Most people already have a long-term care plan. Yet they have never written it down, never funded it, and in many cases never said it out loud — it is simply the assumption that a son or daughter will step in when the time comes. Roughly 25% of U.S. adults do not have that assumption available to them. In Part 1 of her conversation with Scott Barnes, CFP®, CLTC, Director of Financial Planning at Childfree Wealth, host Kirsten Howe looks at what financial planning has to account for when there is no built-in safety net.
Scott explains why disability and long-term care coverage move to the top of the insurance list while life insurance moves down, and why the hardest gap to fill is not the hands-on caregiving but the coordination — hiring the aides, running the schedule, getting someone to a doctor’s appointment. He and Kirsten also get into the Die With Zero approach to spending intentionally, why planning software is not built for it, and the scarcity mindset that keeps people with more than enough money from spending any of it.
Time-stamped Show Notes:
0:00 Introduction
1:05 Meet Scott Barnes, CFP®, CLTC — two decades in financial planning, plus a Certified in Long-Term Care designation.
2:05 Why Childfree Wealth exists: founder Dr. Jay Zigmont saw a gap in the market that nobody was serving.
3:00 Did you know? Roughly 25% of the U.S. is childfree — and the CFP curriculum never mentions them.
3:50 The definition matters: about 21% of people are childfree by choice, about 4% are childless by circumstance, and why
Scott’s team treats those groups differently.
5:05 What about people who haven’t decided whether to have children? Listen as Scott talks about meeting clients where they are.
5:50 Kids are expensive — Scott’s estimate for raising one to 18, and why geography changes the number.
7:00 No college fund, no 40-year grind: what “work-optional” actually looks like.
7:45 Why some of Scott’s clients move states every two or three years — and skip buying a home entirely to keep that mobility.
9:05 Kirsten’s addition: when kids aren’t the focus, you’re not planting yourself in the best school district you can afford.
9:40 Hobbies in the middle of a workday — Scott’s cars, other clients’ gardening and pottery — and the job flexibility that makes it possible.
11:00 The biggest planning assumption that changes: Bill Perkins’ Die With Zero, and spending intentionally instead of building a legacy.
12:20 Every financial planning platform is built to maximize what you leave behind. None of them are built to help you spend it down.
13:20 Why Scott would rather give his nieces and nephews something in their twenties than leave it to them at 50.
14:40 Kirsten names the thing most families never say out loud: for a lot of people, the kids are the long-term care plan.
15:30 The childfree bingo card: “Who’s going to take care of you when you get older?”
16:20 Disability and long-term care insurance move up the list. Life insurance moves down.
17:20 The part nobody budgets for: somebody still has to hire the caregivers and drive to the appointments.
18:40 Care coordination services: most policies now include an insurer-provided coordinator who finds home care or an assisted living facility for you.
19:30 Self-funding instead? Then the geriatric care manager is another cost on top.
20:15 Why waiting until a crisis costs the most: no transition, no shopping around, and care needed immediately.
21:00 Kirsten on Medi-Cal planning, and how many clients arrive only after things have already fallen apart.
21:50 “Soloists” — Scott’s term for people aging without a partner or children — and why they need a funded plan, not an assumption.
22:40 Wealthy enough to self-insure, and still unwilling to spend a dollar of it.
23:15 Where the scarcity mindset starts: grandparents who lived through the Great Depression, and the habit passed down since.
24:10 “I know what your balance sheet looks like.” The clients who will never run out and cannot stop worrying.
24:50 The window that matters: why your 40s and 50s is the time to buy, and what waiting until your 70s costs.
25:30 Coming next: estate planning for childfree adults.
Get in touch with Scott!
Scott Barnes, CFP®, TPCP®, CLTC
Childfree Wealth
https://childfreewealth.com/
scott@childfreetrust.com
Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to Absolute Trust Talk. I’m Kirsten Howe, and this is our podcast here at Absolute Trust Counsel. My guest today is Scott Barnes, and I’m going to introduce him properly in just a minute. But first, I want to say that Scott and I have something in common that I don’t think even Scott knows until right now: we both have a cat named Louise.
That’s great.
