Baby boomers, and I am one of them, have lived much differently than our parents. Many of us have significant debt, live beyond their means, jump from job to job and may not even be able to retire until beyond 65, if at all. In addition to this we have postponed marriage until we were older, have had children later and are writing college checks for our children well into late middle age and beyond. Divorce and remarriage have further decreased our assets and available cash flow in comparison to our previous generation.
The vast majority of us baby boomers will not have taxable estates but we will be desperately in need of estate planning, life-planning, nursing home planning, death planning and burial planning.
Our children can not expect the same lifestyle we have had or have indebted ourselves to have. Add this to a frail economy, an unpredictable stock market, a waning Social Security system, Medicare with its rising costs of living, medical care, prescriptions, long-term care and yes even fewer jobs. Baby boomers are going to inherit little, if anything from our parents and our children will inherit even less from us.
This means that seniors and boomers must develop plans for life, for the possibility of incapacity and for death. Creating and implementing plans to take care of ourselves and not burden our children with more debt is essential.
It is an absolute necessity to have a will, an estate plan, living trust and so forth, but do most of us have this set up. No. The usual reason for not having a last will is that the legal fees are too costly and we do not want to think about our own demise. The death part we can’t change, but the cost of a good last will and estate planning can be affordable.
Don’t leave your children with all your mistakes by not planning properly and maybe create some income for an actual retirement and an inheritance for our loved ones. It is possible.
