Episode 208: Long-Term Care Planning for Childfree Adults

September 10, 2026

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31 Minutes

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Episode Summary

Most people file long-term care under “deal with it later,” which is exactly the wrong time to start. Jesse Vickey of Long Term What? joins Bri Conn, CFP® to make one of the most avoided money conversations feel clear and even hopeful, from the four ways people pay for care to why your healthy window is the moment to decide your options.

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Nobody wants to picture the version of later life where their mind or body stops cooperating, so most people file long-term care under “deal with it later.” Jesse Vickey built a whole company on the belief that later is exactly the wrong time to start. The founder of Long Term What? joins Bri Conn, CFP® to make one of the most avoided money conversations feel clear and even a little hopeful, walking through what long-term care actually is, the four ways people pay for it, and why roughly 70 percent of adults will need it while the average long-term care bill already runs about $129,000 a year. For Childfree adults especially, who can’t assume an adult child will step in as the default caregiver, the planning window and the health that lets you qualify for coverage are everything. The throughline is one Jesse comes back to again and again: the best time to plan is while you’re still healthy enough to have all your options open.

Key Takeaways:

  • Understanding Long-Term Care: What long-term care actually means, the two triggers insurers use to define it, and why 70 percent of adults will need care while costs climb around 5 percent a year.
  • The Four Payment Methods: The four ways people pay for long-term care, from relying on family to Medicaid to insurance to self-funding, and how to think through which fits your life.
  • The Psychology of Long-Term Care Insurance: Why insurance can act as a psychological “permission slip” to actually accept care, when self-funders often deny it to themselves to preserve their savings.
  • The Critical Role of Health Pre-Screening: Why a health pre-screen before you formally apply is critical, how a single recorded decline can follow you across insurers, and why your healthy window is the time to act.
  • Key Policy Characteristics to Watch: What to look for in a policy, from benefit length and cash versus reimbursement to rate-increase risk and the new coverage that finally follows you abroad.

Episode Guest:

Jesse Vickey is the founder of Long Term What?, a company built on the belief that long-term care is one of the biggest untold stories in America. After graduating from Duke and beginning his career on Wall Street, he left banking to found two mission-driven companies, one using humor to teach college graduates the life skills school never covered, and another connecting busy families with in-home meal prep. Through Long Term What?, he now helps people cut through the confusion of long-term care, learn their options, talk with their families, and build a plan, guiding them through insurance when it’s the right fit.

Connect with Jesse Vickey:

About Childfree Insights:

Childfree Insights focuses on planning for solo aging and later life without children. It offers trusted education on financial planning, estate planning, and building support systems for people aging independently. Home of Childfree Wealth® and Childfree Trust®.

Connect with Us:

Ready to work on building better financial habits? Connect with our financial planning team at childfreewealth.com or learn more about estate planning at childfreetrust.com.

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Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational & entertainment purposes. Please consult your advisor before implementing any ideas heard on this podcast.

Bri Conn, CFP®: [00:00:00] Welcome to Childfree Life by Design. Today, we’re talking about long-term care planning and what it means for people who are building a Childfree life on their own terms. I’m Bri Conn, and in this episode, we’re covering the basics of long-term care, the difference between self-funding and insurance, and how you can feel more confident in planning for the future. If you’ve ever wondered how you can prepare for this important life stage, this conversation will give you the clarity and tools to make intentional decisions that support the life you want.

Intro: From Childfree Insights, this is Childfree Life by Design, the go-to resource for building the Childfree life you want. Every episode gives you practical guidance, clear direction, and meaningful conversations to help you live intentionally and design a future on your terms. This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please consult your advisor before implementing any ideas heard on this podcast.

Bri Conn, CFP®: After graduating from Duke, [00:01:00] Jesse began his career on Wall Street. He later left banking to found two mission-driven companies, one using humor to teach college graduates the life skills they never learned in school, and another connecting busy families with in-home meal prep. Now he’s channeling that same passion for solving real problems into Long Term What? A company built on the belief that long-term care is one of the biggest untold stories in America. With seventy percent of adults expected to need care in their lifetime, Jesse is on a mission to normalize the care conversation, cut through the confusion, and help families plan ahead with clarity and confidence. Through Long Term What?, he offers practical, engaging guidance to help people learn their options, talk with their families, and create a plan. And when insurance is the right fit, he helps them navigate it. So Jesse Vickey, welcome to the show.

