Long-term care planning is is basically really thinking about how you want to
age. What do you want in your life? How do you want everything set up so that you can age the way that you want to? We
spend time planning for vacations. We spend time planning for, you know, big events in our lives. We don’t spend a
whole lot of time really planning for what happens in our uh as we age. One of the best ways to sort of describe after
retirement, I I I’ve heard from a financial adviser friend of mine and he said that we have to plan for the go- go years, the slowgo years, and the no-go
years. And I think that long-term care planning is really thinking about, you know, what how are we going to have the
pieces in place? Who is our team going to be? We have our attorney. We have our accountant. We have our financial advisor. And then we have our agents,
our people who are going to be making decisions for us when we can’t make them for ourselves. Who are we going to put in what places? And what authority are
we going to give them to move forward and make sure that we are aging in the way that we want that we envisioned for
ourselves. Aging with dignity is always going to be the goal. That is 100% what we are what we want to accomplish is we
want everyone to be able to age with dignity. And the best way to age with dignity is allowing people to have choices in what their aging is going to
look like. And so we really have to consider what does that mean? We all want to die happily in our sleep in our
own bed in the house that we’ve lived for 50 years. I know that. I know that that’s everyone’s plan.
Most of us don’t get that. Most of us have to have we have to be able to be flexible. We have to be able to pivot and have another plan that we’re just as
comfortable with. And in order to invoke those plans, we have to tell our people what we’re what we want. And they have
to be involved. It has to be a family affair. And there has to be communication on all levels for our
medical care, for our finances, for everything that we want to be able to make the decisions that we need as we
age. and have things in place when we can no longer make those decisions.