SMSF advisers should not see aged care as a separate discussion, but rather a conversation that fills the gap between retirement advice and estate planning, a specialist in the area has said.
Aged Care Steps director Louise Biti said aged care was a form of contingency planning and the need for advisers to become involved in it was similar to the take-up of estate planning in the past.
“When I started doing technical services in the late ‘90s, estate planning was the buzz and the hype back then and what we saw was planners and advisers trying to work out how to do this thing called financial planning, and then it was how do we do this thing called estate planning,” Biti told attendees at the SMSF Association Technical Summit 2025 in Sydney today.
“It seemed like they were completely disconnected concepts and estate planning was something you did after, and separately, from financial planning.
“If we track forward to now, estate planning is part of every single conversation because what you are doing is looking at that contingency of what if you pass away, how does this impact your savings and superannuation?
“Aged-care planning is much the same. It is just contingency planning around what happens if and when your health declines and you are still here.
“I know at some point that I will die, but what’s going to happen before that point of death? What happens in that last part of retirement, where I’m still here and care about how I’m going to be looked after?”
She noted most older clients will go through a period of frailty before death and while advisers did not need to become aged-care experts, they should not be ignoring this phase of life or the needs of those going through it.
“You need to have the conversations to create awareness with your clients and be proactive in this space, raising the issue in review meetings and every time you are in front of the client,” she said, adding that half of retiree clients are likely to need some form of aged care in their life.
“I want to challenge you to start thinking about it for every single client and it doesn’t matter if your clients are 40 year olds because they have grandparents who are in this age demographic as well, and those younger clients are often the ones doing the aged-care research.
“What worries me about aged care is the lack of preparation by retirees, so you need to be aware of what your role is and be proactive with your clients.”
