Life insurance with long term care rider provides cost effective coverage for long term care, and more
Life expectancy in the US increases every year; as people live longer lives, you know that some type of long term care insurance is a good value for many if not most of your clients. Many will certainly need long term care at some point, and the cost of this type of care will only go up as time goes on.
That said, you also know that there are drawbacks to the typical standalone long term care insurance policy – drawbacks that vanish when you offer clients life insurance with long term care rider as an alternative.
Long term care insurance premiums will increase over the life of the policy, but won't with the life insurance/LTC rider choice
Rising premiums can make long term care insurance policies prohibitively expensive for your clients to maintain, such that they will eventually be priced out of coverage and be forced to drop the policies -- and once dropped, of course, there's no residual benefit to having standalone LTCi policies. Clients are simply out their premium payments with nothing to show for them.
This can be avoided if you offer clients life insurance with long term care insurance rider instead. As with a standard life insurance policy, premiums are one-time or fixed, meaning that your clients won't be priced out of their LTC coverage or be forced to drop it. It's always there if they need it, as long as the policy is in force.
LTCi policies are useless for anything other than long term care, unlike life insurance with LTC rider
If your clients end up not needing long term care, they've got nothing to show for the money they put into long term care policy premiums, since the insurance doesn't actually get used. Like term life insurance, a standalone long term care insurance policy only actually returns a benefit if it's used for its singular purpose.
That won't be the case if you offer your clients life insurance with long term care rider instead. This alternative gives clients life insurance that may accrue cash value just as with a standard policy; however, clients may also use the death benefits of these policies to pay for long term care coverage if it becomes necessary. If long term care is never required, death benefits are paid out in full to beneficiaries. If long term care is required, death benefit balance (less LTC costs) will be paid out to beneficiaries.
Clients may balk at purchasing standalone LTCi policies until it's too late; not a problem with life insurance with LTC rider
Finally, a third problem with standalone long term care insurance policies is that your clients have to buy them while they're still healthy if they're to be cost-effective. If your clients balk at purchasing this insurance because they don't want to think about the fact that they may someday need it, it may be too late and they'll be out of luck.
Life insurance with long term care rider may be a more "indirect" or "softer" option for them, because it provides LTC coverage as a matter of course with the insurance policy they buy; it doesn't "force" them to consider the harsh reality, if you will, of LTC coverage alone. When the LTC rider is simply something "extra" (an "extra" that may not be used anyway), it's often easier for clients to agree to it.
