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You planned the pension, the BSSP, the 401(k). Here's what three years of skilled nursing care in Washington State does to that picture — and why WA Cares doesn't cover it.
What Happened to Joan
Let's talk about something fun: end of life. It comes for all of us. One of the fastest ways to devastate your estate and burden the people you love is failing to plan for those last few years.
After a successful career at Boeing, Joan reached her mid-60s and was eagerly preparing for retirement. When assessing her financial plan, she spent time thinking about her adult daughter, Audrey, who suffered from a chronic medical condition and received her life-saving medication through a government program. To ensure the safety of herself and her daughter, Joan adopted a long-term care plan.
After purchasing the policy, she paid the premiums for 16 years. During that time, insurance premiums rose, surpassing projected costs. Frustrated by the rising costs, she stopped paying. Two years later, she felt the consequences of that choice.
At the point that she needed care, there was nothing there to catch her. The only thing she had to fall back on was her daughter. Though Audrey's disability made it both physically and financially challenging for her to self-provide care for her mother, she was tied up in emotional obligation and felt that she couldn’t institutionalize Joan. To provide for her mom’s care, Audrey slowly drained her 401 (k). These large withdrawals qualified as taxable income which immediately pushed her into a higher tax bracket. This income spike meant she no longer qualified for government assistance to obtain her medication. By the time Joan passed away, Audrey had devastated her estate.
When There's No Plan, the Burden Falls on the People You Love Most
It is because of stories like Audrey’s that we call long term care an “I Love You Policy.” Had her mother maintained her long-term care plan, she wouldn’t have passed the financial, physical, or emotional burden of her slow death onto her daughter. Sadly, Audrey’s experience is not unique. Most people do not have a proper plan in place to care for themselves and their loved ones as they age. Once death and disability start entering the picture, their care often falls to family, which, regrettably, locks them into a state of financial vulnerability.
Long-term care insurance pays benefits when you can no longer perform two of the six basic daily activities: bathing, dressing, toileting, maintaining continence, feeding oneself, and moving between positions. While these conditions aren’t catastrophic or unusual, care is expensive. The uncomfortable truth is that a majority of people will face challenges with two or more of these daily activities before they die. And unlike a hospital stay covered by Medicare, the custodial care that most people actually need, such as help dressing or feeding oneself, is generally not covered by standard health insurance at all.
Most Boeing professionals have spent a lot of time planning for the scheduled payouts from their 401 (k), Social Security, and pension plans. But even after having spent years tactfully planning for their life, they often leave death unplanned for.
The Danger Zone: Why Boeing's Middle-Tier Retirees Are Most Exposed
When weighing long-term care options, the most common mistake Boeing professionals make is misidentifying the category they fall into.
Long-term care planning generally follows a three-tier framework based on net worth, excluding the primary residence:
Financial Profile | Likely Strategy | What This Means |
Lower Assets (under $1M) | Medicaid / Social Safety Net | State-funded care becomes available once assets are spent down. High premiums may compromise current quality of life without meaningful benefit. |
Middle Assets ($2Mto $3M) | Long-Term Care Insurance | This is the danger zone. A few years of memory care or skilled nursing can entirely deplete a retirement portfolio or eliminate a spouse’s inheritance. |
Higher Assets (over $3M) | Self-Funding | May have Sufficient liquid assets to pay for care out of pocket without materially impacting lifestyle or legacy goals. |
Most Boeing personnel and managers with 30-plus-year careers tend to land in the middle tier. They land in the danger zone by default. A pension, a 401(k) balance in the $1.5M to $2.5M range, a BSSP payout, and a home. That profile looks substantial until you add up costs for three or four years of skilled nursing care, which in Washington State can exceed $15,000/month.
This middle tier is the danger zone. People in this tier have accumulated enough assets to make them think it won't matter, but not enough money to actually cover the costs of long-term care. It’s not a lack of assets, but it is looking at your retirement cash flow and assuming that whatever is not planned for will sort itself out. The sweet spot is a plan that provides real security to a surviving spouse or family without consuming premiums that undermine the retirement itself.
Projected retirement spending almost never accounts for the final years, when care is most expensive and most likely. Money saved from years of hard work and careful planning will be drained from your estate during the last few months or years of your life. The question is not whether those costs will arrive, it is whether you have made provisions for the people and the estate you leave behind.
The Real Cost of Skipping Coverage on a Fixed Retirement Income
The cost of long-term care insurance is not negligible, and many retirees understandably hesitate to add another monthly payment to a fixed-income budget. That hesitation reflects sound financial instinct. The real question is whether that budget, as currently structured, reflects your actual priorities and includes the people and assets you want to protect.
Boeing employees approaching retirement often navigate a real psychological shift: moving from a steady paycheck to drawing down accumulated savings. Pensions, 401(k)s, and Social Security provide reliable income, but the pool of assets behind them is finite. In that context, every new expense deserves scrutiny.
The challenge with long-term care insurance is that its cost is concrete and immediate, while the risk it covers can feel distant and uncertain. That timing mismatch makes it easy to deprioritize — not out of carelessness, but out of entirely understandable budget discipline.
Whether coverage makes sense depends significantly on where you fall in the asset picture. For larger estates, long-term care insurance functions primarily as a risk management tool — a way to keep a multi-year care event from transferring costs onto a spouse or heirs. For more modest estates, the calculus is different: premium costs over many years may approach or exceed the benefit. The key starting point is an honest accounting of your net worth and the cost of a realistic care scenario.
The Choice Between a Tax-Free Safety Net or Silent Debt Transfer
This conversation always reminds me of the Ben Franklin quote: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” One of the things I like to stress to Boeing clients is the tax dimension of long-term care planning.
