June 21, 2016 5:30 a.m. ET Suzanne Shier is chief wealth planning and tax strategist at Northern Trust in Chicago. Voices is an occasional feature of edited excerpts in which wealth managers address issues of interest to the advisory community. In planning with clients, it’s common for advisers to focus on education funding and retirement planning. But they sometimes overlook the importance of planning for a healthy lifestyle and helping clients prepare for future health-care needs. Advisers should have conversations about health-related planning with clients as early as possible. That gives clients a chance to develop better habits and put strategies into place that can make a meaningful difference over the course of their lives. It’s helpful to frame conversations in terms of lifestyle, risk and prevention. Lifestyle considerations include healthy habits that will help preserve clients’ health for the long term. Risk considerations relate to potential income loss as a result of illness. Since health-care costs can pose some of the single biggest risks to financial security, these risks must be discussed. And finally, prevention relates to strategies such as short- and long-term disability insurance and life insurance that clients can consider if they get sick. Getting a jump start on health-care planning is particularly important for clients in the sandwich generation who are taking care of their own families and their parents. Their stress will be reduced if they have taken care of the health-related planning for themselves and their children before they step into the role of helping to advise their parents on health and wealth-related matters. Conversations about health will vary depending on a client’s stage of life. For instance, with younger clients in the early stages of accumulating wealth, discussions should include pursuing a healthy lifestyle, life insurance and short- and long-term disability insurance. Advisers should also stress with younger clients the importance of modeling healthy lifestyles for their children. In addition, advisers should encourage their younger clients to talk to their parents about issues such as long-term-care insurance and health-care powers of attorney. We’ve seen an alarming increase in the number of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and if children can have conversations about aging issues with their parents early on and in small bits, it will make the experience less stressful. With clients anticipating retirement, discussions should include how to maintain a healthy lifestyle, their current health-care coverage and future needs, such as long-term care. Advisers should review clients’ current health-care coverage, discuss Medicare eligibility and the possible need to purchase a supplementary private health-care plan. Retired clients, meanwhile, have other health-care-related needs that advisers can help address. For instance, many travel overseas and may need to supplement their existing insurance to provide for adequate foreign travel coverage. In every life stage, advisers should be working proactively with clients on health-related issues. By doing so, they can help their clients preserve both their health and their wealth.
Financial advisers tend to focus their aging clients on education funding and retirement planning, overlooking the importance of lifestyle planning. Currently, health care costs present a sizeable risk to financial security, therefore the prevention of illnesses through a healthy lifestyle should be a focal point of financial advisers. This advice should be tailored depending on the client's stage of life, those with young children should work to promote healthy living while those looking to retirement should look to maintain their health.