There you go. Now that we have that very important piece of business out of the way, I’ll properly introduce Scott. My guest, Scott Barnes, is a Certified Financial Planner professional. He’s been working in the financial planning field for over two decades, though he looks like he probably started when he was 12.
He’s going to talk to us about a couple of things he has going on, but in addition, I want to make this known. Along with his CFP designation, he also holds a CLTC designation, which stands for Certified in Long-Term Care. Regular listeners know that’s a subject very near and dear to my heart, so we’re going to talk about long-term care planning a little bit. Scott is the Director of Financial Planning at Childfree Wealth, a financial planning firm with what I think is a very unique focus and client base.
Scott, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Kirsten. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to your group, and I’m looking forward to the conversation today.
Great. Me too. You’re doing some unique, interesting things in the senior space, which is not exclusively what you do, but I feel it has specific impact there. People will discover this as we’re talking. Tell us about the unique aspect of your company. You might be able to guess it from the name, Childfree Wealth, but go ahead — I’ll let you talk about it.
Sure. Childfree Wealth was created by our founder, Dr. Jay Zigmont. He saw a gap in the marketplace for solutions and planning focused on childfree people. Roughly 25% of the U.S. is childfree right now, which is quite a large number, and that demographic is continuing to grow.
Neither of us saw anything about it when we were going through our CFP curriculum to become certified financial planners. There’s no mention of the lives and needs of childfree people in any of the planning curriculum that’s out there. We all saw it as an area that really needs some attention. The needs of childfree people are often different from the needs of people who have children. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just different, and that’s why we’re focusing on it.
I really like that. I have a lot of clients who are childfree, and it’s different for them on the estate planning side as well. We’re going to talk about both — what you do, the financial planning, and then more of what I do, the estate planning, and how different it is for childfree people.
One of the things I want you to emphasize is that you have a very specific definition of the word childfree. Make that clear for people.
Sure. When we say that 25% of the U.S. population is childfree, we actually break it into two parts. About 21% of the population is childfree by choice. They’ve made the conscious decision that they’re not planning to have children. It’s not in the cards, and they’re not looking to do that.
The other 4% or so are people who by circumstance have not been able to have children, whether for medical reasons, because they haven’t had a partner they’ve been able to have children with, or for any other reason. They wanted to have children but are in the position of being childless. We define those groups differently because the lived experience of someone who is childless by circumstance and wanted children is completely different from someone who is childfree. We want to honor that when we talk to people, because everybody’s experience is different, and the way they arrived at their situation is different.
And childfree does not include people who are young and don’t yet have children but plan or hope to. That’s not your bailiwick, so to speak.
That’s correct. Of course, I have a niece who doesn’t have children yet, and she isn’t sure whether she’s going to. I’d personally consider her childfree, but she’s sort of on the fence. For those folks, we meet them where they are. If they come to us currently childfree but they might plan on it, we’ll certainly assist them. But our focus is on people who intend to be childfree for the rest of their lives.
Right. We’re going to break this down into a couple of short episodes. In this first part, I want to focus on the financial planning. I can think of a few obvious features of being childfree — I don’t know if you’d call them advantages. The first one that comes to mind is that kids are expensive.
They definitely are, and that is one advantage of being childfree. My wife and I are childfree by choice, and it’s given me a lot of flexibility to do the things I’ve always wanted to do, including becoming work-optional. I work because I choose to, not because I have to. I’m at the point in my life where I work because I love it, not because I don’t have other things I could be doing. It’s a great position to be in.
We also acknowledge that not everybody who is childfree is in that situation. For some people it’s an economic issue and they don’t have that ability. But for many childfree people, it does allow them to be a lot more flexible and work-optional compared to people who have children.
There’s the raising of a child to the age of 18. What are you estimating that at, just generically across the board?
I believe it’s somewhere in the $500,000 range. That’s the most recent number I’ve seen, and of course it can be flexible. If you’re in New York City, it’s going to be different from where I am in Raleigh, North Carolina, and different again from where you are in the Bay Area. The cost can vary a great deal depending on where you are and what schools you have to choose from.
