Use Emotional Connections to Open the Door to Long-Term Care Discussions with Your Clients
Opening a conversation with a client about a plan for long-term care can be tough. Financial Advisors often ask us:
- “Where do I begin?”
- “How do I bring up such a sensitive topic?”
- “How do I avoid common objections and misconceptions?”
Long-term care planning conversations seem to be laced with land mines, possibly threatening your relationship with your client. But once you master our tried-and-true way to start these conversations, the rest flows easily.
The #1 goal is to listen.
One crucial tactic for beginning these conversations on the right foot is to always put your agenda aside; remove thoughts of products, sales goals, etc. from your mind. Get your clients talking about their own needs and fears. Ask open-ended questions and then sit back and listen.
Understand that any long-term care planning discussion is likely to extend over a few meetings, or might even be a conversation you bookmark for follow-up in a year or more. The bottom line is the client needs to be in the right emotional place to seriously discuss their long-term care plan and how they will fund it. If they aren’t, you will likely go nowhere and encounter a lot of frustration along the way.
Create a personal connection
Rattling off statistics and costs of care rarely moves a client to take steps to plan for long-term care. Without an emotional, personal connection, clients will likely present objections and roadblocks and insist that they’re the exception to the statistics.
Action comes from a personal connection on the topic. You want to find out if your client:
- Has ever been a caregiver
- Knows someone who currently is or was a caregiver
- Knows a care recipient
If your client has personally witnessed the emotional, financial, and physical stress that comes from providing or needing care, they will tap into all of the emotions necessary for proper consideration of their own potential future needs.
This is borne out by multiple studies over the years including a 2022 study sponsored by The Certification for Long-Term Care (CLTC), Home Instead, and TCARE. It found that while 70% of caregivers surveyed said they would have enough money to live on comfortably in retirement, 84% said they were concerned that long-term care needs could derail their retirement financial plans.
As caregivers themselves, in other words, they understood personally how their retirement plans could be turned inside out by long-term care needs.
Additionally, the survey reported these caregivers understood that they are at least somewhat likely to need their own care at some point in the future. Almost 90% said they were influenced to plan for their own care, which suggests that if you don’t help them plan, they’ll find someone else who will.
Get started by asking a simple question
Knowing this, we come back to the original question: “How do you get the long-term care planning conversation started?”
A great way to do so is by asking your client a simple question:
“Have you ever been a caregiver or known someone who has? Or someone who has needed care themselves?”
It’s important to describe what you mean by caregiving, i.e. providing help with things like shopping, preparing meals, paying bills, or getting to and from appointments.
Make sure your client understands that needing help with chores and travel may progress to needing help with daily activities like bathing, dressing, using the toilet, or moving independently from one room to another. And touch on how beyond physical mobility issues, cognitive problems can jeopardize the person’s ability to live safely on their own on many levels.
If they nod their head, that yes, they have had this experience or observed others go through it, ask them to share their story with you.
If they don’t, ask them if they would mind you sharing a story of your own (come prepared).
And if that doesn’t resonate, ask this
Another way to get the conversation going is to ask your client if they plan to live a long life. Most do—that’s why you are working with them! After all, if they don’t plan to live well into their retirement years, then they really don’t need your planning services.
Most will answer “yes” to this question. And when they do, you have the perfect opportunity to ask, “During that long life, do you think it’s reasonable to expect you might need help maintaining your independence due to the effects of aging?”
Once again, ask them if they know someone who has experienced this. Ask them to describe what kind of care their friend or family member needed. Once they share their story, ask them “Do you think you might need care like that some day?”
Whether you engage their emotional connection by asking about a caregiver experience or by asking the longevity question, your client will naturally start to visualize the possibility of their own long-term care. The door is now wide open for you to ask your client, “Do you have a plan?”
Long-term care discussions with clients start with human connection
The most important conversations advisors have with clients rarely start with charts, projections, or product features.
They start with a moment of genuine curiosity about someone’s life — their experiences caring for a parent, their hopes for independence as they age, or their desire not to become a burden to their family.
When advisors create space for those conversations, something powerful happens. Long-term care stops being an uncomfortable topic and becomes what it really is: a thoughtful discussion about protecting the people and the lives clients care about most.
That’s where real planning begins.
Watch this 4-minute video for Don Connelly’s perspective on long-term care conversations — and one planning idea advisors should understand.
A Resource for Advisors Navigating Long-Term Care Conversations
For advisors who want to better understand how this type of solution is positioned within a long-term care conversation, we invite you to review the Bridge Annuity solution.
Learn more about the Bridge AnnuityAbout the Bridge® Annuity and Long-Term Care Solution
Long-term care planning is one of the most difficult conversations advisors have with clients—especially when clients are hesitant to engage or underestimate future risks.
Don Connelly serves as a spokesperson for the Bridge® annuity and long-term care solution, which is designed to help address these challenges by combining growth potential with access to long-term care benefits.
For advisors who would like additional information about how the Bridge® solution works and when it may be appropriate, you can learn more here:
☛ Learn more about the Bridge® annuity and long-term care solution
