Your Retirement-Age Clients and Budget Politics

Your Retirement-Age Clients and Budget Politics

While advisors are there to serve those with investable assets, it is not only your clients who are affected by politics, the Federal budget and cuts to programs. It may be your clients' family members, their aging parents or struggling adult kids.

When family members are beneficiaries of various public programs that help them get by, your clients may not be affected except with feeling relief. But when programs are slashed, the reverberation can affect your own clients, who are likely to be better off financially and therefore expected to help. Every advisor needs to consider this. Cash flow projections on retirement savings can be totally disrupted when your client has to pitch in and give financial help to a low-income family member.

Imagine this: your Boomer clients are ready for retirement. You have carefully worked out what they will need to sustain their lifestyle and make their money last. One or the other of them has low income aging parents in their 80s. Their parents have part of their health care costs paid by Medicaid. Medicaid gets slashed. Your client has to help pay the 20% of costs Medicaid was previously covering for their parent's health care costs. And since those costs tend to rise with aging, your client will potentially pay the cost of a supplemental insurance policy or non-covered medications or other things.

Here's another thing to see in looking at how budget cut proposals can destroy your careful retirement income planning for your clients. Some have disabled siblings, adult children or others who benefited directly from the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act. Some of those folks are not yet eligible for Medicare and rely entirely on Medicaid for all health care coverage. With massive cuts to Medicaid, they are among the millions who would lose insurance altogether. If they have a well-to-do family member, your client, where will they look if a medical need arises and there is no way to pay for it? Probably to your client.

Then, lets look at your clients' lowest income family members who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly called food stamps. Nearly five million seniors rely on this program in order to afford food. A massive cut (proposed) of $194 billion would surely affect them immediately. Can you imagine any client refusing a request from a low-income family member for money because he or she couldn't afford groceries? That grocery money contribution could be every week and go on indefinitely into the future.

Perhaps this is just a heads-up for every financial planner to build into clients' retirement planning that some cash may be needed on a monthly basis to help their relatives who can't get by without their help. In my own family, four of us pitch in every month to support a low-income sibling. He has Medicare and also Medicaid. For all of us who are Boomers and a bit older, a hit to the existing Medicaid benefit would cost each one of us more dollars every month than we are currently paying.

Your clients may be in the same situation. We at AgingInvestor.com hope you will bring up the subject and help your clients plan accordingly. You would do that by asking clients planning retirement if there is anyone in the family they may be called upon to help support.

Our political climate may not change for some time. And every lower income American who is a needy family member of your retirement-aged clients will be affected one way or another. Help them prepare for the anticipated expense.

 

Dr. Mikol Davis and Carolyn Rosenblatt, co-founders of AgingInvestor.com

Carolyn Rosenblatt, RN, Elder Law Attorney offers a wealth of experience with aging to help you create tools so you can skillfully manage your aging clients. You will understand your rights and theirs so you can stay safe and keep them safe too.

Dr. Mikol Davis, Psychologist, Gerontologist offers in depth of knowledge about diminished financial capacity in older adults to help you strategize best practices so you can protect your vulnerable aging clients.

They are the authors of "Succeed With Senior Clients: A Financial Advisors Guide To Best Practice," and "Hidden Truths About Retirement And Long Term Care," available at AgingInvestor.com offers accredited cutting edge on-line continuing education courses for financial professionals wanting to expand their expertise in best practices for their aging clients. To learn more about our courses click HERE

The Lange Money Hour

The Lange Money Hour

The Family Guide to Aging ParentsLooking for practical ideas and expert guidance in making decisions about the legal, financial, and healthcare issues facing your aging parents? Carolyn Rosenblatt’s book, The Family Guide to Aging Parents, is available for purchase and includes insight on important financial topics such as:

  • Family disputes
  • Caring for aging loved ones from a distance
  • Protecting aging loved ones from financial abuse
Our Guests: Mikol Davis and Carolyn RosenblattDr. Mikol Davis and Carolyn Rosenblatt

For perspectives on these topics and more, tune in to KQV 1410 AM tomorrow evening at 7:05 p.m. for The Lange Money Hour, Where Smart Money Talks, as Jim Lange welcomes Carolyn Rosenblatt and Dr. Mikol Davis to the show.

Carolyn Rosenblatt began her career as an RN, primarily working as a visiting nurse for 10 years. She is also an attorney who vigorously represented injured individuals over a 27-year career.  When Carolyn retired from litigation and trial work, she started AgingParents.com with her husband, psychologist, Dr. Mikol Davis. Initially, Carolyn planned to help resolve conflicts involving elders and their families.  As she began working as a mediator, she found that her clients often needed someone with knowledge to provide answers on both health care and legal questions.  Those two areas of expertise can rarely be found in the same individual, and Carolyn saw an opportunity to bring her two professions together to fill that need.  Carolyn is a regular contributor to Forbes.com on healthy aging and dealing with aging loved ones.

Since the show will be live, you can join the conversation by calling the KQV studios at 412-333-9385 after 7:05 p.m. You can also e-mail questions in advance by clicking here. The show will also be live-streamed at www.kqv.com.  KQV will rebroadcast the show this Sunday at 9:05 a.m.  The audio will also be archived on our web site at www.paytaxeslater.com/radioshow.php, along with a written transcript.

Finally, please join us in two weeks on Wednesday, September 16th at 7:05 p.m. for the next new edition of The Lange Money Hour.

About James Lange, CPA

Jim Lange has 3 decades of retirement and estate planning experience as a CPA. Jim’s strategies have been endorsed by The Wall Street Journal (35 times), Newsweek, Money, Smart Money, Reader’s Digest, Bottom Line, and Kiplinger’s. His articles have appeared in Financial Planning, The Tax Adviser, Journal of Retirement Planning, and Trusts & Estates.

Jim is the host of The Lange Money Hour on KQV 1410 AM. He is also the author of two best-selling books, Retire Secure! (Wiley 2006 and 2009) and The Roth Revolution endorsed by Charles Schwab, Larry King, Ed Slott, Roger Ibbotson, Natalie Choate, and Jane Bryant Quinn.

4 Tips to Protect Seniors Against Fraud and Identity Theft

4 Tips to Protect Seniors Against Fraud and Identity Theft

The Huffington Post

                     & CompariTech.com

4 Tips to Protect Seniors Against Fraud and Identity Theft

By Jocelyn Baird, NextAdvisor.com

Posted: Updated:

“Unfortunately, no matter whether it’s a specific reason or many, seniors are at risk for fraud and identity theft. It’s important for the people in their lives to understand these risks and do their part to protect seniors they care about from the many scammers that lurk. As aging expert Carolyn Rosenblatt said in a recent Forbes article, it’s not just a matter of law enforcement or the government taking action — seniors and their caregivers also need to be vigilant.” READ MORE