The cost of long term care is a top concern for plenty of retirees, but new research shows that we could be facing a potential crisis in the U.S. when it comes to providing it.

The oldest of the baby boomers will starting turning 80 in 2025, more people will need support for their healthcare concerns. Since most people have not planned for the possibility of long term care, this is likely to have the biggest impact on the adult children of those baby boomers.

Being a caregiver comes with many challenges. Most adult children have working lives and families of their own, and depending on their loved one’s caregiving requirements, this can be challenging. Most are not prepared and don’t have the time or the healthcare training needed to help with advanced situations. But family members are often a stopgap method of giving long term care support when a loved one cannot afford a nursing home yet.

Longevity has increased, but outside of Medicaid, there’s no real system in place to help people plan for and pay for long term care. Since it can be so expensive for a person to use assisted living, adult day care, or nursing home facilities, these costs can rack up quickly. For an older married couple, one person’s need for long term can drastically draw down retirement resources when it’s too late to continue contributing to them.

What happens if you don’t have a plan for your own long term care? Now is a good time to look over your existing plans and create a strategy for paying for it just in case. This might include moving other assets now or discussing legal spenddown strategies with your elder lawyer in NJ. Don’t neglect these important tasks if you want to cover your bases and protect your family.

Are your financial plans tied to your spouse’s? If you’ve been married a long time, it’s impossible to ignore the possibility that your plans rely on the joint financial strategies or savings you’ve accumulated together. Which makes it that much harder to pivot if you get a divorce in your older years.

There are unique challenges that could affect your estate plan if you get divorced in your older years. Making a decision about what is most important for you should be the underlying reason why you seek out the support of an experienced family lawyer, but you might also need to visit your estate planning lawyer before and after the divorce is finalized. This is because there are many ways that your financial plan can be changed. If you get divorced you will need to update all of your existing estate plan materials. But you’ll also need to conduct a thorough evaluation of your retirement plan.

There is a good chance that any existing retirement plans and estate plans were built on the premise that you would still be with your now former spouse. In those circumstances, it can feel overwhelming to approach the prospect of updating all of your estate plans on your own.

You’ll want to make sure that all of your documents now reflect a new beneficiary including life insurance policies and retirement accounts that you might not have looked at in years. In those circumstances having a lawyer to guide you through the process and help you to avoid unfortunate surprises can be instrumental.

There are so many things to think about in the wake of a divorce and many changes that come in your life, but making sure that your estate plan still aligns with your individual goal should be a top priority.       

When thinking about your estate plan, you must consider what might happen to you or your loved ones if you were no longer able to care for yourself. This is an increasingly common situation as it relates to caregiving for adult children today. Emotional and financial stress can represent significant changes in their life so if the default of your elder law plan is that a family member will step in and care for you, think carefully about how this could impact them and other loved ones.

Many people have had to step back from their careers to care for elderly loved ones and while this is still likely the first choice of the person who has stepped back, wanting to provide the best for their family, it doesn’t come without stress. In fact, a recent study from Fidelity Investments found that over 60% of active caregivers said they were at least occasionally overwhelmed with financial stress.

Plenty of them had to take significant time out of their jobs with the average time out of the workforce being 20 months. Furthermore, many of them took pay cuts when they went back to work at a median of 40% of what they were making previously. Thinking ahead about your caregiving plan and how you can minimize the possible burden on your loved ones is important.

While your loved ones will likely tell you that it’s not a burden to take care of you, the more proactive you can be with your estate and elder law planning, can make it that much easier for you to reduce the stress faced by your loved ones in this already difficult situation. For more information about crafting an estate and elder law plan unique to your family’s dynamics, schedule a consultation with an estate planning attorney.

The pandemic has had far reaching implications for many individuals and families and that has never been more true than now as it relates to the case for women. Women face a higher likelihood of a greater life expectancy than men, meaning that issues of long-term care, health care costs, and how to afford a lengthy retirement are all top of mind. 

A recent study of estate planning attorneys found that many women visited their offices to make changes to their estate plans across 2020 and 2021. In fact, nearly 90% of estate planning lawyers said that female clients had experienced significant financial repercussions due to the global pandemic. This included leaving the workforce, taking a pay cut or losing their jobs entirely.

Prolonged life expectancy became the number one estate planning issue for women and men alike in 2020 and estate planning attorneys reported that many of their female clients visited their offices to make changes to their estate plan. I

n fact, nearly 90% of estate planning lawyers who participated in a recent TD Wealth survey said that they made changes to their female clients’ estate plans, including updating wills, creating post mortem letters, updating letter of attorney documents and changing beneficiary or guardian designations. If it’s been a while since you’ve sat down with your experienced estate planning lawyer to talk through your options, schedule a consultation with an experienced lawyer today.

Gray divorce, which refers to the number of adults age 50 and above deciding to end their marriages has increased by over 109% in the last quarter of a century. There are many different reasons contributing to the rise in gray divorce.

The couple’s purpose can change when adult children move away, new opportunities are embraced by those for living longer, women are becoming more financially dependent enabling them to make decisions like this, society has overall become more accepting of divorce and many people are choosing happiness above lifestyle and financial security.

But the primary fact remains; divorce after age 50 can be devastating financially when most of your spending habits, savings and intentions for retirement are built off of both of you. The cost of living on your own can be up to 40% to 50% higher than for couples when looking at it on per person basis. The cost of divorce alone can be a financial setback that is significant, generating over $15,000 more just to end the marriage.

Household income can also decrease significantly after a gray divorce. It drops by 40% for women but only 25% for men. Scheduling a consultation with an experienced New Jersey estate planning lawyer is one of the most important things you can do when you are contemplating gray divorce to ensure that all of your documents and strategies are aligned with where you’re headed not where you’ve been.