Over 5.5 million reasons to upskill

Thousands of Australia’s 5.5 million baby boomers retire each week and with the holiday period approaching there will be plenty of discussions around the needs of ageing parents and relatives.

The Christmas season is when families catch up and adult children, who may not have seen their parents for a while, spend quality time together.

The holiday period may also provide an opportunity for children to start planning ahead to ensure adequate plans are in place to ensure aged care arrangements are in place for the immediate or distant future. To help with these decisions, they may need the help of a professional adviser.

Financial advisers need to arm themselves with aged care strategies as hard decisions will need to be made and many families will need guidance to convert the mountain of data on aged care into meaningful, relevant information. This will be more difficult for siblings who do not see eye-to-eye or have different perceptions.

Aged care is a growing advice opportunity that could help planning businesses to expand and building better relationships with clients and other professional networks. However, before advisers can expand these relationships, they need to first overcome a number of hurdles including training, pricing and value propositions.

Advisers commonly don’t feel confident that they know enough about aged care and its complexities to help their clients. Many advisers are not sure how or what they can charge for aged care advice to make it worth their while, especially since the advice may not include any product recommendation.

They may also have difficulty identifying what their aged care advice proposition is and how to articulate it.

It’s important to gain these skills and resources, either internally or externally, because those who fail to meet the aged care needs of clients risk losing their clients and their families to professionals who can support these clients across all life stages.