Right. And aside from that, you don’t have the expense of raising a child — all the ballet lessons and soccer and everything else. You also don’t have to save for college. As you mentioned for yourself, and probably for a lot of people, that can result in a different approach to life, as opposed to working your tail off for 40 years and then, bam, retiring. Maybe you can live your life all the way along in a more — I don’t want to say self-indulgent, but that’s kind of what I’m talking about — way.
We certainly see that with a lot of the childfree people we work with. They have a different focus on life. Because they don’t have children to direct their attention toward, they have the freedom to do things a lot of people can’t. They relocate often. I have clients who move states every two to three years, and buying a home really isn’t something they’re interested in. Some childfree people prefer to rent because they want that mobility.
It’s very interesting how those changes — and not having children isn’t a little change — can really affect how somebody acts and operates in the world. They may choose to live abroad. They may choose to live in different places. Or they may be like my wife and me: we’ve settled down and don’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon, but we have the flexibility to travel, do the things we love, and spend the money we want to spend. We’re in great shape. It can be a fun life. I wouldn’t say across the board that all childfree people have these advantages, but it is something we see very commonly.
I think you also have the ability to travel more or live in different places because you’re not tied to a school calendar or a school location. You don’t have to find the very best school district you can afford and plant yourself there. You have that mobility when kids are not your focus.
The other thing that jumps to my mind is that without kids, you can do the things you want that don’t involve travel or moving. Maybe you can really develop a hobby, or a side hustle, or whatever it is that makes you happy — and not feel guilty about it, thinking, I should be at that soccer game.
We see it a lot. I’m a car guy. That’s the stuff I play with, and that’s where I spend the majority of my fun money, whether it’s fixing up my car or going to events and seeing other car people. I work with people who are active gardeners, or into pottery, all these things. They do this stuff sometimes in the middle of the day because they have the ability to. A lot of them have flexibility in their jobs as well, and it gives them the ability to do these things where a parent might not be able to.
Right. When you’re a parent, you work during the school day, and then you’re on to your second job when school’s out.
Exactly.
What kinds of ways does what we just talked about impact how you do financial planning with childfree people?
Probably the biggest thing is that many childfree people don’t have an intention to leave a large legacy behind. There’s a book out there by Bill Perkins called Die With Zero. The goal isn’t necessarily for someone to actually die with zero dollars. It’s to live intentionally, to live your life and enjoy the money while you have it. Even if you do have legacy intentions, or want to be charitable, or want to give to family members like siblings or nieces and nephews, do it during your lifetime and see the benefit of it while you’re here rather than leaving it behind.
That totally changes everything in the financial planning world, because the financial planning software we all use — and there are multiple systems out there — none of it is built to get you closer to zero dollars when you pass away. It’s always about building the biggest legacy you possibly can. You want to die with the most money ever, that type of thing. That’s not the intention here.
That’s not to say parents don’t do the same thing. I know my parents were very much of the mind that they wanted to spend their money during their lifetime, and they told us not to expect an inheritance. I’m completely fine with that, and some parents do make that choice. But for childfree people, that’s probably the biggest planning assumption change we have.
That is a very big one. That’s like a 180 from what most financial planners are advocating. I suppose that once people get to retirement age and their nest egg is very comfortable, financial planners tend to start saying, why don’t you buy yourself a new car, why don’t you take a trip, and they’ll start budgeting for things like that. But the idea of just living your life that way all along is kind of nice.
It’s different, and it can be very liberating. Don’t get me wrong — I have clients who want to leave a legacy to charities, or to nieces and nephews. As I mentioned, so many of these people are in an economic position where they can really help family members, and some definitely have that intention. If that’s their intention, we try to do it while they’re living rather than waiting until they pass away.
If my nieces and nephews are in their early to mid twenties, giving something now would mean a lot more to them than giving it when they’re 50 and I’ve passed away. That’s the point. We’re looking to see whether we can provide that now rather than waiting until we’re gone for them to get some benefit.
I like that. It’s more gratifying than just knowing a document says this is going to happen. You actually get to see it, make it happen, and see the smile on their faces.
Definitely.
