The Challenge

With nearly five decades in financial services, Rich Harper thought he had Long Term Care (LTC) figured out. His clients were wealthy. Many had millions or more in assets. Surely they could absorb the cost of a nursing home.

"Prior to this, I honestly viewed long-term care as something my clients didn't need," Rich said. "They've got $20 million. They're not going to go through it."

But Rich also had personal experience that told a different story. As power of attorney for three family members, he watched long-term care costs destroy everything they had saved. His grandmother spent seven years in care before she died in 1987. His mother spent almost ten years there. His sister, who became disabled in her late 50s, is currently in a facility and will remain there for the rest of her life.

"All of her money is gone… because of going into long-term care."

The old planning assumption was a two to three year stay in a nursing home. Rich's own family proved that assumption wrong three times over. And the costs keep climbing. As Rich put it, nursing home rate increases are sometimes in the double digits, outpacing even the 7 to 8 percent annual rise in college tuition.

The problem was not that his wealthy clients lacked the funds. It was that no one was showing them the actual probability and cost, so they could make informed decisions about how to deploy their money.

The Solution

Rich first saw Waterlily at a LIFE Brokerage study group meeting in New York. He started by running the assessment on himself.

From there, he began integrating it into client reviews. His approach centers on risk management. He compares Waterlily's probability estimates to the Monte Carlo analysis his clients already understand from their investment portfolios. He shared that if a client's probability of needing long-term care exceeds 50%, it demands attention, regardless of net worth.

"If you have a probability of more than 50% that you're going to need long-term care, you need to look at this and say, OK, well, what asset am I going to use for that? And what's the impact going to be?"

For his wealthiest clients, Rich frames Waterlily as an ROI exercise. When a family business recently sold, Rich used the platform to show the beneficiaries where they were better off deploying capital to protect against a long-term care event versus leaving it in other vehicles.

Rich also values that Waterlily accounts for geographic cost variation automatically, something he could never do on his own with clients spread across the U.S. and Europe.

"You can't possibly know the regional costs for long-term care in more than a handful of locations. There's no way you could."

The Results

Since joining the platform in early 2025, Rich has run Waterlily assessments for numerous clients, and plans to rerun assessments every couple of years as client circumstances change.

The business impact has been direct. A new agency partner in North Carolina began referring clients, and Rich ran every one of them through Waterlily first.

"All of which we've done Waterlily on, and all of which have resulted in sales. And none of them are small."

But the metric Rich values most is clarity. After decades of using planning tools that generate 50-page reports no client ever reads, he found something different.

"It's not jargon-based. It is written in a manner that a client can look at that printout and understand it. They don't know all the calculations going behind it. That's not important."

"I like the fact that I can print it out. It's one or two pages."

Why Producers Should Pay Attention

Rich's advice to other agents who think they do not need a tool like this is straightforward.

"They don't need it because they haven't seen it in action."

His recommendation: do not even present it to a client at first. Run it on yourself. See what comes back.

"If somebody is seriously doing planning of any sort, particularly for clients above age 55, they use this once, they'll keep using it."

After 48 years, a cancer battle, and watching three family members lose everything to long-term care costs, Rich knows the stakes are not theoretical. The data simply makes the conversation possible.

"It provides me calculations that I could not and probably would not do on my own, and it really helps me explain the probabilities to the client."

Ready to see what Waterlily can do for your practice? Run your first assessment on yourself and find out. Schedule a demo today.