Many people assume long-term care insurance isn’t for the affluent. After all, if you can afford to pay for your own care, why pay for insurance?

Carl Peterson, a financial adviser at Lindberg & Ripple, Inc., in Windsor, Conn., relates how one of his wealthier clients actually convinced him otherwise. “When I was doing some estate planning for a retired CEO, he asked about long-term care insurance,” he recalls. “I just brushed the question aside. His assets were completely liquid, and the income thrown off by his investments and qualified plans would far exceed the charges for even the most expensive long-term care facility.

“But my client argued, ‘If it’s highly likely I’ll have to pay these expenses someday for myself or my wife, isn’t it smarter to pay them with premiums rather than whole dollars? If paying $150,000 to $200,000 wouldn’t negatively impact my financial situation later, wouldn’t $5,000 or $6,000 a year in premiums now have even less of an impact?’”

Penelope Tzougros, a Boston-area financial planner and author of Wealthy Choices: The Seven Competencies of Financial Success , stresses that the real issue isn’t the size of your portfolio, but how it’s structured. “You may be worth millions,” she says, “but if those millions are tied up in real estate, they may not be able to throw off the thousands a year you’d need for long-term care.”

Even if your net worth is in liquid investments, consider whether you’d want your sell decisions to be forced by your care needs. What if your spouse’s nursing home stay just happens to coincide with a sustained down market? If you paid out $100,000 annually for two and a half years, would your portfolio — now depleted by a quarter of a million dollars — still be able to generate the kind of retirement income you’ve been planning?

As Peterson advises, “What long-term care insurance really protects is the ability of your retirement assets to do what you intended: fund your retirement, not pay for long-term care.”.