What’s the Connection Between Your Retirement Planning and Your Estate Planning?
Your retirement planning and estate planning are linked. When thinking ahead about your retirement, it’s important to consider important key estate planning documents, such as a power of attorney to enable another person to make financial decisions on your behalf. This might inevitably lead to a connection with retirement planning.
What’s Important to Know About Estate Planning?
Furthermore, when looking ahead to your retirement, you’ll need to think about the number and type of funds and assets you’ll need to support yourself into your golden years, as well as the assets that you intend to pass on to beneficiaries through your estate plan.
Focus on what you want your retirement to look like and who will be the key stakeholders or professionals that assist you in getting to that stage of your life and then managing your assets properly. Engaging with outside professionals such as a CPA, financial planner, estate planning attorney, and life insurance agent are all recommended as you make the transition from your working years to your retirement years.
When is it Important to Review Estate Planning Documents?
Your estate planning needs might evolve after your children have reached adulthood, and this is an important opportunity to review all of your existing estate planning documents as well as your beneficiary designation forms with life insurance companies, brokerage accounts, and retirement plans.
Certain assets might make more sense to pass on to your beneficiaries while you’re still alive, whereas others should be placed into a trust or prepared to be passed on through a will.
Deciding which assets fit into each category best can be accomplished by scheduling a consultation with a trusted estate planning lawyer who can guide you through this process.
How Much Should You Save for Long-Term Care?
Given the extensive potential cost of long-term care, you need to carefully evaluate each one of your assets inside your retirement plan. Discussing your long-term care options or actions you can take now, while nursing home care is not needed, can help you or your spouse more quickly qualify for Medicaid in the future if needed. Given the excessive cost of nursing home care (as much as $12,000 per month in DC or Maryland), most people do not have sufficient funds in their retirement plan to support that.
For assistance with estate planning, elder law, asset protection planning, and more, schedule a meeting with a D.C. and Maryland estate planning attorney today.
Contact a Washington D.C. Estate Planning Lawyer
Clifford M. Cohen has more than 35 years of experience helping people throughout Washington D.C. and Maryland create and implement effective estate plans. He can help you draft a comprehensive will, establish power of attorney, and create an irrevocable trust to protect your assets for future generations. Call our firm at 202-845-7036 or complete our contact form for a free case evaluation.
