Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Rick Miller, Founder of Miller Wealth Planning Discussing Protecting the Surviving Spouse in Retirement

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

At Miller Wealth Planning, we provide Doctors, business owners and other high-net-worth individuals a comprehensive, bulletproof financial plan. Rick has put together an exceptionally talented and experienced team to show you how to manage the numerous risks high-net-worth professionals face.These risks include: tax risk; market risk; longevity risk (running out of money); inflation risk; long-term care risk, lawsuit risk, and loss of income risk, among others. Your freedom from worry is our objective.Rick credentials include: Certificate in Financial Planning; IRMAA Certified Planner; Certified Dementia Practitioner and Investment Advisor Representative.Rick has Master’s degrees in English and Counseling along with broad experience in business creation, real estate investing and more.Learn more: https://www.thecaregapsolution.com/The opinions expressed on this show by the host and Fredric W. (Rick) Miller are their own and do not reflect the opinions of this radio or television station. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information believed to be reliable. Although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-rick-miller-founder-of-miller-wealth-planning-discussing-protecting-the-surviving-spouse-in-retirement

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have back with us Rick Miller, who's the founder of Miller wealth management planning, and we'll be talking about protecting surviving spouses in retirement. Rick, welcome back to the program. Well, thank you, Mike. It's really great to be back. You know, I always love, I'm kind of a word smith, and I love when I look at titles or words and it's like protecting. That's an action verb. You know, like it's not just something you do once. It's something you are consciously really implementing. So that protection, I just love that.

So let's talk a little bit about, you know, when that spouse, husband or wife is no longer there. There's a surviving spouse. So how does protecting the surviving spouse in retirement look like? And then what are some of the challenges that people might not have thought about? Okay. This is a topic, Mike, that's near and dear to my heart because in the 27 years I've been in this business. as you might expect, I've had numerous deaths occur in my client base. And, you know, typically what happens is the man that goes first, and it's the wife that usually becomes the surviving spouse.

And with that comes an awful lot of challenges. Probably the first thing I would want to highlight is what I like to call the income cliff, which the surviving spouse or the wife falls off of. What I mean, Mike, is that when both spouses are alive and enjoying, you know, a happy marriage and happy retirement, and one of them passes away, and again, it's usually the husband, there's some immediate financial considerations. Number one, if the husband has had a pension of any kind, typically that either goes away or is cut in half. or is cut down to 25%. So that's a big chunk of lifestyle cash flow that goes away. And when we're talking about retirement here, the social security, instead of having one for both the husband and

the wife, now the wife is only going to have half of the husbands if that was the larger amount. So there's a tremendous financial hit right off the bat. You know, I find it interesting that you mentioned typically statistically the husband will pass before the wife because I've heard that several times that lifespan of women is longer than men. And sometimes that factor is not calculated in with retirement planning. So talk a little bit more about some of the unique and different risks that women face a retirement and maybe lifespan is one of them. Well, it certainly is, and that's going to lead me to talk about some innovations in long-term care.

But one of the things associated with falling off the income cliff that I want to make sure I put out there is that there's a taxation hit for the surviving spouse. Because while you're married, you have the benefit in the tax code of filing jointly. filing as a married couple. Now, the surviving spouse has to file as an individual, and that means what? That means her tax rates are going to go up. So combined with the income cliff and the tax hit, it's something that has got to be, like, a key feature and an emphasis on retirement. planning for women because, again, they tend to outlive us guys. And they probably deserve it.

They're the fairer sex and the better sex, if you ask me. I agree with you there. You know, that really is interesting because it's like, oh, well, even if there's a pension or Social Security or the benefits. And oh, now, you know, like the point about taxation, it's like you never know what taxes are going to do. But one thing we do know is if you're married finally jointly, that's one set of tax brackets and rates and all that. But if you're not married anymore because of a death of the spouse, that changes the picture. So that takes planning. That takes foresight.

And there's a lot of things that cascade down. It's like, okay, this event happened, good or bad, you know, like, oh, a new child came into the family. So now we can do some things that might be positive. But what if there was that death and that surviving spouse? Here comes this cascade of things to just calculate on. Let's roll into what you mentioned there, because another aspect of any retirement plan is long-term care, but how does that impact women more than men?

