predicting exactly what will happen. It simply provides more time to understand what could happen and prepare accordingly.
PLANNING BEYOND RETIREMENT
Ruxandra brings a similar philosophy to the planning itself. One misconception she encounters is the idea that estate planning is a surface-level process. In her experience, gaining a deeper understanding of family dynamics and potential future changes is important when developing planning intended to preserve a family’s legacy.
That becomes particularly relevant when long-term care enters the picture. Ruxandra notes that estate planning through a firm that also focuses on elder law can, when appropriate, contemplate future transitions and preserve options related to long-term care and special-needs planning. Rather than focusing exclusively on what ultimately happens to someone’s assets, that broader perspective recognizes that circumstances during retirement can affect those assets as well.
There is no single long-term care plan that works for every family. Health, finances, family relationships, existing planning, and individual goals all matter. But there is an interesting parallel to the retirement savings many of us spent our working years building: time matters. Just as preparing for retirement generally works better when it begins before the final day on the job, conversations about future care can benefit from beginning before care is urgently needed.
WHAT ALL THAT WORK WAS FOR
Labor Day celebrates workers and their contributions, but it can also be an opportunity to appreciate what years of work have made possible. The house where your family grew up may represent decades of mortgage payments. Your retirement account may represent years of contributing a little from every paycheck. Your savings may reflect countless choices between spending today and putting something aside for tomorrow.
The financial security you built for yourself, a spouse, children, or grandchildren represents more than numbers on a statement. It represents years of your life.
Long-term care planning is not about assuming those accomplishments will disappear. It is about recognizing that the possibility of future care deserves a place in the same conversation that helped you build them. Preparing for retirement should not end with asking whether you have saved enough to stop working. After spending a lifetime earning, saving, and building, it is also worth considering how those resources can continue supporting you if the retirement you experience looks different from the one you imagined.
PROTECT WHAT YOU WORKED FOR
On September 28, Estate Planning & Elder Law Services, P.C. will host the free educational webinar “How to Pay for Long-Term Care Without Losing Your Life Savings,” presented by Ruxandra Oprescu and Shelly Morell.
Drawing from their experience working with families facing long-term care concerns, Shelly and Ruxandra will take a closer look at an issue many people spend far less time preparing for than retirement itself: how future care needs can affect the financial security that took years, and often decades, to create. Their respective experience with families facing urgent planning needs and navigating long-term care transitions makes the topic especially relevant to the work they do every day.
This Labor Day, take a moment to recognize not only how hard you worked, but what all that work made possible. Then join us September 28 to learn how thoughtful long-term care planning can help protect what took a lifetime to build.
