Nobody wants to think about the negative aspects of growing old. Preparing for retirement is one thing, but long-term care planning can be difficult and emotional.

LTCPlanningCentral.com, a Web site designed to teach advisors about long-term care planning, launched today. The site is designed to provide advisors with education and tools to help them speak to clients about long-term care needs, such as insurance.

Karen Henderson, founder and CEO of the LTC Planning Network, entered the field after caring for her own father for 14 years. In 2004 Pro Seminars, a training firm for financial services professionals, hired her to speak to advisors about the subject.

“Once I started to get up in front of these advisors, I realized that they were floundering,” she says. “They didn’t understand the health care system. They didn’t understand know how to talk to clients about this.”

The seed was planted. Along with Kyle Lowe, founder and president of financial services marketing firm Freedomarketing, Henderson began developing a resource portal geared toward advisors.

The basis of the product line is AdvisorWise. “It’s a program we’ve created to help advisors understand why they should be talking to clients about long-term care and how to do it,” says Henderson. AdvisorWise is an educational kit that includes a guidebook, a CD, a workbook, instructional pamphlets, a planning questionnaire and a year’s membership to the LTCPlanningCentral.com site, which is for advisors only.

An annual membership to the site allows unlimited access to a subset of resources such as power-point presentations, templates for letters and documents, articles how-to documents. Additional resources can be bought individually or in bulk for clients.

“Advisors were having a problem,” says Henderson. “They found there was a lot of information on the product [long-term care insurance] but there was no information on why the product is needed in this country and what Canadians face as they age.”

LTCPlanningCentral.com aims to fill these gaps, according to Henderson. She says advisors can learn what long-term care is all about, what the government does and does not provide, how and why they should be talking to clients about long-term care planning. She says armed with the right knowledge advisors will be aware of the objections they will face and will understand the best language to use in conversations about aging, which will make them better equipped to sell products such as long-term care insurance

“We all might not want to buy living benefits products,” she says. “But we’re all going to get old.”