Seriously — do it, and don't put it on until next week.  Does that sound like a good idea?  Feeling confident you won't drop it?  Probably not.   It doesn't matter how old it is, how advanced it is, or how much it costs.  Without that case, one bad drop can ruin everything. 

Kinda like how they hand a TV actor a brand-new cell phone.  Sleek.  Fully loaded.  Looks great in their hand.  But in your head, you're yelling at the screen: "No way that's their real phone — there's no case on it!"

Something similar is happening today with all of the planning crafted throughout the advisory community; planning focused, in some way, shape, or form, on growing, managing, protecting, and distributing wealth.  Retirement income strategies, tax-efficient withdrawal plans, estate planning, asset allocation models — all of it is designed to give clients confidence, structure, and control.  Because we all know how that ends: drop it once, and it's cracked, broken, or worse — and suddenly, something valuable becomes vulnerable and expensive to fix.

So now think about advisory relationships across the financial services spectrum — Regardless of the advisory role with clients, every one of them hands clients a carefully constructed version of a delicate device:  A financial plan.  A trust.  A tax strategy.  An optimized portfolio.  But without a Long-Term Care component, it's still missing the case - And a dose of reality that when a client experiences a Long-Term Care event, it's your work that gets dropped.

• The retirement plan starts bleeding income.
• The estate plan gets rewritten out of necessity.
• The portfolio becomes the ATM.
• The family becomes the fallback plan.
• The tax planning turns into crisis management.

Pivoting back to that phone for a second…..Why do most people have a sturdy cell phone case?  Because we know the odds.  We've seen it happen — to ourselves or others.   Phones slip, life happens, screens are expensive, and it's all avoidable.  That's why we spend $40 to protect a $1,000+ device.  Not because we expect to drop it…..But because we understand what's at stake if we do – The same logic applies to a client's financial life.   Their assets, income strategy, estate plan, and family legacy aren't worth $1,000 — they're often worth millions, and it's simply prudent to protect all of that from a predictable Long-Term Care event that's one of life's most likely events to unravel everything!

Too many in the advisory community hand clients the plan and skip the case.  No Long-Term Care Planning…..No funding strategy……No care coordination……No meaningful conversation about what happens when independence fades, caregiving begins, or housing needs shift. That polished advisory relationship won't be remembered for years of performance — it'll be defined by the moment it failed, when protection was missing, and the plan imploded.

Now that you have a better perspective on what could unravel most of your clients' planning, there's a fundamental question to answer:  Does every client have a case for it?