The $2.5M Problem No One Is Planning For: AI, Aging, and Your Financial Future with Lily Vittayarukskul

0:00Hi, this is Dave Musial, owner of Four Seasons Heating, Air Conditioning, Plumbing, and Electric. With our biggest sale ever, furnaces from just$39 a month, furnace and air conditioning combos from just$57 a month, plus six years interest-free financing. Four Seasons guarantees to beat any competitor's price by up to$1 ,000. With an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau and over 30 ,000 five-star reviews, we are Chicago's trusted local experts. For all the right reasons, call 866-FOUR-SEASONS. Mecham Auctions, the world's largest collector car auction company, returns to Indianapolis for Dana Mecham's 39th original spring classic May 8th to the 16th at the Indiana State Fairgrounds.

0:42Join us for the fun, fast-paced, high-energy Mecham experience with 3 ,000 vehicles up for grabs. For avid collectors, first-time buyers, and enthusiasts of all ages, there's something for everyone. Register to bid and buy spectator tickets now at Mecham.com. When it comes to AI in this society, if there was ever a time to work hard and actually understand how business works and how you should be learning how to make money, it's now. Because what I anticipate with AI is just with a lack of government regulation, and I don't see that happening anytime soon in the U.S., is that you're going to have more and more wealth disparities, unfortunately.

1:18You're going to have the people that built the AI that everyone uses and the people that use the AI but don't have normal wealth. And the disparity is going to get so wide that it's going to have economic ramifications that we're going to hit a place where we'll be in a post-scarcity world. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.

1:54People are living longer than ever, but financially, most people aren't prepared for what that actually means. When it comes to long-term care, it's one of the biggest expenses people will face, but one we're the least prepared for. Lily Videoritzkuhl, the CEO of Waterlily, is building a company using artificial intelligence, predict those costs years in advance, and help families plan before it's too late. Lily, welcome to Right About Now. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Lily, who the hell are you? You got a great story. I'm excited to tell that. And I love Waterlily. I mean, what a great playoff your name.

2:27You had me at Waterlily. Tell me about Lily. We built the first ever AI that predicts what an individual's future aging trajectory is going to look like in their future long-term care needs. I built out the company that focused on this topic because we personally navigated a long-term care event. It was super devastating for us. A lot of folks don't realize how this long-term care or aging is not something that's taken care of by Medicare or traditional health insurance. And you have to pay for it out of pocket. Most people don't have funds and you have to have family members step in. And it's all incredibly stressful, breaks up relationships.

2:59So I found this to be one of humanity's biggest problems that we could try to solve for. So here I am going at it very intentionally and very intensely. It's a good time because boomers are one of the biggest generations and they're right here in this time period. This is a relevant topic for a lot of people. I want to lean into a little bit of that emotional impact. It's fascinating. And hearing you say it, I have guests on, I read the notes and I think about it. But then when I actually talk to them, things start to crystallize a bit. It's fascinating that as sophisticated as we think we are and doing all these things, planning all these things.

3:28The reality is we're all aging and we're all sort of headed towards these situations every day. And the fact that we haven't developed systems, plans, health care, more dedicated towards it seems like a gap in and of itself. It's now more important than ever has been to be a planner. There's older generations where if you worked really hard and you found some opportunities and you're good to go, things have become so much more complex than we ever expected. I think technology has made our life more complex and more expensive. Stuff where you might think I could live on like rice and beans. We don't have that situation.

4:00There is more wealth disparity than we ever had in society, at least in the U.S. that tells us like, hey, you have to buy more. You have to get the nicer thing because that other person has that nicer thing. Life is just way more expensive than it ever has been, relatively speaking, to other generations. How are you supposed to take care of someone? Things are a lot more expensive. You have to plan smarter and we have to get on top of all these technologies to help us plan smarter. In some ways, it's fascinating to say this. The data, I looked this up actually a few months ago to prove it because I was like, it's hard to believe because we eat in a lot of ways.

