ArcaMax

What are the odds? It’s a question you should ask yourself when making any financial decision — from investing in the stock market to buying a house. What are the odds that this decision makes sense? What are the odds of profit? What are the odds of a loss?

If we each had a crystal ball, it would take all the uncertainty out of important financial moves. Since we don’t, it makes sense to consider the possibilities — either using historical patterns or personal experience or our own intuition. All have obvious flaws.

Smaller decisions are easily reversed if it becomes obvious that you’ve gone down the wrong road. But what about the big financial decisions — the ones that literally could cost you and your loved ones their entire financial security? How do you make those decisions?

The time has come to try artificial intelligence over intuition in one critical financial decision: covering the costs of long term custodial care.

With the rising costs of custodial care, any family could find their savings demolished by the need to pay for care — especially in the case of dementia, Alzheimer’s or stroke. The 2025 Genworth Cost of Care Survey says the national median annual cost for an in-home health aide is $82,530, and assisted living community costs are $70,800 — and much higher in urban areas.

The alternative — Medicaid-funded nursing home care — is looking less and less attractive every day.

On the other hand, you might buy long-term care insurance and never use it. These days, that “use it or lose it” policy has been largely replaced by a combo of LTC and death benefits, so if the care isn’t used, the death benefit goes to the heirs. And it locks in the coverage with no exposure to rising premiums. Still, many people figure they can “self-insure” for the “reasonable costs” of long term care.

Is that a smart decision? Or do you want to buy LTC insurance, so you can leave your estate to your spouse or children? And do you trust this decision to intuition, or guesswork, or luck?

We hear so much these days about the benefits of artificial intelligence. But when Waterlily founder and CEO Lily Vittayarukskul explained how she was using AI to show people the real likelihood of needing long term custodial care, I must tell you I was simply blown away.

Let me say at the outset, this is not a program trying to sell LTC insurance. In fact, it’s available at minimal cost to insurance companies and agents, wealth advisers and care providers, and only tangentially to the public. This young tech genius who started college at age 14, and interned at NASA at age 16, was motivated by the impact that uninsured care costs had on her own family.

Graduating from the University of California-Berkeley with a degree in genetics and data science, Lily led product and engineering teams at multiple startups before founding Waterlily, a company dedicated to making healthcare and its costs accessible, understandable and empowering for all, according to its mission statement.

She explained to me that its algorithms use predictive AI that instantly analyzes from more than 500 million historic datapoints to build a comprehensive care plan and model the ROI (return on investment) for your alternatives — ranging from self-pay to insurance policies.

A simple 3-minute online intake question is used to model your likely long-term care needs and best solutions — whether you’re starting to consider this at age 40 or are staring at the imminent need for care. The plan builds out a care/financial plan based on the impact on your family. In simple terms, it shows you the “money in-money out” alternatives.

Waterlily can model the progression of care needs — from early or moderate care to full-time care, predicting the hours of care needed and future costs. That includes the amount of hours a family member might be required to contribute to your care.

It can review your existing coverage by actually reading your current long-term care insurance documents, or help agents demonstrate choices between policy types to estimate the hypothetical maximum benefit. Major Fortune 100 insurers, including Prudential and several others, are already making this software available to their agents or policyholders. And many continuing care communities are also using it to forecast the likelihood that their residents will need additional care — and for how long.

In other words, Waterlily gives you the absolute odds — and costs. This is not a sales pitch. If you knew there was a 1 in 5 chance that your house would burn down, you’d buy insurance. The odds don’t have to be overwhelming to convince you to buy LTC insurance, says Lily. She calls it a simple decision, saying: “Look at the math!”

Waterlily.com is currently allowing selected individuals to join its waitlist to use the program online, free, to figure it out for themselves. Plain old regular intelligence says that’s definitely worth a try. And that’s The Savage Truth.

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(Terry Savage is a registered investment adviser and the author of four best-selling books, including “The Savage Truth on Money.” Terry responds to questions on her blog at TerrySavage.com.)

©2025 Terry Savage. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.