Medicare Advantage Open Enrollment Period ends March 31

January, 2020 — One of confusing things about Medicare is that it has two different open enrollment periods. We are currently in the Medicare Advantage Open Enrollment Period, which runs from Jan. 1 through March 31. We have previously written about the Medicare Open Enrollment period and which type of Medicare might be best for you.

The different enrollment periods cover a specific set of actions, so it is important to understand the difference.

These periods are the times when you can sign up for, switch, or disenroll from various plans.

The current Medicare Advantage period allows actions, as the name would imply, pertaining to Medicare Advantage plans. If your plan didn’t turn out to be what you were looking for, or some other event in your life suggests a change, consider what you can and can’t do now.

Here is what can be done during the current period.

1. Change Medicare Advantage (MA) plan to another MA plan

2. Change MA Prescription Drug (MAPD) plan to another MAPD plan

3. Change your MA plan to make it a MAPD plan

4. Change MAPD plan so it is only a MA plan

5. Disenroll from MA or MAPD to Original Medicare and enroll in a Part D Plan

During this period you cannot:

1. Switch a Prescription Drug Plan (PDP) to a new PDP

2. Change from a Medicare Savings Account

3. Change from a Cost Plan (These plans are ending in several states).

There are Special Enrollment Periods that allow you to make changes to Medicare plans outside of the two open enrollment periods. Those include losing coverage, changing locations, and aging into Medicare.

Comments: Have you ever made changes to your Medicare coverage during one of these periods? If you are unhappy with your coverage or costs it might be worthwhile investigating at this time.

BULLETIN: Software glitch unsubscribed you from our Weekly Best Places Newsletter!

We are sorry to burden you with this, but it appears that because of operator error and a badly designed interface, we accidentally UNSUBSCRIBED ALL of our weekly Best Places Newsletter subscribers! If you would like to continue getting THAT free newsletter, please send an email to jbrady@topretirements.com with the word “SUBSCRIBE” in the email. Thanks so much, we definitely don’t want to lose you!

PS – The only newsletter subscriptions affected are those for the weekly Best Practices newsletter. The Communities East, Communities West, and Daily Digest/Alert were not affected – no need to resubscribe to those.

December 25, 2019 — It is always interesting to see what articles at Topretirements generate the most readership and comments. Out of 94 Blog articles written in 2019, these are the 10 most popular. Subjects range everywhere from 401(k) changes to the 7 Deadly Sins of Retirement. Let us know your favorites, along with any ideas for future topics you might us to tackle. To drill down on your areas of interest, you can always explore the Blog Categories on the right hand side of the page.

July 5, 2019 — What you drive says a lot about you. And if you live in a big retirement community where the preferred way of getting around is by golf cart, why not drive something that reflects your personality?

That is what is happening in places like The Villages,where many of its 120,000 residents are getting around in golf cars that look like Corvettes, Hummers, and even 18 wheelers. It has spawned a cottage industry that customizes them into all kinds of fantasies. While an ordinary golf cart might sell for $11,000, a specially tricked out version can go for $20,000 or more, some retired couples have two of them in their carports.

 January 18, 2019 – The good news is that the vast majority (90%) of Facebook users do not pass along articles that represent fake news. But the bad news is that people over 65 are seven times more likely than younger people to post about articles that are not factual.

The study was done by a group at Princeton University who studied the 2016 election campaign. They found that the Facebook users who shared the most fake stories were much more likely to be over the age of 65, and to be self-declared Republicans.

The authors of the study concluded that, just as older people are more likely to fall for financial scams, so they are open to manipulation by groups that publish stories on the web that are just not true.

What can you do? Regardless of party, the vast majority of people do not want to encourage or pass along false information, whether it comes from Russia, China, hate groups, or political partisans. We encourage you to have a critical eye towards everything you read online. Ask yourself, is this published by a media outlet that employs trained journalists committed to the truth, or on a website with little or no editorial oversight? Just about every news organization has some degree of bias, but bias is a lot different than publishing false information. So if you read something that seems sensational, give it the sniff test. You can use fact checking websites like snopes.com and factcheck.org to help you detect if something is true or not.