4:28We're unhealthy eating and processed food and all that stuff. But we are living longer than we ever have. You want to live longer. And we all do. And at certain times, I'm sure we all go, man, life's hard, but you want to have longevity. But with longevity comes cost and time because time is money. And that's even more to plan for because, hey, just more dollars that are spent every year. You're supposed to be at a time period where you're probably a little slower getting around, a little slower processing. We all age. You've got to plan for a longer period of time and thus a larger amount of dollars to support yourself over that.

5:00I'm sure that's a lot of what your platform does. these seem like obvious no-duh things, but we haven't been doing a whole lot about it. I don't blame the average person that wakes up, they're 60, and they're like, oh my God, wait, I should probably plan for this event. I'm about to retire. I don't blame them because times have shifted faster than I ever expected. It was just a silent generation or two that is aging right now and the generation before where the family used to live under the same roof. It wasn't too long ago. A couple of decades ago, when you'd raise your kids, those kids would grow up in the same roof.

5:28You would find a job in your city. And when parents got older, He took care of them or he lived right next to them. But times have changed. In order to make more money, most people go to college now. When you go to college, you try to find the best job that you possibly can. You go to the coastal areas. You move away from home. This is like the first time ever where we now have single generation households. When parents age, how are we going to take care of them? When we age, how are kids going to take care of us? We weren't taught to think about it that way. When we kind of feel like we woke up, we're like, oh crap, I have to plan for this.

5:58It's because who had to do it before us? No one really and no one really talked about it until right now. So it feels new. Why do you think people haven't been and aren't planning more for long-term care? The first generation that never really want to talk about long-term care, if it happened, they had an assumption that like, yeah, my kids will take care of me. I'll definitely never go into a nursing home. You talk to baby boomers nowadays, they're a lot more open. And if you talk to Gen Xers, they also say like, hey, we have Reddit. We talk about our problems online and more people are spreading their problems online ever than before.

6:27So we now have more dialogue around this. It's a relatively new thing to have dialogue around rules that you have, being able to get an anonymous person to chime in here. And we now finally have language that we can use on what does it look like to retire? What does it look like to age? How are we thinking about it? But the reason why we didn't is because aging is not a fun experience to think about. You also don't want to think about mortality. We're not really deaf first, sort of, kind of like, I already run out like, oh yeah, let's talk about it all the time. It's like, you actually really try to avoid it.

6:54You really try to avoid talking about when you're sick or thinking about getting sick. And it's not to our benefit. And we're recognizing it now. That's the whole point of this episode is that education. Yeah, exactly. Hi, this is Dave Musial, owner of Four Seasons Heating, Air Conditioning, Plumbing, and Electric. When emergencies happen, who do you call? Broken pipe? Power outage? Furnace failure? No hot water? The answer is always the same. Call Four Seasons. We guarantee same-day service and installation on all heating, cooling, plumbing, and electrical needs with no extra charge for nights, weekends, or holidays.

7:23That's why over 30 ,000 customers have given us a five-star Google review. For all the right reasons, call 866-4-SEASONS.

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8:38Waking multiple generations. We skew 25 to 45. 60-40 male to female. Hey, we're getting you ready for yourselves and your parents. I'm in this now, Lily. My parents are in their 70s. They're healthy, but I'm seeing this. It's funny. You almost switch roles of parents and kids and then role reversal of taking care of them in some ways. I've thought about it. My wife and I talked about it. What does that reality look like? We're as humans and as Americans, we don't want to talk about death. We don't talk about mortality of ourselves. There are huge implications across not just money, but societal, social, where they live, where they go, all those things.

9:14And I'm sure that's what you encountered in your situation. What we see is not that many people talk about this topic. And when they do, what you see online roughly is the same old stuff. You're probably looking into this for your parents right now. You're like, okay, they're growing older. What does that mean? If you looked up, my parents are growing older. What does that mean? You get a whole slew of stories that are not relevant to you. Or if you try to look at the statistics and when is it going to happen, it's national averages. Easy for you to scare yourself with, but not easy for yourself to prepare for the topic.

