Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Scott Leonardi Founder of Complete Solutions Discussing Home Healthcare

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

Scott Leonardi began serving families in 1995 as a licensed Life & Health insurance agent. In 1998, he founded Complete Solutions, a holistic planning firm dedicated to helping individuals and business owners protect their future. As a Certified Financial Fiduciary® and member of the National Association of Certified Financial Fiduciaries, Scott is committed to putting his clients’ best interests first.A passionate advocate for financial education, Scott co-authored *Don’t Go Broke in a Nursing Home* to help people avoid costly mistakes that threaten their life’s work. His mission is to align insurance coverage with each client’s unique needs and lifestyle.Outside of work, Scott enjoys time with his wife, five children, one granddaughter, and three Dobermans—and continues to campaign for that family boat.Learn More: https://www.completesolutions.insure/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-scott-leonardi-founder-of-complete-solutions-discussing-home-healthcare

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 Scott Leonardi, who's the founder of Complete Solutions and we'll be talking about home health care or nursing home care. Scott, welcome back to the program. Hey, Mike, excited to be back on the program. How are you, Ben?

Doing awesome, and I know this is quite the broad topic because people don't like to think about it, but statistically, there is a raising and rising need for people that might need that home health care or nursing care or long-term care. So talk a little bit about getting started with. what are some of the statistics that in the last few years you're seeing out there that you're now bringing to your client's awareness? Well, you know, I'm really excited to do this, to do this podcast because I think this is an area that people just do not learn enough about. And reasoning, it's preconceived notions, you know, the old long-term care plans, you know, if I needed some long-from care, I would buy that and there's some different disadvantages to that. We'll get into that in just a minute.

But a lot of times they just don't think it's ever going to happen to them. Well, the problem is it's going to, right? If we live and live long enough, we're going to have some issues, and we are just living a lot longer. So, you know, three of the biggest problems when it comes to long-term care issues, the first one is seven out of ten people. Statistically, seven out of ten people before the Lord comes and takes them will use some form of long-term care or the other. Whether that's home health care, Mississippi Living, adult day care, or a full-blown nursing home care. So seven out of ten people. Well, people often say, well, it's never going to happen to me.

Well, seven out of ten people, it will. That's the highest insurance statistic there is, except for life insurance. Because how many people are died? Yeah, those same seven out of ten said it wouldn't happen to them, and then there it came. Yeah. Exactly. Life insurance, everybody's going to die, right? So seven out of ten.

I mean, if our car and if we had car, if we drove a car and seven out of ten of us we're going to get to an accident today, you probably wouldn't go on the street. Right? Yeah, I'd be happy to pay them. If seven out of ten of the houses in your neighborhood were burning down, would you stay home all day holding the garden hose? Heck yeah, you'd be scared to death. So that's the first problem, is the statistics are we're going to need this care. That's statistics.

Right now, again, you need two days, two weeks, two years, 15 years. We don't know that. That's the statistic we don't know. So the first problem is seven out of ten people, this are going to need it. And when they do need that, guess what? nobody pays. And we'll talk about that here in just a second. But the next problem is, other than seven out of ten people need care is, again, no one pays. No one pays. Sometimes people think, well, Medicare pays for that, don't they? No. Well, I got, I'm a veteran. There's a little bit of benefits there, but they're not going to pay for it. Well, I've got a state teacher's plan. I work for federal blue. I've got a great health insurance plan with my retiree plan. Guess what? None of those pay. And the reason being is because of the levels of care. Did you realize that there's multiple kind of levels of care? Did you realize that, Mike?

It would sound feasible, but I don't know what the levels are. Yeah, yeah. Well, say, a lot of people haven't. That's why I asked that question. So realistically, there's like three levels of care. You know, the first care is called skilled care. Skilled care is a very high acute level of care. You have to go into the hospital.

You have to have at least three days stay in the hospital, which sometimes that doesn't happen because they kick you out of the hospital so fast your head spins, right? Yeah. So you have to have three days in the hospital to get discharged in the hospital. and go get care. If that occurs and you're at a high acute level of care, you can qualify for what's called skilled care. Well, skilled care is wonderful because guess what? Medicare pays for skilled care. Your state teachers pay for skill care. All the retiree plans pay for state care paid for skilled care is when you have an issue and a problem and you need to get better to get home.

