Millennials And Estate Planning: Another Mountain Of Bad News And One Piece Of Good News

If there is anyone who cannot wait for 2021 to be over, it is millennials.  Just as we didn’t need any more bad news, along comes the omicron variant to keep our kids, even the ones who are old enough for the COVID vaccine, cooped up inside for another winter, away from the Florida sunshine and the Sunshine State’s ever-increasing iguana population.  People born in the early 1980s have spent their entire working lives in a precarious economic situation, with few of the financial cushions that were available to their parents, making it harder for them to save money for retirement.  Now 2021 is ending, and you are another year older, with children of your own, so working on your estate plan might give you some peace of mind.  Unfortunately, many of the challenges that affect our generation manifest itself in the paucity of retirement benefits available to our age cohort.  A Tampa estate planning lawyer can help you see past the gloom and doom and build a realistic estate plan.

Let Us Count the Ways That Uncle Sam Will Not Be There for Millennials in Their Old Age

It isn’t that millennials do not try to save for retirement.  In fact, we make every effort to live below our means, but with so little employer-provided health insurance and so little paid time off work, we have no funds to cope with the unexpected except our own earnings.  In theory, federal programs for the elderly aim to provide enough money to keep retirees out of poverty, whether or not they earned enough income to have anything left at the end of the month to put toward retirement savings.

These are just some of the ways that millennials can’t catch a break when it comes to retirement:

• Medicare premiums keep getting more expensive
• If you defaulted on federal student loans, your Social Security payments will be lower
• If you still owe overdue child support or back taxes by the time you reach age 65, your Social Security payments will be lower
• Your payments will be lower anyway if you were born after 1968, because the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance fund is set to run out by 2033

Panic and despair are perfectly reasonable responses to this state of affairs, but a better response would be to contact an estate planning lawyer.

And Now for Some Good News

If your children were born after 2005, there is a good chance that all your photos of them are stored online, as is everything you have written since then.  The good news is that Apple has just introduced its Digital Legacy program, which gives designated survivors access to your iCloud account after you die.  As it stands, trying to access a deceased family member’s online accounts is a nightmare, but the Digital Legacy program makes it simple.

Contact Our Office Today for Help

An estate planning lawyer can help you set up your estate plan when the most valuable things in your life do not have a dollar value.  Contact David Toback in Tampa, Florida to set up a consultation.

Sources:

moneytalksnews.com/slideshows/10-things-that-could-hurt-your-social-security-payments/

theverge.com/2021/11/10/22774873/apple-digital-legacy-program-comes-to-ios15-iphones-macs