RETIREMENT
pending on the type of assistance needed and the location. Most people prefer to receive care at home rather than in a nursing home, but home care is generally the more expensive option. Moreover, industry watchers say, the price tag for long-term care is rising at a faster clip than inflation. By 2034, the yearly costs are projected to rise to between $ 102,000 and $ 170,000.
The second and perhaps larger issue is the shortfall of willing and able caregivers. The supply-and-demand mismatch isn’ t new, but it’ s become much worse— with potentially dire consequences.“ This caregiving dilemma is not going away anytime soon,” says Sikorski.
The first wave of retirement-age boomers will soon reach 80 years old, an age at which most of them will almost certainly need some degree of assistance with daily tasks.
She calls it the result of“ an untenable system which is breaking every day.”
Consider this: Baby boomers started reaching retirement age back in 2011. In the 14 years since, the number of Americans age 65 or older has grown to more than 61 million people, or roughly 18 % of the total population, according to U. S. Census data. And that number keeps growing by leaps and bounds.
The first wave of retirement-age boomers will soon reach 80 years old, an age at which most of them will almost certainly need some degree of assistance with daily tasks.
Within families, it’ s usually women who end up setting aside their own lives to care for mom and dad. But even if clients have the funds or long-term-care insurance to pay for expensive professional help, they’ re hard-pressed to find it, since the professional caregivers are not getting paid much and volunteers aren’ t getting financial help.
Sikorski says caregivers should be making something better than McDonald’ s wages, and adds family members who volunteer to help aging or disabled loved ones should be getting Social Security credits for their unpaid labor. They should also, she says, receive paid leave from their employers or be allowed to work remotely so they don’ t lose their jobs when they can’ t show up at the office.
She would also like to see Medicaidtype coverage for long-term care extended to more people.
“ We need to look at not only how to help families [ financially ] but also how to adopt better health outcomes,” she says.
Making matters worse is the current immigration crackdown. According to a recent report from Boston College’ s Center for Retirement Research, immigrants make up 28 % of the long-term-care workforce. Most are naturalized citizens, who should be safe from Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Yet many of them have family members who are undocumented. And other home-care workers carry only temporary immigration authorizations or none at all, so they are“ afraid to go to work during the current immigration crackdown,” the report said.
Planning Ahead
Given the challenges of finding caregiving, experts say people will have to take stock of their lives, at least by age 75.
“ Take a look at where you’ re living and how you would receive care if needed,” says Harry S. Margolis, a Wellesley, Mass.- based attorney who specializes in eldercare( and who is also the author of the Center for Retirement Research report). By 75, he says, most people have stopped working and their children, if any, are likely independent, and by that age people are probably still healthy enough to get ahead of their own care issues.
“ That may mean moving closer to children or into a housing arrangement where you could receive care if needed,” he says. Regardless of who is doing the caregiving, older people should not become too isolated, Margolis says, since“ loneliness has deleterious physical and mental-health effects.”
He adds that your clients should start saving funds for their own future longterm care expenses, not just those of their elders. He would like to see more low-cost housing for seniors and additional funding to update or replace decaying nursing home facilities, though he acknowledges that such measures might have to wait until there’ s a change in government.
Financial advisors might not be able to offer all the solutions for a problem so big and frightening, but that doesn’ t mean they should shy away from talking about it.“ At a minimum, financial advisors should highlight the significant financial risk of not having an extended-care plan in place,” says Tom Beauregard, CEO of HCG Secure in Goshen, Conn. It is a complicated subject, he concedes, and advisors should both educate their clients about it and encourage some type of financial protection. This may require consulting outside experts.
“ Currently, in the U. S., there are more people caring for an aging parent or other elder adult than for a preschool-age child … and the need for eldercare is expected to increase as the population ages,” he says.
He adds that it will take a coordinated effort between the public and private sectors to ease the strain on families. The government, for example, could expand Medicaid eligibility and allow Medicaid dollars to go to family members caring for their loved ones. It could also begin to embrace immigrant labor. In the private sector, more employers could extend paid family leave for caregivers and offer flexible work hours so that volunteer caregivers don’ t have to give up their jobs or their income.
“ Without these kinds of interventions,” Beauregard says, the pain for families“ will not only continue but accelerate.”
48 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | NOVEMBER 2025 WWW. FA-MAG. COM