I don’t know that this is necessarily a deliberate thing, but I do see a lot in my practice that clients, in a way, view their children as their long-term care plan.
Very accurate.
And we know — you can probably cite the statistic — we know how few people actually have long-term care insurance coverage. There’s a whole psychology around that. But I do believe that a lot of people have the attitude of, well, my kids will help me.
That’s very much a common attitude among people who have children. The reality is that even when they do have children, it’s not necessarily a given that it’s going to happen.
For childfree people, that’s probably one of the most common questions they get. We sort of call it the childfree bingo card of questions we commonly get from people we know, family, friends, everybody. One of the most common ones is, who’s going to take care of you when you get older? That is a big question for a lot of us, and it is a big concern.
For us, when we’re planning, disability insurance and long-term care insurance are probably our two most important insurances. Life insurance, not so much.
Not so much.
During somebody’s working years, life insurance can make sense to replace income that’s lost. But outside of that, we want to protect your income, so disability insurance. And then when you do potentially need care later in life, long-term care insurance, because they don’t have that built-in safety net.
It’s not even the fact that you might have a child who will come in and help out physically. It’s the coordination of things — taking people to doctor’s appointments, helping coordinate everything for the life of that person who is now older and needs assistance in a lot of ways. It could be financial, it could be physical, it could be any number of things. Not having that built-in safety net in place means they have to pay to receive that type of care and that type of benefit that people get when they have children.
As I mentioned, it’s not a guarantee it’s going to work out that way even if you have children. But at least there’s something in the back of their mind that says, okay, worst comes to worst, hopefully they’d be able to help me out.
Your point is very good, that even for clients who have plenty of money or have long-term care insurance, if you don’t have a child you can rely on to quarterback the whole situation — and it is a lot of work to make all the arrangements. We can pay for caregivers, but somebody has to go hire those caregivers. Somebody has to coordinate the schedule. And then, don’t you know, who’s going to drive Mom to her doctor’s appointments? All the things. Somebody has to do those things, even if they’re not the actual caregiver. People don’t think about how much work that is.
It’s a lot of work, and it’s not easy on the person providing the caregiving, especially if they’re a family member. We often see that for people who do have children, the person who has to step in and be that caregiver or coordinator is really impacted physically and mentally. It can be a very difficult position to be in.
We encourage people, whether you have children or not, that long-term care insurance is a great baseline benefit for providing certain services. Most of the policies today — which is a great thing — have what they consider care coordination services. The insurance company provides a care coordinator who will help you identify the people you can call in and get professional services, home care services, and different things like that. Or they’ll help you identify an assisted living facility if you need facility-type care.
That’s one of the biggest benefits of having a long-term care insurance policy. It’s almost always included now, because insurers are trying to make sure the people who own those policies are getting the best service possible, and that they know where to go if something happens.
If you don’t have any of that in place and you’re self-funding care, it’s completely up to you to figure all of it out on your own. You can hire an aging care manager or a geriatric care manager, but that’s going to be an additional cost.
That’s another cost.
It’s just something else. Unfortunately, for most people, especially if they don’t have an insurance policy, the way they handle a care event when something does happen is usually the worst-case scenario. They’ve gotten to a position where they can no longer do anything at all and they need care immediately. Now they have to hire out, and they’ll probably pay the most expensive costs associated with the care that’s needed. They don’t transition to it. It just happens. That’s a big problem for a lot of people.
I see that a lot. They come to me because I do what we call Medi-Cal planning, which is Medicaid planning in your neck of the woods. I have a lot of elderly clients, or middle-aged children of elderly clients, reaching out, and a very high percentage are seeing me as a result of what I’m going to call a crisis. Things have gotten to a point where there’s nothing left to do but the worst. That’s just human nature.
But having that extra bucket of long-term care insurance probably helps people say, well, let’s trigger that now. Let’s get our money’s worth out of this thing, so they’re not putting it off until it’s dire. They’re actually getting help when they need it instead of struggling through and making their family struggle through. That’s a positive thing for everybody, but for childfree folks in particular, because they don’t have that homegrown care manager. They don’t have that oldest daughter who’s going to jump in and do the things the oldest daughter always does.