Jesse Vickey: Thank you and compliments to saying long-term what with such emphasis.

Bri Conn, CFP®: Yes. When I was watching all your videos, I noticed the emphasis on the what every time, and I like it.

Jesse Vickey: Well, thanks for having [00:02:00] me on the show. One of the big reasons that I started this company was to educate folks. You saw my YouTube channel and you saw my blog, but to be on a podcast like this is great. It’s the thing that I enjoy most about the jobs. Thanks for having me.

Bri Conn, CFP®: Absolutely. I’m glad you’re here to talk about this because for many people, long-term care is something that they think about, and they either wanna push off or they just don’t know how to navigate it. So can you give us just a practical starting point for people when we’re thinking about long-term care, of why it’s important to start planning for this and why pushing it off is probably not the best route to go. Instead, let’s learn more about it.

Jesse Vickey: I think a lot of people really don’t wanna talk about it just because they have to think about mortality and getting old, and those are sometimes yucky things. But before we get started, I think to your point, just defining what even long-term care is. Put simply, it’s really when your mind and your body just don’t work like they used to. Insurers have to [00:03:00] define it even more specifically, so they have triggers for what long-term care means. And insurers define it as cognitive decline, think Alzheimer’s or dementia, so needing help with that, or needing help with two out of six activities of daily living. And those are things like bathing and dressing, which are the most common because they just require more dexterity in the hands and such. To answer your question, why is it important to talk about and think about and plan early, I think that’ll be a theme that we’ll talk about throughout this podcast. But, the reason why it’s so important is, in your intro you mentioned that over half of everybody needs care, and that’s just such a big, big number. There was a study that said 70%. And the other big thing is it’s just expensive. I would encourage any of your listeners to look at assisted living costs in their area, to see what the current costs are. Nationally, the average is about 75 grand a year for assisted living and home care, meaning somebody [00:04:00] coming into your home, can be north of over 100 grand a year for just eight hours a day. So if you were to imagine, in cognitive decline, you’re probably gonna need a lot more care than just eight hours. And those costs keep going up. They’re going up about 5% a year. And just to throw a couple more stats out there, the average amount of care for people is typically around three years. And the big wild card is memory care, and that can often last for more than eight years. With that said, I would say that long-term care is the biggest problem in the US that no one’s talking about. There’s a lot of big problems, and a lot of them get press, but this one really doesn’t get the coverage that it deserves.

Bri Conn, CFP®: I agree with you. It’s something that we don’t talk about, and we don’t wanna talk about. And more and more baby boomers are reaching the stage where that is an important conversation that needs to happen, and to be prepared for and plan for it. So we’ve got the definition of what it is and why to start with it. How do you start planning [00:05:00] for preparing for how you’re gonna pay for long-term care, go into it?

