Estate Planning After 65: How to Protect Your Legacy and Understand Your Medicare-Age Rights

By working on your estate planning and Medicare-age rights together, you can protect what you’ve built and be better prepared to make the sometimes-tough decisions surrounding your health and legacy.

Why Medicare Age is a Turning Point

Estate planning involves decision-making. Who receives your assets? Who can make decisions if you’re unable? Planning eliminates or at least reduces the amount of confusion and decreases the chance of conflict occurring.
Reaching Medicare age changes more than health insurance. It often marks a transition into retirement, fixed income, and long-term planning.

From an estate planning perspective, Medicare age is a good time to review retirement accounts and beneficiaries, update legal documents, and evaluate long-term care preferences.

One of the biggest considerations to take into account is future healthcare costs. Even if nothing seems urgent, this stage of life and transition to Medicare offers a natural pause to reassess and ensure your healthcare wishes and legal documents align with your present-day wishes.

Understanding Medicare-Age Rights

Turning 65 gives you specific rights related to Medicare enrollment and coverage. Understanding these rights helps prevent costly mistakes and gaps in coverage.

When you turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare, you are given a 7-month initial enrollment period surrounding your 65th birthday month. You are also guaranteed a 6-month Medigap open enrollment period to apply for a Medigap plan, during which you cannot be denied coverage based on your health status.

These rights exist to help seniors transition smoothly into Medicare, but they’re often misunderstood or overlooked, leading to gaps in coverage or financial consequences.

How Healthcare Decisions Affect Your Estate

Healthcare and estate planning are closely connected. Medical expenses, coverage choices, and long-term care decisions can all impact the value of your estate.

Out-of-pocket healthcare costs, potential long-term care needs, all these things are why it is important to plan ahead. As much as possible, you want to reduce the financial burden you may leave behind that loved ones would have to deal with.

Long-Term Care

Long-term care is one of the most challenging topics for seniors, partly because it’s unpredictable and expensive.
Estate planning after 65 is a good time to clarify your preferences with family and check out insurance or alternative funding options.
Medicare generally doesn’t cover long-term custodial care, so be sure to consider how long-term care costs could affect assets.

Beneficiaries

Many assets pass outside of a will, such as retirement accounts or life insurance policies.

These assets go directly to named beneficiaries, making it important to keep beneficiary designations current.

Don’t forget to update beneficiaries after life changes and coordinate them with your estate documents. Review these assets regularly to ensure everything goes where it needs to go.

Make it Easier for Loved Ones

One of the biggest benefits of estate planning is peace of mind, not just for you, but for your loved ones as well. It can be incredibly challenging to navigate the legalities without an estate plan.

Clear instructions and updated documents help prevent family disputes, expedite the legal process, and lessen the emotional strain during this difficult time.

Estate planning is an act of care. It removes uncertainty and gives loved ones the confidence to carry out your wishes. With the right plan in place, your loved ones can spend less time on logistics and focus on honoring you.

Work with the Right Professionals

Estate planning often requires a collaborative team approach.

Consider consulting an estate planning attorney, a financial advisor, and a Medicare specialist. Each professional focuses on a different piece of the puzzle to help you understand what the right pieces are for your plan. When they work together, everything is more likely to align with your goals.

Review and Update

Life continues to change even after 65, so your estate plans should evolve with it. A good rule of thumb is to review documents every few years or at least after major life events.

If you move to a new state or experience a health change, you should make updates. A financial shift or marital status change, such as getting divorced or becoming widowed, also warrants a review and update of your documents and choices.

Keeping your plans as up-to-date as possible helps ensure they work as intended when the time comes.

Take Control of Your Legacy

Estate planning doesn’t mean you have to think about the end and all the doom and gloom surrounding that. It simply allows you to remain in control, protect your legacy, and support the people you care about.

So, take the time to organize your documents and understand your healthcare options. Before it’s too late, communicate your wishes and create a plan that reflects your values and protects what matters most to you.