OC 500: Jeff Motske

Out of the estimated 48 million Americans living with some degree of hearing loss, only one in five wears hearing aids. The main reason? Cost. And these aren’t the only costs associated with hearing loss. Over the course of a lifetime, healthcare fees can add up to tens of thousands of dollars—or more. Here are tips to help you budget and plan for these expenses.

Find a health insurance plan tailored to your needs. Hearing aid devices usually range from $1,000 to $4,000 each and may require replacement roughly every five years. Many insurance companies do not provide full or even partial hearing aid coverage. Currently, only 22 states require insurance companies to provide hearing aid coverage for children, and only five states have provisions that include coverage for adults. Government healthcare programs such as Medicare offer little to no coverage, with the breadth of coverage varying from state to state for Medicaid.

If your current health plan does not cover hearing aids, an accredited insurance broker or agent can help you identify a plan that will work best for your situation and location. Make sure your agent represents several major insurers to ensure they are not incentivized toward selling you a specific plan.

Plan and budget to cover your healthcare costs. Plan for three types of expenses: fixed monthly premiums to your insurance company; routine out-of-pocket expenses (e.g., hearing devices); and unexpected costs (e.g., emergency room visits). In addition, make sure you understand all the costs included with your health plan, including deductibles, copays, co-insurance, and the out-of-pocket maximum. Once you’ve identified all these expenses:

Add up the cost of your fixed premiums and routine out-of-pocket expenses. Divide the total by 12 and aim to save that amount each month.

Open a separate medical emergency fund. You’ll want to start saving enough to cover your deductible and eventually, your plan’s annual out-of-pocket maximum. Consider opening a high-yield savings account, as they often have no fees and no minimum balance and offer higher returns than a typical savings account.

Ask your employer whether you’re eligible for a Health Savings Account (HSA) or Flexible Spending Account (FSA), both of which allow you to make tax-free contributions to save for medical costs. You may be able to use HSA or FSA funds to pay for hearing aid devices and hearing aid batteries. One key difference is that HSA funds automatically roll over from year to year, while FSA accounts have a use-it-or-lose-it provision.

If you’re raising a child with hearing loss, consider developing an estate plan to help ensure they are financially secure. A financial planner or estate planning attorney can help you navigate this complex topic and

develop a plan tailored to your financial situation as well as to your child’s needs. A trust, for example, can ensure your child’s inheritance is carefully managed according to your wishes. If your child is eligible for Medicaid or Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a special needs trust will ensure that he/she will remain eligible for federal benefits.

The costs associated with hearing loss can be overwhelming, but you don’t have to navigate them alone. A trusted financial professional can help you plan for these expenses or ensure your loved one’s costs are taken care of after you’re gone.

Matthew Phillips is a wealth adviser at Trilogy Financial, a privately held financial planning firm with advisers across the country. Based in Corona, California, Phillips partnered with RISE Interpreting and California Baptist University to deliver American Sign Language–certified translation, workshops, and other services to better serve his clients. For more, see trilogyfs.com. This article originally appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of Hearing Health magazine.

For references, see hhf.org/spring2019-references

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James Rooney hadn’t planned on carving out a niche working with deaf clients. But nearly 30 years after his first encounter with a deaf client, he has become Morgan Stanley’s go-to adviser for this unique community of clients.

“If a deaf client were to walk into any Morgan Stanley office anywhere in the country, they will find me,” he said.

Mr. Rooney, who is based in West Hartford, Conn., and has been an adviser at Morgan Stanley for 20 years, was with Merrill Lynch in Long Island, N. Y., in the early 1990s when he noticed the receptionist struggling to communicate with a deaf client.

“I walked over and started talking to the person in sign language,” Mr. Rooney recalls. “Within six months, I probably got a dozen or more unsolicited walk-in deaf clients.”

Mr. Rooney, who now has 225 deaf clients, learned sign language as a child growing up in a household with two deaf parents.

Even though he and his team also work with about 1,000 other clients without hearing impairments, he considers his work with deaf clients as a “way to honor my parents.”

“I have grown my client base of deaf people every year and it’s mostly word-of-mouth referrals,” he said.

There are an estimated 2.2 million deaf people living in the United States, a number that is shrinking as a result of medical and technological advancements. But financial advisers who work with one or several deaf clients uniformly agree that it is an underserved market.

It was less than two years ago that wealth adviser Matthew Phillips had his first encounter with a deaf prospective client who emailed him at Trilogy Financial and closed with the explanation, “we are deaf.”

Mr. Phillips, who had studied sign language in college but didn’t consider himself fluent, wasn’t sure how to proceed.

“I reached out to our team to ask how we should handle this, and nobody had any idea,” he said. “I started to realize no one at Trilogy [which has 150 advisors in 10 offices] has dealt with this before.”

Mr. Phillips, who now works with 20 deaf clients, contacted his former sign language instructor at California Baptist University for some advice.

The instructor, W. Daniel Blair, organized a tutorial for a half dozen Trilogy advisors.

One of the challenges when it comes to providing financial advice to a deaf person is clear communication. With technology and creative determination, the communication can be managed even if the adviser isn’t fluent in sign language. But even being fluent in sign language doesn’t guarantee perfect communication.

“There’s so much in the financial world that doesn’t exist in sign language,” Mr. Blair said.

Not only does sign language differ by region, similar to regional accents, but he said some words just don’t exist in sign language.

“Take compound interest, for example, which I don’t think most hearing people even understand, but there’s just no way to interpret that in sign language,” Mr. Blair said.

In another example, he recalls watching a certified American Sign Language interpreter signing for the word investment in a way Mr. Blair said he would have signed for the word contribute.

“And what I was signing for investment, the interpreter was using for saving,” Mr. Blair said.

Mr. Rooney of Morgan Stanley has had similar experiences trying to employ words and phrases that did not yet exist in sign language.

“There’s a sign for interest and most everyone understands that, but I found there was not a sign for dividend, which is similar to interest,” he said. “So I decided to make a sign for dividend, and now I see other signers using it. That’s exactly the way it works. Sign language, like all language, evolves.”

Of course, many financial advisors don’t even have a foundation in sign language to start with. But that hasn’t prevented John Cooper, private client advisor at Greenwood Capital, from working with a deaf client for the past 10 years.

“We meet in person once a year, and I give him a notepad and I have a notepad, and that’s how we communicate,” Mr. Cooper said. “Let’s just say there’s not a lot of small talk.”

Technology, including the internet and smartphones, has made communication a lot easier than with the early teletype phone communication of decades ago when deaf people would have to type messages to a hearing operator, who would act as translator.

Mr. Rooney said he now has a video phone in his office that enables him to sign with his deaf clients in real-time.

For advisors who are interested in working with deaf clients, or who might be having trouble communicating with current clients who are deaf, Mr. Rooney said it’s important to make eye contact and remember always to face the deaf person.

“They may be able to read lips, so be sure to enunciate properly, maybe even over-enunciate,” he said. “And be patient. I find it much more frustrating for me not being able to get my ideas across than they were with me because they couldn’t understand what I was trying to say.”

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