Rising Health Care Costs Are Top Threat to Estate Planning: TD Wealth

A new survey of estate planning professionals released Thursday by TD Wealth finds health care costs have superseded family conflict as the biggest threat to estate planning.

Twenty-two percent of respondents reported that the increase in health care costs and prolonged life expectancy had moved to the forefront of concerns in estate planning, up from just 7% who said so in 2019.

Concerns about market volatility and political conflict rose significantly from last year’s survey.

Family conflict, the leading threat to estate planning cited by respondents over the past three years, fell from 25% in 2020 to 10% this year.

In previous years, TD Wealth found that the most common cause of family conflict was failure to communicate estate plans with family members, noted by 43% of survey participants in 2020. This number fell to 24% in 2021 as dealing with blended families became the most common cause of family conflict, according to 34% of respondents. 

Other sources of family conflict noted in the new survey were the designation of beneficiaries in retirement accounts, a client’s resistance to creating an estate plan and naming the guardian of a minor in a will.

In another finding in the new survey, 89% of estate planners said their female clients had lost jobs, left the workforce or experienced salary cuts because of the pandemic.

As a result, 87% made changes to their female clients’ estate plans to reflect their new financial situation. Thirty-eight percent changed guardian and beneficiary designations, another 38% changed powers of attorney, 35% current wills and 17% postmortem letters.