Healthy Personality and Long Term Care

 Another exclusive written by LTC Tree Advisor, Joe Houston.

A healthy personality knows the need for making provisions for long term care should the need ever arise.  A healthy personality is aware of her place in the world around her, with its good times and bad.  Such a person can realistically calculate the general odds of needing various services from other people at various stages of her life. She will have educated herself or sought advice from knowledgeable experts as to what assistance can be expected from family, private, non-profit or governmental resources.           

One of America’s premier psychologists, Abraham H. Maslow, devoted most of his career researching and developing a vision of the “healthy personality.”  To this end he developed a hierarchy of needs that he felt helped humans to develop their capacities to the fullest degree.  And he arranged them in a bottom-to-top hierarchy that he said we need to follow in order to live satisfactory lives. His scenario can be summed up with the phrase an old counselor friend of ours used to use with his clients:  “You don’t need to be sitting around contemplating your navel and its place in the Universe if you’re starving to death.”  First things first!         
A psychologist friend once posed this illustration:  “Suppose you are having all sorts of emotional problems and need some counseling, while at the same time your toilet’s stopped up and is flooding your house.  And you’ve only got one hundred dollars to your name.  Who are you going to call first:  a psychologist or a plumber?”  Of course, the plumber wins out.     

Maslow said to tend to your physical needs first, which would include all things necessary to maintain a healthy, functioning body, such as food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.  Without these the rest won’t matter much.  Upon this foundation we next tend to our safety needs, which means we need to seek out an environment in which to live and work which is free from personal harm and threats and which gives us a sense of security.          

Next, we tend to our love and belongingness needs, which addresses the fact that we seek affection and warm relationships with other people.       
Progressing further, we now try to meet our self-esteem needs. This is the desire to be respected for who we are, to get recognition for our accomplishments and to gain prestige for our actions.              

Last, if all these have been achieved it opens the door for self-actualization. This allows us to fully and freely express our talents to the world, to pursue the highest qualities that make us human, such as truth, beauty, or justice.  The person is now free to figure out and pursue her mission in life, to be whatever is possible for her to be.        

Where most people go awry, Maslow might say, is when they try to pursue the higher goals before the lower ones are met.  An example might be if a young man were seeking a suitable wife, with a middle class orientation, when he has no job, no money, a poor education.  We can see that would be an almost impossible road to travel under those conditions.      

Closely allied to this business of getting one’s needs met is the fact that one needs money to be able to do these things.  One needs money to get a higher education, to wine and dine a young lady and convince her to marry you, to pay rent in an acceptable neighborhood, to buy food and clothing. The list goes on, but it is clear that in this society one needs money to do almost everything.    

Long term care insurance addresses primarily our physical and safety needs, as you can see, but it can open the door for us to continue pursuing those higher needs for the rest of our lives.  It can enable us to remain in our own homes, caring for ourselves as much as possible, socializing with friends and neighbors, maintaining our freedom and mobility, entertaining ourselves as we’d like, pursuing hobbies or vocations, or anything else one would like to do in their declining years.  And if they have to go to a long term care facility, they will have the monetary resources to select a suitable place for them, where they will be able to continue the self-actualization process.

We've noticed in our 15 years helping clients plan for the high cost of long term care that the people that actually buy long term care insurance have similar personalities.  People who buy this insurance often are: driven, fiercely independent, logical, able to separate their emotions when making important decisions, and a drive to be independent of the US Government paying for their care.  These people are planners and because of these positive personality traits they have saved a nice sized nest egg as a result of decades of hard work.  Since these people know how hard it is to earn a dollars they find themselves wanting to protect their fruits of their labor with long term care insurance. 

If you'd like to research long term care insurance further please take a moment to fill in the form below and we'll mail you the quotes from the top five blue-chip carriers.