By Marc Gilman
Questions? Call (800) 927-9326 or email
Key Takeaways
-
96% of financial professionals say they discuss health issues with clients — but only 44% of clients recall those conversations happening, according to LIMRA research published in early 2026.
-
Among people who’ve already served as caregivers, 92% say clear conversations about how to pay for care would have helped, and 90% say discussing who would provide care would have helped — but these realizations almost always come after the fact.
-
People who work with a financial advisor are meaningfully more knowledgeable about long-term care than those who don’t — 84% versus 62%, per Nationwide’s 2026 Long-Term Care survey.
-
The gap isn’t just about clients tuning out. A separate industry survey found only 54% of financial professionals actually recommend or offer LTC protection to clients, and about 1 in 5 said they’ve never offered it at all.
-
This is a solvable gap, not an inevitable one — it just requires the conversation to happen earlier, and more directly, than it typically does.
The Gap Between What Advisors Say and What Clients Hear
Here’s a genuinely striking finding from LIMRA’s latest research: nearly every financial professional surveyed — 96% — said they talk about physical health issues with their clients during retirement planning. But when clients from those same relationships were asked, only 44% recalled those conversations happening at all.
That’s not a small discrepancy. It suggests that even when the conversation technically happens, it isn’t landing — possibly because it’s brief, buried inside a broader planning discussion, or raised only in passing rather than as its own dedicated topic. Four in ten financial professionals and consumers alike agree that estimating health care and long-term care costs is one of the hardest parts of retirement planning — which makes it exactly the kind of topic that needs to be raised clearly, not mentioned in passing.
What Caregivers Wish They’d Talked About Sooner
Nationwide’s 2026 Long-Term Care survey asked people who had actually served as caregivers what they wished had happened differently — and the answers are worth sitting with:
-
92% said clear conversations about how to pay for care would have helped.
-
90% said it would have been valuable to discuss who would actually provide care, before the need arose.
-
Beyond the financial question, caregivers reported real fears about navigating care alone — 84% worried about not having someone to advocate for them, 81% worried about care coordination, and 81% worried about receiving lower-quality care without support.
The pattern here is consistent: people don’t regret having the conversation too early. They regret not having had it at all — and by the time they recognize the gap, they’re usually already in the middle of a crisis, not planning ahead of one.
The Real Cost of Staying Quiet
A related industry survey found that 96% of people said long-term care planning was important to them — but only 19% had done any substantive planning, and more than half said they’d never even discussed long-term care with their advisor. That’s the conversation gap showing up not just in recall, but in actual behavior: people know this matters, and still don’t act on it, often because the topic simply never gets raised in a way that prompts a decision.
Why Working With an Advisor Actually Closes Part of This Gap
Here’s the more encouraging data point: Nationwide’s 2026 survey found that people who work with a financial advisor are meaningfully more knowledgeable about long-term care than those who don’t — 84% versus 62%. Simply having someone in your corner whose job includes raising this topic measurably changes how prepared people are.
That said, the advisor side of this isn’t uniform either. A separate survey of financial professionals found that only 54% actually recommend or offer LTC protection to their clients, and roughly 1 in 5 said they’ve never offered it at all. The conversation gap isn’t purely a client-attention problem — it’s also, in part, an industry habit that doesn’t always prioritize this topic as consistently as it should.
How to Actually Start This Conversation
If you’re reading this and realizing you haven’t had this conversation — with an advisor, or with your own family — a few starting points that tend to work better than a vague “we should talk about this someday”:
-
Raise it as its own topic, not a footnote inside a broader retirement or estate planning conversation. Given how often it gets lost in the mix, it deserves its own dedicated discussion.
-
Talk about who, not just how much. The financial question matters, but caregivers consistently say the “who will actually help me” question is just as important — and it’s often the one nobody addresses until there’s no time left to plan around it.
-
Do it earlier than feels necessary. Every piece of data here points the same direction: the people who wish they’d had this conversation sooner vastly outnumber the people who wish they’d waited.
What To Do Next
The long-term care conversation gap is real, well-documented, and — based on the data — genuinely closeable. If you haven’t had this conversation yet, whether about funding options, who would provide care, or how to structure a plan that covers both, that’s exactly the kind of discussion worth having now rather than during a future crisis.
Reach out and let’s have that conversation directly.
Questions? Call (800) 927-9326 or email