9:39And that's what we noticed as the really massive gap is how can we make this topic more relevant to the first person sitting in front of them and make it helpful? If they want to touch on this topic, let's go ahead and make it immediately useful, immediately helpful. What can we do? How do we give you that peace of mind? That's why it designed Waterloo. And that's where AI is a really fascinating use case here. It's not ChatGPT. It's not Gemini. It's not CLOD. It's not large language models. It's traditional machine learning models that are trained on real data, where we have over half a billion data points of families that we've been following for several decades.

10:09We looked at the patterns so that we can look at the families that look like your parents in this case. If you tell us this information, we could actually tell you what that trajectory is going to look like. When? How many hours? Could you step in for that care? How much is it going to cost? And that's when it becomes concrete like that, you realize, can I afford to step in in some way? If not, how do I solve this? Understand the problem. Now we can talk about solutions. Fascinating. You went to where I was going next. Talk to me about the platform. Are we talking LLM or are we talking something bigger, which it sounds like we are.

10:37This is processing the volume of data that's out there that you've collected. Who is this platform helping? Are we helping the institutions? Are we helping individuals? Walk through a little bit more of kind of the nuts and the bolts of Waterlily. We help both. What's really fascinating about this aging industry is that if you help both people, you're helping the end family. The way that works is with Waterlily, we first designed our software tool that has an intake form. It's a three to five minute intake form. We ask basis, social demographic info, medical info, financial info. From there, we look at the massive amount of data that we have.

11:11We look at, OK, based on this data for the person that just told us who they are. Can we look at the people that look like them, that we have historical data on and tell them, hey, what's your likelihood of needing care? What age it'll begin at? How many hours to start at the tail end? We gave that to wealth advisors. We gave that to financial advisors. We gave that to estate planners. We gave that to retirement communities. So whenever they bring up the topic as a part of helping families understand what this future risk is going to be, those professionals want to help prepare these families for that risk.

11:36They have all the information that they need to be able to do that. Families, though, don't always have access or they're not always talking to those professionals. that's where we have given the software also directly to families. So if you actually went to waterlily.com, you can actually click on start for free and start that process. Two main problems that we're solving for is one, the motivational problem. Most people will say, throw their hands up and say like, there's nothing I could do on this topic. It's really scary. Why try to scare myself? It's motivational. First off, you can actually do some pretty incredible things financially for yourself.

12:04And health wise, if you were to learn what your future self would look like, it didn't change anything. Two is that if you know what that future cost is going to look like. And we helped you try to solve for that cost as efficiently as possible, either in your 40s or for your parents in your 50s or 60s, instead of just reactively paying out of pocket in a non-strategic manner. That's a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars to those of us that are really young, millions of dollars because of the inflation of cost. It can make it more sustainable for the end family that pays out of pocket and help the professionals more strategically have that conversation.

12:33We've helped the space become more affordable. Interesting. I could see how this could be leveraged and I wouldn't be surprised. I might be going there. I'm just like, my mind starts working, Lily. I think of now college savings plans, tax-free, the tax benefits. We should have parents' savings plans for, and they should be tax-free or we should have tax benefits for what's necessary. Because look, wouldn't the government rather give us a tax break to save tax-free to take care of our parents instead of the government have to take care of them? Let's solve it on the front end and not the back.

13:04Yeah. So first off, you're asking like, why doesn't the government step in. Like if this is such a massive problem at scale, why isn't the government stepping in effectively? And it's because in its current shape and form, if they just took on the families that ran out like that had a long term care event and they'll just pay for it, the government would go bankrupt really fast. Yeah, I can imagine that they would. I just meant help. But assisting the ones that will pay for it, that have the money making tax benefits or whatever, was more my suggestion. You can look into HSAs, for example, putting some money in there.