And what are some of those innovations that you have mentioned? Well, first of all, because women tend to outlive men, if you look at these statistics, women's average stay in a nursing home or needing care of any kind is in excess of five years. And most people are aware of the high cost of long-term care in a facility and in some cases, the even higher cost of getting the care at home, which, of course, you know, pretty much all of us would prefer to be in that situation. So the number one thing as a part of my practice, and it's a white paper that I've written some years ago, actually, is how to hedge the long-term care risk, because this is a unique and difficult risk. Think about this, Mike. Do you know if you're going to need long-term care?

No. If you need it, do you know how long you'll need it? No. Do you know how much it's going to cost? No. You know, where are you going to be able to get the care? Can you get it at home? Do you end up necessarily in a facility? So there are so many unknowns that from a financial planning perspective, Mike, it's very, very difficult, you know, because there's, there's, all those are question marks without, without clear answers. So. But didn't I hear recently that, or somewhere I heard this, that statistically, a. around 70% of people will need some form of long-term care in their lifetime. And there's many levels of long-term care. We know that, you know, from full-on memory care or, you know, assisted

living, things like that. But 70% is a pretty large stat. Well, yeah, and that is, that is the correct number, unfortunately. You know, it can, it can range from, you know, a few months or a year, a year and a half, men typically, to get back to the statistics, once they start to require care, whether it's at home or in a nursing home, they usually have passed on within two years. So, but again, if they're part of a happily married couple, the spouse is gone. Now, what assets are left and remaining for the surviving spouse? Yes. So what people generally and Americans certainly universally don't realize is that there are nine unique ways of hedging the long-term care risk.

And I use that term hedge because, again, it's such a situation where you don't, there's no certainty about any of those questions. went. So what financial advisors need to do is they need to understand what all the tools are because, you know, the tradition, let's take the traditional financial or long-term care insurance plan. Those are fine. There are issues over time with premiums being raised, but the idea is if you have one that works, it's going to provide, let's say, $400,000 towards your long-term care. Well, Mike, in Florida, where I'm sitting right now, the average facility cost is $100,000 a year. Wow. Four years worth of coverage.

Yeah, just four years worth of coverage. And those costs inflated over 6% a year. So women surviving spouses in particular are in a great deal of peril of running out of money. And all the traditional kinds of ways of preparing for long-term care are ways to essentially amass more assets or use insurance vehicles. but what they don't do or where they kind of fall away is when someone actually is in a facility or needs care. And that's where this innovation that I mentioned to you has come to be available in the United States. I love the word innovation, so I'm excited to hear about that. Well, interestingly enough, if we look at England, the UK, there are no traditional long-term care policies available.

Many of the life insurance and annuity hybrid vehicles that we are familiar with here in the U.S. are not available there. In the entire history of the U.K., there has only been one way. for families to approach the long-term care risk, and interestingly enough, is only after the risk has become real. Or, you know, someone is diagnosed with early dementia or, you know, they're starting to have trouble functioning independently at home. that's when all the preparation in the past, you know, has to start shelling out dollars for care. And that's traditionally where if you are in a position of needing care, you can't get it.

If you haven't prepared, you have to rely on your own assets. Isn't it kind of like driving a car around town with no car insurance and then getting in an accident and then shopping for car insurance? Well, it's too late. you just wrecked your car. That's a great analogy. Thank you for that. I'll use that and I'll quote you.

Okay, good. That's a perfect analogy. Once the risk has hit you, you're out of luck. Well, that's where the immediate care plan, which has again been used for decades in the UK, is now available in the United States. And what this does is it, essentially leverages the assets that the family has. It extends them, it increases them, based upon underwriting,

a mortality-based underwriting so that once the insurance company understands what the likely lifespan is based upon the various conditions, then they're able to say, okay, well, if you have $200,000, we're in essence going to be able to double that, for example, because they have a very clear understanding of the actual mortality in this individual case. So what this really means practically for families is that in a very high number of cases, we can ensure that they won't run out of money. even though they're already spending it for care. Wow. So let's dive a little bit deeper on that because I really feel like you've hit the nail on the head. Like, hey, traditionally, you have to be planning so far ahead that if I need long-term care,

I've got it covered with this solution or that solution. But if you're not prepared and now all of a sudden the onset happens and you're needing long-term care, it's too late. But now this opportunity, they already have that box checked. Oh, you're diagnosed with, you've got dementia, and you don't have anything set in place, we can help. What does it look like from there? When you sit down with someone that says, I didn't prepare, and I heard that you can help even though it's kind of like a preexisting condition, like the old, you know, insurance, like, sorry, it's preexisting. Well, now this is not the factor. What does that conversation look like and where does it go from there?

