End of life planning is ridiculously difficult. You don't know how long you're going to live, much less how long you'll be in terminal care. The average nursing home residency is 2 years, true. but there's really no upper limit. The cost: if you haven't budgeted at least $300/day for nursing care, you aren't going to make a dent in it....and in areas like NY, the actual average cost is $450/day. That's at least $219K that you will need to have available, over and above your retirement funding. Don't forget to factor in inflation, which is at least twice CPI for healthcare expenses. Self-funding final care is definitely a challenge.

There are specific financial products that work for this, but they're all expensive and fraught with problems. Traditional long term care insurance is ideally purchased when you're around 50. Earlier, and you're wasting money. Later, and it becomes prohibitively expensive. Twenty years ago, policies were unlimited, and as a result the companies that issued them ended up in serious trouble. More recent policies offer a fixed benefit for a fixed period of time...say $300/day for five years, so it's more likely the insurance company will be around to actually pay out. But very few people have the cash and foresight to buy his & her policies at 50. And if you end up not using the benefit, the money you paid is never returned.

Another alternative is either a permanent life insurance policy or deferred annuity, either of which can include an accelerated death benefit rider. Essentially, your policy pays part of the death benefit to the nursing home while you are still alive. These have the advantage that they always have redeemable cash value in case you need the funds for something else, although you would obviously lose benefits if you took advantage of this. Any residual value goes to your beneficiaries. The problem again is that late in life, it's hard to handle the price for a sufficiently large policy.

Many people rely on Medicaid, which pays for LTC as a free benefit. The problem is that you need to be destitute in order to receive benefits. Medicaid will look back at your financial records five years, and claw back funds if they think you're tying to game them. So you may find that free help costs all your money. It gets more complicated if we're talking about a married couple, as you really don't want to leave your spouse penniless. Of course, if you had LTC insurance, it would cover you for the first five years. So your POA's can safely hide your money before they abandon you to the system.

So there's a list of pariah products that you may end up needing before it's over...LTC insurance, annuities, life insurance and Medicaid. Or you or your POA could just arrange a reverse mortgage and pay your end of life costs with home equity. It's a long life, so don't be so quick to dismiss these "awful" products.