Despite our feelings when rate increases occur, insurance is a funny thing. The pricing of insurance, including Long Term Care insurance, is very different from most other products you buy. Let’s say you want to buy a T.V. Well, you can research various stores and sources of that particular T.V. and find out who has the better rate. Long Term Care insurance is different in that the rate will be identical for a given carrier and plan (same policy settings, benefit type, etc). Whether you go through a licensed LTC agent or directly to the carrier, it’s going to be the same rate.

The problem is that we must first figure out what type of plan we want, which carrier provides the best rate, and what policy settings are optimal for our situation. That’s the tricky part when it comes to finding the best Long Term Care insurance rate. If you go direct to one carrier, they can (or better yet, will) show you only their plans. This may or may not be the best situation for you. With so many carrier and plan options on the market, the chance of stumbling on the best rate for you this way is very small. Sort of like throwing a dart at a dartboard. When you’re dealing with potentially thousands of dollars, that’s not a good strategy. So what works better?

We have a two part solution to finding the best Long Term Care rates on the market. Let’s break it down and start with our first item, Optimal LTC plan settings.

Optimal Plan Settings. Long Term Care actually has relatively few variables to choose from when selecting a plan compared to health or life insurance. These variables can really swing the rates and probably half of the people that are paying too much in the LTC market are doing so because of poor plan settings. We go in depth into each variable as well as our Optimum Plan Settings but let’s give a rough sketch here:

Waiting period.