Jesse Vickey: I think there’s a couple of different ways to look at this. One is how do you pay for it? Another is, how do you get care? Potentially care for your parents and then care for yourself. So what we can do is dive into just how the dollars work to start off with. There’s generally four different ways that people pay for this. The first one is frankly just not paying for it and having your family take care of you. It’s really, really common just because this is expensive and there’s a pull on the adult children to take up a lot of that role. The second is having Medicaid pay for you. So Medicare, which is kind of health insurance for folks over sixty-five, does not pay for long-term care. Medicaid, which is public assistance, can pay for long-term care, but you really have to be in tough, dire straits. In most states, [00:06:00] it means that your assets have to be under about two thousand dollars and that your income has to be under thirty. And even then, that means that you’re getting care in a facility that accepts Medicaid, and there’s sometimes limited spots for that. The third way that people pay for it is through insurance. What you’re really doing is you’re saying, “I don’t wanna take all the risk myself,” and you’re kind of sharing it with other people. And then the last one is just self-funding. If you look around the internet, a lot of advisors say that if you have over three million dollars in liquid assets, not including your home, it’s worthwhile thinking about paying for this on your own. And I think it’s true. I definitely think it’s worthwhile trying to think about it if you have the funds to be able to do that. A lot of conversations are about whether you should self-fund or whether or not you should buy insurance. A couple of points for insurance is that, if you spend a dollar in insurance, it typically buys you three to five dollars or [00:07:00] so of coverage right away. So there’s just a lot of more money for you, and all of that is paid tax-free, which is great. And insurance also just gives you a little bit more control, to getting the care that you deserve, if you wanna stay at home, being able to pay for a caregiver. A lot of times when people are thinking through that decision of whether or not it’s insurance or self-funding, typically, I recommend for people to think through, what are they trying to insure? Is it the more likely scenario of needing care for three years, or is it that scenario that it can be a lot more expensive for memory care, where you need north of eight plus years of care? And that’s when it can really hurt. For me, my wife and I just recently purchased insurance ourselves, we have a number of reasons why we did it. But one of the things that I think about is as I’m planning for retirement, I am in my early fifties, the big unknown for this cost, will it be three hundred thousand dollars when I get older, or will it be a million and a half? I have a little bit better planning ability knowing that that risk is [00:08:00] taken off the table. I don’t have to over-reserve for funds and then not go on that trip or under-reserve. It helps me in that respect.

Bri Conn, CFP®: ‘Cause it gives you a little bit of wiggle room there. And you mentioned it gives a little bit more control, too. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because when I see people who are looking at insurance and deciding whether or not they should go for it or if they don’t wanna go for it, one of the big questions that they say is, “I don’t know that I’ll have control if I purchase insurance. But if I self-fund, it feels more like I’ll have control.” So can you talk about what you mean by insurance gives more control?

Jesse Vickey: So insurance for long-term care has changed over the years. And historically, the way that it’s worked is you submit a receipt, you have to get the okay, and then you get reimbursed for it. One of the nice things about a lot of policies today is that they pay in cash, which means that there’s no real oversight in terms of [00:09:00] how you can use that money. If you are in a situation where you need care, you just get a check, and that check can be used to pay for a neighbor coming over to help you. It can be somebody that isn’t a formal caregiver, that isn’t working with an agency. It means that you can buy any type of personal equipment in your home. In 30 years, there might be robots running around and giving us care. So it just provides a lot of flexibility. Insurance still gives you the chance to do that. And in terms of control, comparing it to doing it yourself versus going through insurance, both of those provide a lot of control. But both of those are the ideal situations. A lot of people don’t have the funds to do that, so it just gives them more opportunities to get the care that they want.

Bri Conn, CFP®: From what we’ve seen anyway, is people who have insurance are more likely to use it versus those who are self-funding and go, “I don’t necessarily want to have to use my funds to [00:10:00] cover care.” Is that something you see as well?

Jesse Vickey: Yeah, for insurance, it’s interesting. A lot of people think of using insurance as a permission slip to be able to get care. If you’re spending it out of your own funds, you commonly think about being very conservative with it, trying to go as long as you can without using those funds. Depending on the insurance policy that you get, those policies can last for a real long time. It’s just a lot easier with insurance to be able to say to yourself, “Yes, I can do this and I should be doing it ’cause I paid for it.”

Bri Conn, CFP®: Even with health insurance we see the same thing too, is if you’re paying for it, you’re more likely to use it, and I love that aspect about the long-term care too. And that’s a conversation that I’ll have with clients is saying, “Hey, yes, you wanna self-fund. Just know that you might not, behavior-wise, be as likely to actually get the care that you need if you are self-funding versus if you are purchasing an insurance policy.” And to me, it makes no difference because we don’t sell [00:11:00] any sort of insurance. But it is still a conversation to have for people, particularly couples, when you see the one person caring for the other person on there. If I was going and saying, “I wanna look for an insurance policy,” can you give tips on, let’s start with what is the best age to look for that?

