It’s an accepted fact that financial planning incorporates many different methods to keep Father Time at arm’s length — Dollar Cost Averaging, asset allocation, bucket strategies, and hedging, to name a few.  The reason is that the problem with timing anything is timing, and the problem with planning, or in most cases, not planning future Long-Term Care needs, is the same thing:  Timing….and biology is human timing. 

Actually, it's worse, because when biology causes health to collapse, the consumer loses control of the plan, and both Best Interest and fiduciary functionality collapse with it.  Biology is something that can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, and doesn’t respond to optimism or planning assumptions.  And it won’t stop because a binder section is missing.

This is what that looks like in real life:

• When 65-year-old Betty Boomer is told she can self-fund future care needs, she doesn't hear "with 10-15 years of growth" as the caveat, and that doesn't matter when early-onset Alzheimer’s starts at 68.

• Or when Ned Worth needs care at 82, and his largest holding is the business his son now runs, and there’s no liquidity to keep Ned “aging in place” like he wants.

• Or when Grandma in Dallas needs care, and her adult children live in Denver, Detroit, and Phoenix, where spreadsheets don’t change bed sheets, show up when the caregiver has the flu, or take calls at 2:00 AM when the paramedics call. 

If the who, what, when, where, how, and why don’t exist in the plan, any reliance on Best Interest and fiduciary functionality is misplaced because biology was the earthquake that financial planning never felt, and the tsunami on the horizon is demographic inevitability.   And while today’s compliance guardrails protect the firm, how does that protect the individual advisor, accountant, attorney, or planner?  When does omission cross into something more unforgiving?  Can it be proven that healthcare is a risk that must be carried on the balance sheet, away from the asset allocation and efficient frontier?  Does that make self-funding a myth?  Should the trust ensure independence before it ensures asset transfer?  Does the tax planning consider all of the levers and gears available to the client in the tax code?

2026 will be different....

There will be accountability.  There will be quantification.  There will be a realization that sequence and timing can’t overcome the mathematical certainty in one simple truth:  Every day, every client, everywhere in America is one day closer to biology taking over everything you’ve done—and everything you didn’t do – leaving Americans financially unmodeled, unplanned, and unprepared.

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