Many Japanese Not Financially Ready for Long-Term Care

Funds Required

Japan is one of the world’s leading countries for life expectancy. While longevity is considered a blessing, concerns about how to pay for living expenses and long-term care can be a source of anxiety.

An estimate of the total cost to provide a person with one year of care at home, followed by five years in a private nursing home, was carried out by Lifull Senior, which provides online information on nursing homes and long-term care facilities. According to that estimate, the cost would come to ¥23.0 million per person.

In early June, Lifull Senior conducted a survey on feelings about long-term care costs, targeting 304 people in their fifties and sixties, who are beginning to think about their own future care needs, and 317 people in their thirties and forties, who are likely to face caring for their parents in the future.

When respondents in their fifties and sixties were asked how much they believed they would need for their own long-term care, the largest segment (42.1%) answered that they did not know. The results also show that more than half of the respondents, at 56.2%, had made no financial preparations at all to cover the costs of care. Only 6.2% reported having set aside ¥20 million or more, which is roughly equivalent to the estimated ¥23 million required for long-term care.

Meanwhile, when it comes to receiving financial support from their children to cover expenses for long-term care, more than 80% of the respondents said they did not want such assistance, with 38.2% preferring to not receive it and 46.1% saying they definitely do not want it. However, when elderly individuals require long-term care without having made sufficient financial preparations, it is not uncommon for their children to make up the shortfall. The representative from Lifull Senior stresses the importance of “having discussions at an early stage and gathering information on ways to limit long-term care costs so that the burden on both the elderly and their children can be reduced.”

While care facilities in central urban areas or near major train stations are more convenient, their admission fees and monthly charges tend to be high due to higher land prices. One way to reduce costs significantly is to expand the search for a facility to suburban areas of neighboring municipalities, even if they are not the preferred location.

According to the cost estimates published online by Lifull Senior, one way to reduce costs significantly is to look beyond Tokyo to prefectures like Kanagawa, Chiba, and Saitama as options. As an example, the average upfront fee to enter a nursing care facility in Saitama is roughly ¥6.2 million lower than in Tokyo, while the monthly fee is also around ¥74,000 lower.

Data Sources

• Data from survey on long-term care costs and ways to reduce nursing-home expenses (Japanese) from Lifull Senior

(Translated from Japanese. Banner photo © PhotoAC.)