A Boeing retiree’s income in retirement is almost entirely taxable: pension, BSSP distributions, required minimum distributions from the 401(k), and Social Security. In contrast, the payouts from a long-term care insurance policy are not taxed as income. We call this a “tax-free bucket of money” that sits entirely outside that stack of taxable income. This brings immense relief at a time when medical expenses are highest. A tax-free benefit does not just protect assets; it relieves the tax burden precisely when the income stack is already under pressure.
Your Trustmark Policy: Is It Really Enough?
In 2019, Washington became the first state in the nation to create a publicly funded long-term care program for workers through what is commonly known as the WA Cares Fund.
Beginning July 1, 2023, all W-2 employees in Washington became subject to a 0.58% payroll tax, deducted directly from their paychecks. There was no income cap, and all wages were subject to the tax, including bonuses, stock options, PTO payouts, and severance.
To access benefits, most workers must contribute for ten years and have a qualifying care need. Benefits became available starting January 1, 2026, paid up to $100 per day, with a lifetime maximum of $36,500. There are a couple of variations here, BUT let's not miss the forest through the trees.
You can easily see the holes in this plan when you are confronted with the real numbers. A year of skilled nursing care in Washington State routinely exceeds $120,000. A year of memory care assisted living runs similarly. The WA Cares lifetime maximum covers roughly one year of modest in-home aide support and considerably less for facility-based care.
This was, to put it plainly, an absurd mandate that created the appearance of long-term care coverage while only providing a fraction of what care actually costs. Many Boeing employees enrolled in the WA Cares program have not revisited the question since. They believe the decision has been made. In most cases, what they have is a starting point, not a plan.
Washington is not the only state moving in this direction. Other states are developing similar programs. Even if you are not a Washington resident, you cannot assume exemption from this plan. The lesson is the same regardless of state: any long-term care decision made without examining the specifics, coverage amount, benefit duration, inflation protection, and how the policy interacts with your actual retirement income picture is not a plan. It is a placeholder.
The Questions Boeing Employees Ask
Should I keep or cancel the LTC policy I purchased during the WA Cares Act?
Before canceling, verify exactly what the policy provides: the daily benefit, the lifetime maximum, the inflation protection, and how it interacts with your projected care costs in your area. Many Boeing employees purchased private coverage quickly to opt out of the payroll tax without fully evaluating the policy they were buying. Some of that coverage is meaningful. Some is not. The answer depends on the specific policy, not on whether it was purchased in response to a state mandate.
How do I know if my spouse and I can self-insure?
The honest version of this question requires running actual numbers, not a general estimate of net worth. Take your liquid assets, excluding your primary residence and any assets you intend to leave to heirs, and model a three-to-five-year care scenario against current costs in your area. If that scenario leaves your surviving spouse with materially fewer resources than you planned, you are not self-insuring. You are hoping.
Am I still insurable if I already have a medical condition?
It depends on the condition and the carrier. Some conditions are automatic declines. Others are rated, meaning you may qualify, but at a higher premium. A few conditions that seem disqualifying are handled differently across carriers. The only way to know is to apply through an independent advisor who can shop multiple carriers simultaneously. What is certain is that waiting makes this question harder to answer favorably. Every year of age and every new diagnosis narrows the field.
When is it too late to buy long-term care insurance?
The optimal window is generally between ages 55 and 65. Beyond age 70, the decline rate for health-based qualification increases significantly, and premiums for those who do qualify reflect the shorter underwriting window. Waiting until the decision feels urgent is often waiting too long. The time to evaluate coverage is when you are still healthy enough to have real options.
How does purchasing long-term care insurance change my retirement plan?
It changes the plan's risk profile, which in turn changes the assumptions on which everything else is built. With coverage in place, a multi-year care event does not liquidate the portfolio you built to transfer or preserve. Your 401(k) sequencing, Roth conversion planning, and Social Security timing all carry different implications when you are not planning against a worst-case scenario where care costs consume the assets you built for another purpose. It also changes what your spouse is planning against.
Does Boeing offer long-term care insurance as part of its benefits package?
Boeing has historically offered group long-term care insurance to active employees through its voluntary benefits program, but coverage options and retiree eligibility have shifted over time. Whether or not a plan was available to you during your working years, the more important question is whether what you have — or had — is still adequate. Group coverage offered through an employer is often a starting point, not a complete solution, and it doesn't follow most people through the full arc of retirement. If you're uncertain what you have or whether it's enough, it's worth reviewing the benefit triggers and daily benefit amount and comparing that against what care actually costs in your area today.
Ready to see how this connects to your full Boeing retirement picture?
Long-term care planning does not sit in isolation. It intersects with your pension income, BSSP distribution timing, 401(k) withdrawal sequencing, and estate structure in ways that change the analysis considerably when examined together. We walk through this and other interconnected Boeing retirement decisions in our Boeing Retirement Webinar Series.
DISCLOSURE:
DISCLAIMER: Joan is a composite example designed to illustrate common long-term care planning outcomes. Details have been altered to protect privacy. This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute tax, legal, or insurance advice. Long-term care insurance products, eligibility, and costs vary by individual health history and carrier. Consult a qualified financial advisor and licensed insurance professional before making coverage decisions.
Fulcrum Wealth Advisors, LLC (FWA) is a registered investment adviser registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Registration with the SEC does not imply a certain level of skill or training. The firm is not registered as a broker-dealer and is not affiliated with any broker-dealer.
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This material is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute personalized investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Any references to specific securities, asset classes, or investment strategies are for illustrative purposes only and may not be suitable for all investors.
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