13:33You're Right. The max that you could contribute to an HSA that has its triple tax benefits, it does, you know, long term care is qualified under that count. But why is the cap so low? And then when you think about it, it's like, well, if you wanted to change things in government, how do you go and change things in government? Well, first, the governor has to essentially like legislation has to say like, oh, yeah, we should put a petition. Does it get approved? Is it on the ballot? And then you have to educate, you know, citizens, hey, vote yes on this. And if it's going to mean more taxes for them, if you want more dollars to go to a social net, it means more taxes usually.

14:03And most people just blanket don't want to pay more in taxes. They're already paying more than enough. And so it's not just enough to say, let's just put in dollars. But how do we become strategic about when we start to allocate those dollars? When is it on the government? When is it on ourselves? Is there a new type of account we should build? That's insurance products nowadays, too. I would love more of a dialogue here because it's complex. A lot of citizens just don't even know about this topic and how expensive it's going to be. That's why we don't talk about it. Lily, does your platform do tracking the reality that census data or standardized data is not personal enough?

14:36How is Water Lily maybe personalizing this on a family or individual basis to make it relevant? If you filled out the intake form, I would just like say like for you, for example, I'm not going to guess your age, but let's just say you filled out the intake form for yourself. That's actually when a lot of folks start to become aware of this topic. So when you mentioned like, oh, I'm aware of this topic, it's because of your aging parents. For you, we would predict your thing about having a long-term care event. If you were to have a long-term care event, let's just say, you know, you grow older, you slow down.

15:01And then we expect you, if you were to have an event, we think you have 61 % likelihood of having that event sometime in your life. And if you were to have that event, we think that'll happen around age 83. If you were to have that event, we expect that it'll be roughly about four and a half years of care, starting with about 20 hours of care per week, kind of coming into the home and ending with about 65 hours of care per week when it comes to nursing home level care needs. Your family, based on your household structure, they would take on roughly 20 % of your care needs or about 3 ,000 hours in total for all of your care.

15:33And the rough cost is going to be about$2.5 million by the time you need care when you turn age 83, when we count for healthcare inflation and how when family steps in, we pay for that. We tell you that story. We double check it. We say like, okay, we predicted based on your preference that you want to start to age at the home. Then you want to stay at the home. If you have assisted living level of care needs, like you want to stay at the home. But what happens when you have like nursing home level care needs? What do you want to do? Then most people say like, you know, I'll go to professional setting in that case.

15:59Now I'll consider that. We're like, okay, great. When you age at the home, we also predict how your family members might step in. If you're at the home, we predict how much your wife would step in. It looks like she would step in roughly about six hours of care per week to start. Your kids about 10 hours of care per week. Other family members about two hours of care per week. And roughly 20 hours goes to the professionals. Do you want that to happen? Or do you want to change those numbers in any way? So if I said that to you, Brian, like what would you immediately, thing. What are immediate questions or comments you have?

16:24The first thing I would say is, did you put the PETA tax on it? That's the pain in the ass factor tax on it for me. You'd have to have extra care because I'd be grumpy and pissed that I wasn't as moving as fast. We'd have to add some extra dollars to that thing for the PETA tax of dealing with me. But no, I would say what I'd be, okay, eyes open. I'm an independent person. I take care of myself and my family. I don't want anyone else being infettered or encumbered with that. You'd probably look at the six hours on your wife and these are physical caregiving hours. I'm not even talking about care coordination.