Well, that's a really astute question, because basically what we need to do is we understand what the financial capabilities, are, what are the savings, what are, you know, the 401ks, the retirement assets, what does the totality of that look like? Then we take a look at, all right, given your particular situation, you might be in a position where Medicaid, after you spending down the facilities or the assets that you have, is really going to be the only choice. That's not a desirable choice, but if people, you know, reality is reality. People only have so much money and some folks will fall into that category. However, if there are some assets available and, you know, most folks in this country will have some cash flow at least, social security, you know, they might have an annuity that they

bought or they're certainly going to have other investment assets out there. So we take a look at all of that. we understand what is the cost of care likely to be in their particular situation. And just as an aside, one of the things that people don't realize, Mike, is that once you go into a nursing home, you know, and let's say that cost is $85,000 a year, that is not a static cost. That's going to inflate roughly 6% every year. And families don't realize that fact so that once they're in there, they're thinking, okay, I've got 85, 85, 85, 85, 85, and then mom will probably be gone. Well, no, it might be 85, 92, 103, you know, whatever. It ratchets up.

So it's really important to have a vehicle that recognizes that the, the, the more you can extend or leverage your money so that you have actual, you've got increased dollars, the higher the likelihood is that once mom, for example, is in a nursing home, if the family runs out of money, transferring her to a Medicaid facility is going to be traumatic. Not to mention the fact that in the nursing home, she probably is in a private room. Now she's going to be in a room with two, three, four other individuals. So families would want to avoid that at all costs. And this is one of the ways that we can extend their buying power, if you will, to keep them where they are.

You know, it's just really amazing how innovation happens on the back of struggle. You know, someone out there had to have seen there is a huge segment of the population that has this need, but it's too late because they didn't plan ahead of time. And we can put something into place that can be a fair win-win for everyone involved. And I think that's such a powerful, you know, serving humanity kind of approach. And I just love when I see how that happened. So you say it's been used for decades in the UK. It's now available in the U.S. What are the types of companies behind that?

is this like an insurance company AAA-Reeded, where people can kind of hang their hat on and go, okay, well, it's new to the U.S., but it's not a new scenario, and the companies behind this are trusted? Yes, we've got an A-rated carrier. There's currently only one in the U.S. Because as I mentioned, this program is just now, essentially, we've seen here what the U.K. has been doing. And we've had, we now have a quality whose focus has been on aging and Medicare and Medicaid

and all of those things so that they are, they are experts in this field. You have to go to a financial advisor. They do not have a retail presence at this time, pardon me, at this time. But it's certainly something that you're going to see widely disseminated over the next probably decade. But right now in the United States, I believe there's only about 55 advisors that even have access to it. Wow.

Well, I think if someone is interested in learning a little bit more about this, Rick, what's the best way they can reach out and connect with you and see if it might be an opportunity to help them? Well, an easy way would be to go to my website. The website in this case is the caregap solution.com. That would give them just a wealth of information. It would expand on what we've discussed here today and be on that you can certainly reach me via email. My personal email, professional email, is Rick Miller,

advisor at gmail.com, or they can certainly call or text me directly 703, 401, 3672. And just let me know that, you know, with texting or emails, sometimes things end up in the spam box. I make it a priority to return my calls and emails as quickly as possible. if you haven't heard from me within 24 hours, you know, ring me up again. Because I can tell you, and let me one other thing. One other point is that the facilities might love this because their biggest costs are when they have to move somebody out. And then they, you know, it's and then they have to market that bed to fill that bed. So the assisted living facilities who are currently participated in this program now have their retention rate, you know, above 98%, which is like it's golden for them.

So it's a win-win not only for the clients and those in need, but for the facilities providing the service. Wow. Sounds amazing. I really appreciate you coming on to explain this to us, Rick. Thank you so much. Oh, it's quite my pleasure. Thank you, Mike. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders.

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