Right? You had a heart attack stroke. Broke your hip. Rehab. Rehab. Get you better, get you home. That's skilled care. The problem is, skill care doesn't last very wrong. It lasts very long, right? You'll typically go into what's called intermediate, which is kind of a stepping stone. Then you go into the biggest area of care, and that area is called custodial care. Well, custodial care is when you have a problem with what's called ADLs. You ever hear of ADLs? No.

Activities of daily living. What are the activities of daily living? Dressing, bathing, toileting, transferring, cognitive incontinence. See, those are the things we do every single. day and we take for granted until we can't do it no more, right? See, when we have a problem with that kind of stuff, it falls under the custodial care level. And under custodial care, guess what? Guess who pays? Nobody. Oh, no. You out of your pocket. Out of your pocket. Got it. So that causes the problem because huge amounts of people today that are getting care at home, you know, getting home

health care or in a nursing home, they need help with dressing and bathing and toileting and transferring and that kind of stuff, which is custodial care, which means nobody pays. It means we got to pay. that out of our pocket. Do you think that's probably a problem in today? Probably to pay that out of your pocket? I would think so. You better believe. You better lose. Yeah. When that leads us into the third problem, third problem with long-term care is the cost. I mean, take look at the average cost to cost America for long-term care, and it's well over $10,000 a month. Some areas less, not many, some areas more. So just think if you're cutting a check for 10, 12,000 a month a month, every single month, month in and month out for your spouse. I think that'll do a nice job beating up your portfolio?

Yeah. Absolutely. So it eats up your assets terribly, terribly. So people really need to learn about law and care. They really need to do. It's important. And I would venture to say that that 70% number that you mentioned, and you also said that there's so many people that go, yeah, yeah, yeah, won't apply to me.

Those are the same people that probably don't put enough of an emphasis in their retirement plan and planning to put in a decent enough number because probably no one's putting two or three thousand dollars a month aside much less eight to ten like you mentioned you got you got it you got it just they just want to stick of their head in the sand and not kind of worry about it but again it happens and you've got a plan for it now why don't people want to plan well again none of us want to believe that you know that we're going to become decrepit someday you know that we can't walk if we need to be pushed around or helped in and out of bed nobody wants to blow believe that, right? They just think we're going to, we're going to last forever, Superman, and then

drop dead, right? I got this one client. He's 95 years old. He's just a great old guy. He's been a client for like 25 years. And he says, Scott, you know, when it's time to go, nothing beats a massive heart attack. I said, really, Roger, he goes, yeah, he goes, but he goes, but I've got to be massive. It can't be a little one because you'll end up in the nursing them. It's got to be massive. Yeah. Time to go, massive. And I said, wow. That's great. That's my philosophy. You know, live long, die fast, right?

Yeah. Unfortunately, we don't have that. We can't control that plan, right? We can't control that plan. So it is crucial to really kind of learn about this stuff and see how it affects you. Because when it does, it eats up, portfolio, it's crazy, crazy. Yep. So what are some of those ways that you can plan for that 70% possibility?

Well, great. I'm glad you asked that question. So most time when people need care, you know and let's say god forbid you need to care mike you know where do you want to get your care first hopefully at home i mean at home i would think yeah yeah yeah most people they want to get their care at home right and that's wonderful if we can facilitate that right if we can facilitate that well what does that mean well see sometimes people don't want to plan for long from care because they think medicare's going to pay and all those other reasons but they also think

well we'll just take care of each other you know i'll take care of my wife she can take care of me. Well, guess what? That's not going to happen because your spouse is usually about the same age you are, right? Yeah. Right? So if you're old and you're older and having issues, your spouse is probably older. I mean, you're probably not a 75 year old guy married to a 19 year old person, right? And if you are, if you need a long-term care, that person's bolting. They're leaving, right? They're not going to take care of them, right? So the key is taking care of each other just doesn't work. See, we have a warped, people out there have a warped understanding of what caregiving means. do we think caregiving is cooking and cleaning for each other?

Well, if caregiving was cooking and cleaning for each other, Mike, is your wife caregiving for you right now? She is if it was cooking and cleaning, right? Yeah, yeah. You're probably cooking and clean for her too. You're both caregiving for each other, right? That's not caregiving. Caregiven is when you can't get up.

Your spouse has got to pick you up and put you into the bathtub, not hurt them, not hurt you, put you under the toilet to go to the bathroom, move you out to the kitchen, move you back into the den, move you back to your bed. I mean, that's caregiving, and it's very difficult. So people have a warped understanding of just what caregiving means.