16:54I'm not talking about them being a power of attorney. You might say, hey, my wife, she is like, if I'm age 83, she's going to be, let's just say age 80. She's going to be frail herself. How is she going to physically take care of me? And most men need care first if that happens. And then women actually like need care afterwards. And actually a lot of men assume, oh yeah, my wife, if anything happens to me in sickness and in health, she'll take care of me. That's different when you're both aged. she can't physically get you in out of bed in out of the shower like what does that put her at risk of and you're like yeah i don't want that to happen but no one has that conversation today it just happens and the wife just goes ahead and takes that on but if you said to me right now hey if my care is gonna be two and a half million dollars by the time i need it two things i'll tell you the first one is okay we remove those hours from your wife the cost went up by a little bit went up to 2.6 that's the cost of taking care of your family members we put on more of that to the professionals and two is hey if you're in your 40s did you know that your roth ira account you never touched it you decided to max out in your 40s you kept putting in yearly a couple thousand dollars every single year up until your care's end date did you know you would have a couple million dollars in that account by the time you need care most people don't think about that it's not just saying oh i have two and a half today well what's a financial habit you should probably have that could try to cover this in the future and that gives people peace of mind oh i could do something about it i could protect my family members felt smarter about my finances but how and so we do that projection okay what do you have in what accounts how are you thinking about paying for this.

18:13How is that going to grow? People are super surprised on the power of compound. This sounds what estate planning should be. When you think of estate planning, okay, the will, where's stuff going, all that sort of stuff. And I'm sure there's some of this, but this sounds estate planning in 2026. That's what I'm hearing. I'm hearing evolved estate planning. Am I making the right leap, Lily? Yeah. A lot of folks that think about estate planning, they're like, oh, well, when I die, how much money, how do I want to divvy up my assets 50-50 amongst my two kids or something like that. State planning should start when you get sick or you should be thinking about this period that you're describing when an event happens or disease or whatever it might be.

18:52Instead of being end of life estate planning, it should be last 10%. Imagine if you had done your finances. Yeah, I'm going to have 2 million bucks by the time I pass. Well, what if you had a long-term care event? You don't have 2 million bucks anymore. Whatever you're telling your kids about what you'd have for them by the time you pass. Some people make real decisions and plans off of that. Building a much more realistic plan about, hey, the state plan is about the legacy. It's about what is the legacy you want to leave behind? And that means the legacy that you're establishing when you're sick as well.

19:18How do you want your family members to step in? How do you want to protect them even from that? Not just about how much money you're going to leave them when you pass. Lily, maybe we'll close out more on specifics within Water Lily. I'm kind of fascinated, like the business side of starting, growing, and running this company. Our audience is also, there's a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of marketing executives, business people. We're being informed by, oh shit, we need to plan for this and we need to get on Waterlily or wherever it's available, we'll get to all those deets. What's it like building, starting, running a company like this?

19:48Both incredibly rewarding and incredibly painful. It's definitely not the path I would put most folks down. Imagine how hard it is to build a company. You're just imagining it, but you haven't built it or you're in the middle of building the company. And then imagine it was 10X harder, just imagining that. And then it's actually harder than that. That's why when people say like, oh, you know, follow your passion and you know, does this It's like you kind of have to marry just what are you going to be really obsessed with? Are you really good at noticing that there's a market opportunity that no one else actually sees?

20:14And people buy because you're really passionate as well. People like buy what you have because you're going to sweat the details on this thing. You're going to be great at it in a competitive market. We've been incredibly fortunate. It's still hard to fundraise. I went to college at 14. He went at 11. I started in aerospace working with NASA from 12 to 16. It didn't matter if I looked like a prodigy. It's really still hard to fundraise to bid out that company. And it's really hard for me to build my company. It's all about relationships. Whatever you're particularly interested in, what you want to improve, how you want to help other people, the more and more you surround yourself with people that allow you to do that, that is going to make and break your business at the end of the day.

20:47When I focused on aging, I'm so obsessed with it. It's such a big problem. I focused on who were the sharpest investors in this space. How do I stay really home? I don't know much, but they could tell I'm passionate. They could tell I'm going to learn what I need to learn and build a relationship with them. And we've gotten money from some of the top VCs in this space. Water economic forum. I've spoken twice at Davos and in China, like on the topic of aging, was also named Forbes 30 under 30. I speak very often at industries like on this topic, but that also means I run 80, 90 hour work weeks myself every single week.