Jesse Vickey: So technically speaking, you can get coverage really any time between 40 and 80. What I see most commonly is folks in their 50s. 50s is an age where you may have accumulated some income and you have some assets that you can reallocate towards insurance. It also means health, you’re often healthier. And that’s something that I think is worth talking about is how important health is in this decision. Let’s say you’re 50 years old, and you are starting the conversation for getting insurance. What does that look like in terms of trying to apply? One of the things that’s really important in long-term care insurance is being able to qualify. It’s called [00:12:00] underwriting. One of the hard things that long-term care insurers have to do is try to figure out what the predictors are of you needing care in 30 years, and it’s really hard. What’s interesting to me is that everybody seems to have a different rubric in terms of trying to decide if you’re gonna be able to need care. And historically, they’ve been wrong a lot, which has been frustrating for people. One thing that I would say on this podcast as a takeaway is that if you’re looking to get long-term care insurance, it’s really, really, really important to get a health pre-screen before you apply for coverage, and I’ll talk about what that means. So for applicants who work with me, I ask them to complete a real short form asking them some questions about their health. And what I do is I take that, and I will share it with insurers without their name attached, so it’s anonymous. And they provide informal feedback as to how they would evaluate them. And this is important because if you [00:13:00] officially apply, the results are recorded in a database that other insurers can see. And if you were to be declined, the chances of you getting coverage from another insurer become much more difficult. So as an example of this, there’s a couple that came to me from Austin, Texas, early 50s. The wife had a benign brain tumor about 20 years ago that she had surgically removed, and she’s had zero symptoms since. And she came through an advisor, and they were really interested in, we’ll just say, Policy A. So we did a pre-screen, and I submitted that to three different insurers. And Insurer A came back and gave a hard no, even though that that was something that she didn’t have any symptoms of for 20 years. Insurer B gave a maybe, “We’d have to get some more information.” And Insurer C, said yes. So we applied to Insurer C, and she got approved, and everything went great. And what’s interesting to me is this [00:14:00] is the same person, the same health history, and with completely different outcomes from three different insurers. And again, it’s these folks in these tall buildings trying to figure out how to predict this, and it’s really, really difficult. If you’re going to get long-term care insurance, I really recommend that you work with somebody that can give you a health pre-screen to avoid getting that decline. And then once you apply formally, the way that the process works is insurers have a lot of information about your health without you even supplying it, which has also been kind of a real eye-opener. So they have your full prescription history. A lot of them have access to your lab work. They will do a interview over the phone. Sometimes it’s online. If you’re over 60, they’ll often do a cognitive screen where they’ll have you remember words and numbers and stuff like that. They may ask for records from your doctor, and on rare occasions, they may even ask for blood work. So ultimately, what they’re trying to do is figure out whether or not you’re gonna need care as opposed to when you’re gonna die, like life [00:15:00] insurance. If you kinda look through the lens of your own health, if there are any predictors of you potentially needing care, that’s what they’re looking for as well.

Bri Conn, CFP®: With that, what are some of the things that will really stand out? You mentioned doing the pre-screen, ’cause I’ll often have clients look at the underwriting guide and I give it to them. And I say, “Are you on this list at all? If so, we’re not putting an application in for you,” ’cause they don’t want that to pop. What are some of those big things that might pop for people and get them declined?

Jesse Vickey: Some of those underwriting guides are 60-plus pages, and there’s so many prescriptions that they screen for, it’s unbelievable. Let’s walk through some of the big buckets. Cognitive and neurological issues are big ones. Alzheimer’s and dementia are for sure. Even if you’re in a doctor’s office and your doctor mentions something to the effect that it looks like that your memory is starting to slip, and that’s written in a note, that can hurt you. Neurological issues, Parkinson’s, MS, Huntington’s, again, these are all things that can potentially lead towards needing [00:16:00] care. Other things would be just help with activities of daily living. Those are essentially you already need insurance. I get a lot of people that come to me and say, “I already need insurance. Can I buy insurance?” And the answer is really no in that situation. The glitches that are interesting is that a number of things can be okay, but two things combined are not okay. Example, diabetes might be okay, but diabetes plus smoking, no. Or diabetes and being overweight could be a no. It’s complicated, and navigating those guides is hard, and that’s what people do for a living on the insurance side. That’s why, again, pre-screens are important. There’s also a subset of issues which are essentially pauses for somebody to apply, where an insurer will say, “We might accept you, but we have to wait a year.” A common one is physical therapy, for really anything. I’ve seen physical therapy on fingers, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Insurers wanna make sure that things are resolved before they say yes to accepting you. [00:17:00] So that can include minor procedures that aren’t completed. If you’ve talked about having surgery and it hasn’t started yet, that can be a pause. A big change in medication can be a pause. They just need some confidence that everything is okay right now. When my wife and I applied, she had something going on in her shoulder. It was a minor issue, but she was getting physical therapy for it, and we needed to wait before applying based on some feedback from insurers. We’re in our early fifties, and I often talk to people, and I mention that you want to avoid the thing. And the thing is that you go into the doctor, and it pops up, and all of a sudden it prevents you from getting coverage. And that thing pops up, and it’s six months, it’s a year where you can’t apply, and then you’re stuck. So if you have a healthy window, jump at it.