So we've got to figure this process out and kind of plan for that, which is just crucially important. We're going to need these, going to need this, going to need care. So if we can't facilitate it with the dollars, I mean, we could use their own money, right? That's some people's plan. We'll just use our own money. Well, again, using our own money can be devastating if we need long stays in the nursing room. We can eat up the assets quickly. So what are some of the solutions?

Well, number one, traditional long-term care insurance, right? And you probably heard of traditional long-term care insurance. You buy a plan, pay the premium, hope for the best, right? You've heard of those plans, right? If you need it, it's there. Well, if you need it, it's there. But what's the problem if you don't need it? You paid the money.

20, 25 years down the road. Yep. Yeah, 20, 25 years down the road, you didn't need it. You got a stack of receipts. But guess what? It's about risk sharing. I always tell people insurance is about. sharing the risk with the insurance company.

You know, why do we have car insurance? Well, we pay a little bit of money to share the risk with the insurance. We have a big accident. They're going to pay the bulk of the bill. Our home insurance, same thing. But if you don't have an accident, you don't get those premiums back, do you? Exactly right. Like homeowners insurance.

You know, people say, well, I don't want to plan for long-term care because I'm not really worried. I'm like, seven out of ten chances, do you're going to need this? I said, do you have homeowners insurance? And so, of course I do. I thought, well, you probably can't sleep at night if you didn't have homeowners insurance, right? He goes, oh, yeah, it's my biggest asset. I said, okay, great. Well, think about this for a minute.

Have your house ever burned to the ground? Well, no. Okay, so you never had a full-blown claim burned to the ground, right? Well, no. Okay, so let me ask you question. Do you ever do this? You get home, you tell your wife, listen, I'm just upset. And she says, what's the matter?

You said, listen, we've had that insurance company for 26 years, and we have not had a claim. I'm going to start a fire in the garage of this weekend because I want some claim money. Yep. Does that happen? Maybe sometimes that happens. but hopefully it doesn't happen, right? But so we don't think that away. We think, hey, I'll spend a little bit of money

and share the risk with the insurance company. Well, I don't get when people say, well, if I never needed, I lost the money, well, you're protecting yourself. But I do kind of understand because law and care, traditional long-fair insurance is expensive, right? We have to buy a plan.

We pick and choose some benefits, and maybe that plan can be $5,000, $7,000 a year in premium. Well, that's a big premium. But what was the average nursing home cost a month? $10,000. Yeah, so a big doubt. I'd rather pay $5,000,000, a year than $10,000 a month, right?

But I understand why people think that. You know, the other problem with traditional long-term care insurance, a lot of them the premiums don't stay guaranteed, which means what happens? The premiums go up. Yeah. So that's kind of a fun discussion to have. You know, all of a sudden, you've had the plan for 15 or 16 years.

You know, you hit 80 or 74 or 75. you get a notice from the insurance company saying, hey, listen, we love you. We appreciate you. Well, we're going to raise your premium 28%. That's exciting news to get, right? And usually what they'll say is, listen, well, we don't have to raise it. We can reduce your benefit if you like. Well, both those are in six, right?

You don't want to pay more and you don't want to have less benefit because you're getting closer to needing it. So again, there's some inherent issues with traditional long-term care insurance, even though it beats nothing. It beats nothing. As a matter of fact, talking about having some planning. You know, I always tell people you should have some type of plan. So I've got clients who have, maybe they don't have a large estate, but they are worried because, you know, short-term stays sometimes can be worse than long-term stays. I mean, think about this. How's that?

Your whole nest egg was $120,000. Well, think about this. If your whole nest egg was $120,000, then that's your whole nest egg. And all of a sudden, you or your spouse, one of you needed care, you got laid up for six, eight, nine, let's say, ten months. well in the beginning you probably got some care paid by Medicare because it was probably in the hospital, that type of stuff. But then you needed seven or eight or nine months of care at 10 grand a month. Maybe you discharge and come home because you got better, but you blew 70, 80,000 bucks of that 120. That's kind of tough.

