The Challenge

Two partners run a planning-first wealth management practice serving 150 to 200 family households. Their clientele spans three generations: pre-retirees in their 40s, 50s and 60s, retirees drawing down assets, and older clients who purchased long-term care insurance policies 15 to 25 years ago.

Long-term care (LTC) planning was a persistent gap in the firm's process. Clients would show up with cost estimates ranging from $8,000 to $15,000 per month, numbers pulled from thin air with no connection to their actual health, location, or care needs. Traditional financial planning software made the problem worse: turning on the LTC planning module with realistic healthcare inflation would break every plan, no matter how many assets a client had. The projections became unusable.

Meanwhile, many of the firm's clients held legacy LTC policies with compounding inflation riders and rising premiums. There was no reliable way to show a client whether their existing policy was still worth the cost, or whether it was time to adjust.

"We haven't found any other program that's allowed us to visually show someone, hey, your policy is okay right now, you may not need that benefit." Lead Advisor, CFP

The Solution

One of the firm's partners discovered Waterlily at an industry conference where Waterlily's founder and CEO was speaking. He had been looking for a tool that could evaluate whether a client's existing long-term care policy was still adequate. Waterlily was the first platform he found that could do it.

The firm signed up in October 2025. Shortly after, a Waterlily representative presented the platform to a broader business group of 40 advisory teams, a session that accelerated adoption across the practice.

The team now uses Waterlily in three distinct ways:

1. Replacing guesswork with personalized projections. Waterlily's intake form captures a client's health conditions, family history, location, and care preferences, then generates personalized cost projections based on over 500,000,000 data points. Clients see what their care is estimated to cost, not an industry average.

2. Visualizing a complete funding plan. The platform maps how a client's income streams, liquid assets, home equity, and existing insurance combine to cover projected costs. For many of the firm's wealthier clients, this reveals that their current cash flow already covers most care scenarios, reframing the conversation from insurance sales to informed planning.

3. Evaluating legacy policies and saving clients real money. This is where Waterlily has delivered the most tangible impact. A simple upload of the client's policy maps it directly to the projected long-term care plan, enabling a clear side-by-side analysis.. 

The Results

50% Premium Reduction for a Long-Time Policyholder

One client had been paying for inflation protection on her LTC policy for 25 years. The compounding benefit had grown so large that it had become nearly impossible to exhaust. Waterlily's analysis made this visible for the first time. By removing the inflation rider, her annual premium was cut in half, freeing up meaningful cash flow while maintaining a policy that was already more than sufficient.

Data-Backed Decision to Keep Coverage

A different client was considering dropping her inflation protection to save money. Waterlily's projections told a different story: she was still 10 to 12 years from likely care needs, and the gap between projected costs and current coverage would widen without the rider. The firm recommended she keep the inflation protection, a recommendation backed by data rather than intuition.

"Waterlily is allowing us to get more direct and intentional with them on specifically what their long-term care costs, personalized, are for them." Lead Advisor, CFP

The firm built a repeatable CRM workflow around Waterlily: templated client communications, permission-based opt-in, a two-meeting planning cadence, and structured follow-up steps. What started as an experiment has become a standard part of how the practice delivers long-term care planning.

Perhaps most importantly, Waterlily has pulled LTC conversations earlier into the client lifecycle. Pre-retirees in their 50s and early 60s, clients who previously would not have engaged on this topic, are now having productive planning conversations because the platform gives advisors a concrete, visual reason to raise the subject.

"It's the first tool we've had to show how [long-term care] can be funded." Lead Advisor, CFP

Ready to Make Long-Term Care a Strength of Your Practice?

This Midwest wealth management firm went from evaluating Waterlily to building their entire LTC planning workflow around it in under four months. The platform helped them have smarter conversations, deliver data-driven policy recommendations, and provide measurable value to clients across three generations.  

To see how Waterlily fits into your planning process, please visit our website or start now by scheduling a demo.