Bri Conn, CFP®: That’s good advice to be mindful of those things and do it while you still can.

MidRoll: Hey, Childfree Life by Design [00:18:00] listeners, don’t let the conversation stop here. Get inspiration, quick tips, and behind-the-scenes content tailored for the Childfree life by following us on social media. We’re most active on Facebook and LinkedIn. Just search for Childfree Insights. And for our deepest dives and event invites, make sure you join our inner circle by signing up for our weekly newsletter at the link in our description.

Bri Conn, CFP®: How about parents’ cognitive decline? How does that play in? ‘Cause we’ve seen some of that being asked and questioned too. But how do you navigate that? ‘Cause I also will have people who come and say, “I don’t think I can ever get long-term care insurance because my parents had XYZ.”

Jesse Vickey: I’ll talk in broad strokes, it’s not as big of a deal as what others might think. For Alzheimer’s and dementia, there are a couple of insurers that will look at first-degree family, your parents, your sisters and brothers, and if one of them has early Alzheimer’s, it might be okay. Two, it might not. But there’s a lot of insurers that [00:19:00] that’s not a factor. So I wouldn’t worry too much about that. An outlier is Huntington’s disease. If you have a family history of it, in a lot of cases it’s a hard decline for insurers. But even then, it’s worthwhile exploring it, because frankly, even a lot of insurers’ underwriting guidelines change. So, it’s generally not a big issue.

Bri Conn, CFP®: With the underwriting guides changing too, I’m assuming that they’re not getting any more open of what people can have and apply for. It’s getting more restrictive as time goes on, particularly with some of the different policies.

Jesse Vickey: It can be. I would say it fluctuates. I think the more that people keep aging, the more the claims keep coming in, they have more and more data points of what is really a predictor and what’s not. There’s a variety of different plans out there, and some of the newer ones frankly look different than some of the older ones. And, sometimes, like my explanation with that awesome couple, some think [00:20:00] about anything that’s happened to you, and others are more focused on where you’re at right now in your life. It’s tough. It varies.

Bri Conn, CFP®: It’s a big thing to go through and navigate and dive deeper into. As you go through and are helping people with these policies, can we dive deeper in some of the nitty-gritty stuff that is maybe not as simple to talk about? But one of the things that people will ask is, “Well, how long should I get long-term care insurance for? How long should the benefits last? What does that look like?”

Jesse Vickey: I would say from a high level, things that you should really pay attention to when you’re looking for coverage, is one certainly length. I think at a minimum, getting three years of coverage is good. That’s pretty much the average length of time for people. There are policies that go out seven or eight years. There is only one policy left in the market that offers lifetime coverage, and that’s a great peace of mind, when you’re dealing with memory loss. Another, I think, important thing to be thinking about is how those policies pay. [00:21:00] And I mentioned this earlier in the podcast that some are reimbursement and some pay in cash, and cash is just a lot more flexible. All of these policies give you the opportunity to pay in different schedules, meaning that you can pay monthly, annually, you can pay for the rest of your life, you can pay it in one lump sum, you can pay it over 10 years. And each policy frankly prices their policies more aggressively the different ways that you wanna pay. And then the other thing I’d really stress is that there’s a subset of policies that give the insurer the right to raise rates over time, and there’s been a lot of bad press about that within policies where the rates keep going up. Everybody might have their own opinion on what insurance is used for. I think insurance is around to take risk off the table and not let you have to worry about things. And if the cost of your insurance can go up over time, that’s just this big variable that you’re trying to get off the table to begin with. [00:22:00] So there’s a lot of policies where you’re guaranteed to have that same rate over time. I think I wanna create a lot of transparency so that somebody knows what those risks are.