So sometimes the short stays can hurt people more than the long stays. So in all type of situations, as a matter of fact, I have a client specifically. I'm thinking about a couple weeks going out with them. And we're talking about needing a plan and they were concerned. about it. And so one of the things I asked them is, again, if you get needed care, where would you want to have your care? And of course, they said what? At home. I wanted to stay home as long as I can. So there's some very nice home health care care plans out there that are pretty cost effective, fairly easy to help qualify for, and at least it gives you protection in the home. So now you have money coming in to help your parents care give for you, help your kids care give for you, to help get you some care to keep you at home as long as they possibly can. So even a short-term plan, beats no plan. Beets no plans. Does that kind of make some sense?

Yeah, for sure. There is some inherent issues with traditional long-com care. Yeah, well, let's get into those because I know that, you know, anything is better than nothing. You know, like done is better than perfect, you know, or started is better than perfect. So let's at least get something in place. So don't ignore it. But what are some of those options? So, you know, I'm kind of excited to talk about this planning strategies, especially for folks who have

actually worked hard. They've built up a nice portfolio. Maybe they got 6,7,8, 900,000, 4,000, 600,000, 2 million, whatever they got. They've worked hard and saved up these assets, right? So now they're rolling into retirement. They're a great adventure. And now they're potentially faced with a long-term care issue, right? Option one is to buy a traditional long-room care plan. But again, premiums can probably go up in the future. At the end, if I never needed it, I spent the money, wasted the money, even though I protected the estate. But there are some very cool options that Ashley is a leveraging concept. It's called asset-based launch-term care.

Are you familiar with asset-based long-term care? I am not. Okay. So asset-based launch-room care is very cool concept. There's really kind of two parts to that. There's like a long-term care life insurance plan and like a long-term care annuity plan. So the long-term care life insurance plan is my favorite concept.

It's a leveraging concept. So what we can do is we can take some money out of your portfolio. we just reposition it. So if we reposition it from this account into this other account, do you still have the money? Yeah, you still got the money. But we repositioned it into this asset-based long-term care plan. So we moved the money in.

That instantly creates a large pool of money for long-term care. And that long-term care became used for home health care, adult day care, assisted living, or full-blown nursing home care. So any level of care you can use that big pot of money for, right? So we put X dollars in, create a bigger pool of money for a long-term care. So if I started needing care and I can pull more money out of the plan than I put in, let me ask you, is that a win? Sounds like a win to me.

Yeah. If you can pull more money out than you put in, that's 100% win, right? The beautiful thing about that concept is let's say you're one of those three out of ten that never needed care, you passed away, never needed care, all the money you put into that plan, plus some goes to your beneficiaries income tax free. So now you get all the money back. That sounds too good to be true. That is pretty awesome.

But the leveraging concept, we reposition it. You still got it. If you need it, great, we've maximized the benefit. So if we maximize the benefit and we're using that pool of money, guess what? That money is protecting the rest of the estate, right? And then if we never need it, we get all the money back. That's a pretty cool con. So again, people, I think everybody needs to learn, learn about that concept.

Now, as I mentioned, I co-authored a book called Don't Go Broken in Nursing Home with a very good friend of mine, Don Quante. It's called Don't Go Broken in Nursing Home. If you get on my website, duckduckplan.com, you can ask you order a copy of this book. I'm happy to mail you out a copy, free copy of the book, mail it out to you, and then we can have some questions if you have some questions on. But it talks about all the news and the announcement with long-term care, traditional long-term care and planning. There's some veterans benefit stuff in there. but it talks specifically about that asset-based stuff. Everybody needs to learn about the asset-based stuff.

Whether you do any planning or not, that's besides the point you need to become educated. And that's again, I'm happy to send in my book, don't go broken in a nursing home. Just get on my website and order. Awesome. That's really, really good. Great stuff. Yeah. So I tell you, the people that, again, we've said this so many times, but the people that think, oh, it won't happen to me.

Well, 70% is a statistic that's been proven. What if it does happen to you? Well, I would submit to you that if you've put together that plan and you've got something in place that if it happens, you're prepared and it's not costing you a lot of money, well, then if you're not part of that 70%, then the money's still sitting there and you're using it for all kinds of other things. So have those contingencies in place. Yeah. Yeah, it's a no brand. I was talking to this one guy just a couple weeks ago. A really super nice couple.

They came in. They did very well. They had about a $1.4 million portfolio. Just a nice retirement program. Got some decent cash flow coming in, so we weren't worried about the cash flow. And I asked them, I said, what kind of a launch of care plan do you have? What planning strategies have you done? He said, yeah, we haven't really done nothing.