Exactly. For people who are childfree, and even for people who may have had children or lost a child, if they’re solo, if they’re by themselves, it’s an even more acute issue. Whether you’re female or male — and obviously it ends up being more often women who need long-term care — they definitely need a real plan in place. We almost across the board will say you need a long-term care insurance policy.
If they don’t have one, we need a more specific plan in place using other solutions, which may be setting aside certain funds and saying, this is your long-term care benefit pool. The minute you start needing care, you need to hire somebody in. Don’t hesitate. Don’t get to the crisis point where you’re no longer able to make a decision for yourself. That’s key.
Solo individuals — we call them soloists in the childfree world — need to have a real plan in place, and insurance should be part of that.
Unless you’re just so wealthy that — and I do have some of those clients.
Sure. They’re wealthy enough that they can self-insure. It’s one of those things that’s a challenge, though, because as you said, human nature is that people will wait. They don’t want to pay out of their own pocket for these services, and they have a tendency to hold off. If you can make sure that a client who is self-funding their long-term care expenses actually pulls the trigger to hire people in when it’s needed, then that works, but you need to make sure they’re comfortable doing that.
Unfortunately — and I’m sure you see this a lot — especially the generation that’s now going through potentially needing assisted living or nursing home care, most of them operate from a scarcity mindset.
Sure.
They’ve saved up all this money and they don’t want to spend it. That’s a challenge for a lot of people. They always think they’re going to run out. I have plenty of clients where that will never be the reality. They could spend more than you could ever imagine in most circumstances and never run out of money. But they hesitate. That’s how they think.
It’s usually because of their parents. Their parents operated in a scarcity mindset, and a lot of those grandparents — like my grandparents — went through the Great Depression.
The Depression era.
Right. Your parents are the same way. They’ve been through that, and they’ve implanted that same feeling into you. It’s something you can’t really avoid, for a lot of people. It’s just about getting them comfortable with it.
I do see that a lot. I see it in the most perplexing, confounding ways with women. I know what your balance sheet looks like, and you’re telling me you’re terrified you’re going to run out of money, and I know you never will. But I see it a lot with single women. Your point about the soloists — get them some insurance so they can just stop worrying about it.
That’s usually the best move, and the earlier they can get it, the better. Obviously it gets more challenging as you age. You can certainly get long-term care insurance into your 70s, but it’s much harder. You really need to be in excellent health, and the cost at that point is going to be very high. We recommend people in their 40s and 50s. That’s when they should be getting it, ideally.
I’m on board. I’m an evangelist, and I have long-term care insurance for myself.
Excellent.
We’re going to close this conversation about financial planning out. Scott, thank you so much. Scott is going to join me for my next episode, where we’ll talk about estate planning in the context of childfree people. Thank you all for watching and listening, and I look forward to connecting with you next time.
Resources Related to This Episode:
- A Will is Not Enough – Securing Your Legacy with Estate Planning Life can change in an instant. A will is not enough to be prepared. Get free access to our actionable E-book Guidebook #1 and start protecting your legacy today. https://absolutetrustcounsel.com/guidebooks/
- Learn how to comfortably define gray areas and assess your unique needs to build a secure future now effortlessly. Check out Guidebook #2, Estate Planning Beyond the Basics, here > https://absolutetrustcounsel.com/guidebooks/
- Get our free introductory guide to the most used estate planning tool, family trusts, and understand how we plan to help protect your family. Guidebook #3: https://absolutetrustcounsel.com/guidebooks/
- Absolute Trust Counsel would love to offer access to our Incapacity Planning resource page: https://AbsoluteTrustCounsel.com/Incapacity-Planning/. We’ve collected our top planning information all in one place so listeners can find videos, guidebooks, blog posts, and a host of information with tips and strategies on implementing, planning, and protecting themselves and their loved ones.
- We’re pleased to provide a library of e-books to address common estate planning questions and concerns in practical, easy-to-understand language. https://AbsoluteTrustCounsel.com/Resources/.
- ASK KIRSTEN: If you’d like Kirsten to answer your question on the air, please email her at Info@AbsoluteTrustCounsel.com.
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