Louise Biti
Financial advisers need to arm themselves with aged care strategies in the new year, as the holiday period is likely to prompt clients to question the care needs of their ageing relatives and the financial impacts of this care, says Aged Care Steps (ACS).
“Christmas is a time when families catch up. Adult children may not have seen their ageing parents for a while due to busy lives and distant homes,” says ACS Director Louise Biti.
“At this time, families may begin to notice changes that have developed in their ageing parents since they last saw them. This is especially so if children are spending a number of days with parents as difficulties are harder to cover up over a period of days.”
With the family getting together, the holiday period may be a good time for clients to start planning ahead to ensure adequate plans are in place to access aged care either immediately or in the future. To help with these decisions, they may wish to engage the help of their professional adviser, she says.
“Hard decisions may need to be made and many children and parents will need professional guidance to convert the mountain of data on aged care into meaningful, relevant information and ultimately into appropriate decisions,” she says. “This can be more difficult for siblings who do not see eye-to-eye or have different perceptions.”
According to Biti, aged care is a growing advice opportunity that could help planning businesses to expand as well as assist in building better relationships with clients and other professional networks.
However before advisers can expand these relationships, she says they need to first overcome a number of hurdles including training, pricing and value propositions.
“Advisers don’t feel confident that they know enough about aged care and its complexities to to help their clients,” she says.
“Advisers are not sure how or what they can charge for aged care advice to make it worth their while, especially since the advice may not include any product
recommendation.
“They may have difficult in identifying what their aged care advice proposition is or how to articulate the value to clients.”
Advisers without sufficient skills or resources to address these hurdles in-house can look for support and outsource access key areas of training, paraplanning, strategy development and marketing support.
These are the foundations upon which Aged Care Steps’ business model is built. Advisers who fail to meet the aged care needs of their clients risk losing their clients (and their families) to professionals who can support these clients across all their life stages.