It will be okay. I said, okay. So what do you base we'll be okay on? Well, you know what? I don't think it's ever going to happen to me. And, of course, the wife is looking kind of like browning over there. because a lot of times guys say, it's not going to happen to us. And the woman goes, yeah, but what if it does?

He's more worried than he is because that's how guys are sometimes. Yeah, we'll be okay. And the wife's so like, well, maybe we won't be okay, right? And so I said, well, why do you think it'll be okay? She said, well, we have a nice portfolio. Got them let over a million dollars. We need launch from care. We'll pay out of our portfolio.

I said, listen, Roger, I get that. I understand that. You did well. You saved up this money. But let me ask your question. If you can boil down to why. you're successful. Why are you sitting on a million and a half dollars with a asset? You can bolt down to one single word, what would that word be? I love asking people

that because they come up with all kinds of stuff, ethics and blah, blah, blah, work hard. I said, you can't say work hard because how many words is that? That's two words, right? So what's the one word to boil down why you're successful? That's two words, right? So what's the one word that can boil down to why you're successful? And here's the word, leverage. I asked Roger, let me ask you question. You got out of high school. Got out of high school. How much money you guys have in the bank account? They kind of laughed a little bit. I said, you didn't have enough money to pay attention, did you?

He said, no, we did. We were flat broke. I thought, so what did you do? You went out and started working hard, leveraging your time for what? Dollars. You leveraged your time for money, right? Once you got enough money to pay your expenses, what do you do with that extra money? You put that into retirement and 401Ks and investment and you bought stocks.

So now your money is leveraging, making money. You're working hard leveraging making money. Two wonderful leveraging concepts there. make some pretty good decisions over your whole entire lifetime. Keep leveraging. Come retirement time, what do you have? A big pile of money because you leveraged. I said, so why in the world would you take a risk with that portfolio when you can leverage today?

What if we pull a portion of that and transferred into a long-term care asset-based plan? We're going to leverage that into two to three times a bigger pool of money than what you put in. If you need long-term care, you got the money. If you don't, everything you put in gets paid to the beneficiaries. Isn't that a wonderful concept? He goes, oh, my goodness gracious, I love it. So again, the key is, don't be so close-minded, become educated and then decide, hey, I should plan or I shouldn't plan. That's kind of a key.

But get my book. You'll enjoy it. Awesome. Well, let's, I think that's a perfect spot to wrap up. Have a plan. Realize that if you don't need it, it's there. Get the book. And what was the best website to use to go pick up a copy of your book again?

Yeah, you go to Duck Duck Plan. I always talk about getting your ducks in a row. So DuckDuckPlan.com. Again, I'm happy to mail you. I'll copy of the book. I know we're kind of at the end of the podcast, but I love talking about this stuff. Let me show out one more thing.

Sure. One more thing. And that's the whole concept of taxes when it comes to Longroom Care. And sometimes people don't get this. If you don't do any planning for long-term care, what is typically one of your biggest assets? Besides your house, what's your biggest asset?

You know 401k IRA, your retirement account, right? Right. Well, guess let's say for an example, you need care, right? So you start pulling $8, $10,000 a month out of your IRA to pay for care. Not only now are you getting slapped around because you need big expenses for your launching care. But what else is happening when you're pulling that money out of your 401K? 100% taxable. Right, right, right, right.

Triggers. Get killed on taxes. And you're getting killed for the health care costs. Well, there's a cool concept called the Pension Protection Act. And when you do that asset-based plan and even some traditionals, We create that big pool of money. That big pool of money is 100% income tax free to pay for a long term care. So everybody needs to learn about tax-free dollars to pay for launchment care.

And that's in my book too. So again, I'm sorry to pass our time a little bit, but oh, you're fine. It's so awesome to learn about tax-free money for a long-term care. People need a lot. Yeah, when we talk about guarantee and tax-free, boy, that's just music to people's ears. So that is just spectacular. And also when you talk about things that people typically are either consciously or unconsciously ignoring. So I think that this nursing home and long-term care is such an important concept because probably if we were to poll 100 people in a care facility, a major percentage of them would have gone, yep, I'm not prepared.

I should have done better. and these tips that you brought and the book that you're offering is just going to really help a lot of people. So thank you so much for coming back on, Scott. It's been a real pleasure. Appreciate that. It's great to be on. Good luck to you, buddy. Talk to you in the future.

Bye, bye. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www. www.influential entrepreneurs radio.com