Bri Conn, CFP®: ‘Cause if you’re planning for something and you anticipate your policy price to stay the same over a number of years, but it actually doesn’t, you have taken the risk and moved it from one way of, oh, it’s gonna be self-funding risk to now the cost of insurance risk is totally different, and it really hasn’t done a whole lot to mitigate that risk profile there. With that, all of those different policies and the pricings, one of the things that we’ll often talk about with clients is we prefer them to do either the lump sum pay or the 10 pay because the pricing is a little bit better than that annual pay. Does that policy with the unlimited benefits yet, because very rarely are those seen, and every once in a while have people who grabbed one of those policies years ago. How does that require payment now with just everything that insurers have learned?

Jesse Vickey: Historically there were a lot of policies that [00:23:00] did offer unlimited and lifetime coverage, and those again have really dried up. I’m a little bit of a nerd in this stuff, so I actually go to annual long-term care insurance conferences, and I was just at one a couple weeks ago. And the insurer with the lifetime policy, I cornered a couple of people, and I was like, “You guys are the only people left doing this. Is it gonna stay that way?” And according to them, yes. So kudos to them. But in terms of that particular policy, they’re really, really flexible. You can pay up front, and I agree, typically that works a lot better. When you say 10 pay, that means that you pay for over 10 years, and then you get to stop paying. And related to that, I get a lot of questions from people that when you pay over 10 years, does your policy stop? And the answer’s no. Your policy stays in effect. It’s like buying a car, and you just have paid it off. But that particular policy also offers the ability to pay until, age 95 annually. So it provides a lot of flexibility, and that’s [00:24:00] actually the policy that my wife and I got just because it’s good peace of mind.

Bri Conn, CFP®: It gives you a lot of flexibility especially if you have family history of long-term care and anticipating that. I like the peace of mind of the unlimited. One other thing that is popping up a lot for us too is people are saying, “Hey, I wanna go abroad.” And I know that there is policy recently who does allow people to go abroad for long-term care, but most of the time that is not the case. Have you seen requests for coverage of long-term care abroad pop up for you as well?

Jesse Vickey: You’re very on top of the market, that just recently came out. That’s good. That actually came up a lot at the conference that I just went to. I do. I get people that, for a variety of different reasons, are thinking about using this abroad. And I asked a couple of the insurers why they are so stingy with international benefits, and it’s really fraud. It’s just harder to monitor people when they’re on the other side of the world. But you’re right, there’s a policy that just became the most flexible policy out [00:25:00] there that allows you to use 100% of your benefits, really anywhere. That’s great. The most that I’ve seen it is a lot of times folks that are born outside the country, they live here now, and they think that they might go back to their home once they get older. I think when you’re getting insurance, you just don’t know what’s going on in 20 or 30 years. To predict that you’re gonna be living in one place or another is hard. And if you give yourself that flexibility for your future self in 30 years to be able to use it anywhere you want, that’s great.

Bri Conn, CFP®: I’m glad to see that being offered now, and I hope others will follow suit as well and make it available because it’s a thought more and more people seem to be having on there. What are other big things when it comes to long-term care, whether it be long-term care in general or insurance, that you would encourage people to think about?

Jesse Vickey: One of the good things that’s happening in the market right now is that there’s a lot of competition, and I think competition is good. And to your point, even with [00:26:00] international benefits, there’s more and more flexibility because other insurers have offered it, and to compete, they have to do it as well. So I think that the biggest thing that I could recommend besides pre-screening would be to shop around. Use me, use anybody. On my website, I give reviews on pretty much all the big policies out there and compare them side by side. But just recognize that not all insurers are the same. They don’t all offer the same benefits. One good thing is that the triggers are all the same for them, meaning that if you need long-term care, one’s not gonna give you care versus another. It’s a national standard now, which is good. But the benefits really do vary. Even just you give one insurer a hundred grand and you give another insurer a hundred grand, one of them will pay you more. And in six months they may revise their policy and then try to leapfrog the other one. I really think that reviewing a variety of different options is really, [00:27:00] really important.

Bri Conn, CFP®: I like the reviewing lots of different things, seeing what they are. And you had mentioned at the beginning too, cognitive decline is one of the things that can stop you from getting care, but then also just the activities of daily living. And I know you had mentioned two of them. There are six of them. Can you give us all six of them, though? I usually use the acronym BEDCOT, but you remember them in a different way, and I find that fascinating.

Jesse Vickey: A lot of people don’t like to think about it, but all of the ADLs are bathing and dressing, and again, those are the most common. Then it’s toileting, transferring, if you wanna think about going from your bed to a wheelchair, continence, and eating. And it’s interesting as you look at those, you are a baby and you start to gain life skills, or activities of daily living as you get older and older. And a lot of times, those activities of daily living leave you in the opposite order. So in other words, bathing is one of the first things that you, lose [00:28:00] when you get older, and it’s one of the last things that you can do as a child. In terms of those. So yes, those are the six.

Bri Conn, CFP®: Thank you. So we’ve covered a lot of things today. Most importantly, the different types of long-term care insurance that are available and the things you can look for in a policy. How to actually get a policy, and what it will cover, those trigger points. And then also the process of what that looks like as well. I think that’s all a really good start for our listeners to go through and dive deeper into as they move forward on this long-term care journey, and ideally get their plans in place sooner rather than later. I wanna transition now into our final segment, which is what we call deliberate detail. So here, this is where we ask you to share a small intentional thing that you’re doing to design an amazing life. If you can share what it is, why it matters, and the cost if you’re comfortable.

Jesse Vickey: I would say that I’m a very curious person, and because of that [00:29:00] curiosity, I think about things and then try to go deep on them. Examples of this is I read a book about near-death experiences, and I found those stories so interesting that I sought out a local support group of people that have had near-death experiences, asked them if I could just be an observer, and they were very welcoming. And I did that for months, and I even went to a couple of national conferences just ’cause it’s so interesting. I came across the idea of improv, getting up on stage with no script and just being funny, and I was like, “That’s really interesting.” So I signed up for a 101 class, which is very intimidating, and I’ve done that for years now, and it’s just a fascinating art form. And even this company, I mean, long-term care, I got interested in that, and I started a company, and I have a YouTube channel, and I’ve written all of this, and I’m talking to you, I love going deep into things, and I think, if you find things in the universe that tug on you to explore them without [00:30:00] fear or expectation. Fear just being, will people laugh at me? But expectation, sometimes I think it’s easy to say, “Well, what am I gonna get out of this?” Or, “What’s the point?” Or, “How am I gonna make money out of this?” Just go into it with no expectation and that nothing will happen from it, and then just explore it, and I think it’s a really healthy way to go through life. And what does it cost me? Not very much, to be honest.

Bri Conn, CFP®: I love that.

Bri Conn, CFP®: Obviously Long-Term What? Is where people can find you, but can you actually give a couple more places for people to find you as well? And we’ll make sure to put all the information in the show notes.

Jesse Vickey: So I have a YouTube channel. A lot of people like to learn stuff through video. If you wanna see me make a fool out of myself, that’s the place to do it. I pretend like I’m on a Saturday Night Live Weekend Update set and have canned laughter and so on. The goal there is just to kinda normalize the conversation and, make it more engaging and get people more interested in learning about this. All of those videos are also in a podcast format, it’s on Spotify and in other places. And then my website, which is longtermwhat.com, are really the best places to [00:31:00] find me.

Bri Conn, CFP®: Well, thank you for joining me today, Jesse. That’s all for this episode of Childfree Life by Design. Remember, intentionally choosing to invest in moments of joy is just as important as investing in your future. Until next time, happy designing.

Outro: You’ve been listening to Childfree Life By Design. Make sure you follow the show, leave a rating or review, and connect with us on social @childfreeinsights. For more resources, guides, or upcoming events, visit childfreeinsights.com.

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