See The Best Fact Checking Websites

Older Facebook Users More Likely to Share Fake News

April 3, 2017 — Our recent article about the Proposed Obamacare Replacement Bill generated some consternation among some of our Members. We had a few emails and comments to the Blog that wished we had remained apolitical (and some more colorful). Many more people were probably upset but did not say anything. We appreciate getting all kinds of feedback, it is always helpful (if sometimes painful). With that in mind it seems like a good time to state what Topretirements.com stands for.

Here is what we say on our “About Us” page,.

Our goal at Topretirements.com is to help 78 million baby boomers make more informed decisions about key issues in retirement. That includes topics such as where to live and the reasons that should go into that decision. We also try to provide intelligent background information about important issues like Social Security, Medicare, how to survive retirement financially, as well as how to make the best of and enjoy your well deserved retirement. We hope this site is where real people share honest opinions about retirement in a supportive environment. Our message to retirees is: retirement gives you the freedom to start over fresh, so you might as well make informed decisions!

We do have an axe to grind in the retirement discussion; if you are a retiree or near-retiree we are rooting for you! If we see an issue that affects you, we will try to present you with objective facts from reputable sources. We will also occasionally give you a point of view – if we think a development is harmful or beneficial to you, we will say so. But if we do, it will be labelled as our opinion.

We hope this statement summarizes why we wrote the Healthcare article. We felt that the bill was going to hurt our audience of near retirees, and wanted to let you know the facts (yes, the facts, from authoritative sources with real journalists doing honest research, not political blogs with axes to grind). With the facts in hand you could make up your own minds.

Our biases might inadvertently creep in from time, and we apologize for that. But we won’t apologize for standing up for you when we think you need to know about an issue that affects you.

Thanks for being part of the Topretirements community – we appreciate your support.

March 17, 2017 — We have some good news for our many Daily Alert subscribers! When we switched from Aweber to Mailchimp to send out our e-newsletters, one of the casualties was anchor links. Here is an example that will explain anchor links. In the Daily Alert what was happening was when you clicked on a Blog Comment, the anchor link was supposed to take you directly to that Comment. Unfortunately on smart phones and iPads they weren’t working. Instead you were taken to the top of the Blog article – and that might mean you had to scroll down through hundreds of Comments to get to the bottom where that Comment was located. Thanks to our subscribers for mentioning the problem as well as to Jeff, our intrepid developer, for figuring this out and saving all our Daily Alert subscribers a lot of hassle.

Here is where you can Sign up for the Daily Alert.

Here is a screen shot (partial and reduced size) of what the Daily Alert looks like:

If you have any suggestions for the Daily Alert or any of our other newsletters, please let us know!

October 29, 2016 — As most of our long term members realize, our periodic Member surveys are a treasure trove of interesting research and findings on wide-ranging aspects of retirement. So please invest 5 minutes to take our latest on “Retirement Living Preferences”. There are just 10 easy to answer multiple choice questions, and when you fill it out we will have an amazing info on how you feel about 55+ and other types of communities, types of housing, amenities, Home Owners Associations, and a lot more.

This survey is now closed. But here is where you can find our detailed analysis of the results for the more than 800 good people who completed it – “Walking Trails, Single Floor Living, and Social Interaction Dominate Our Community Survey Results“.

Thanks to everyone who contributed their time and thoughts to the survey!

Want to see our previous Survey Reports? Here is a link to All Previous Surveys.

April 2, 2016 — We were recently quite flattered to be asked to be featured in a podcast for RetirementJourneys.com. Ted Carr, its President, asked some very helpful questions. It was a good challenge to re-think many of our positions on and reasons for choosing a place to retire. We hope you will find our comments and observations, as well as the RetirementJourneys.com website, interesting.

Let us know in the Comments section below if you have any feedback.

August 13, 2014. Some of our members might have noticed that we are experimenting with a new format for our Blog articles. The purpose is to make our pages more readable and user-friendly on ipads and smart phones (but not impact regular computers), which more of our members are using to read our articles. Today the Blog articles use the new format as a test.

The change should not be too great. The main difference is that as your screen gets smaller, the stuff on the side of the page gets smaller or is pushed to new navigation symbols on the top, making the main article easier to read. Feel free to Comment on this Blog Format Test post with your thoughts and reactions. And by all means, check it out on your smaller device to see if it works for you. We will use your feedback to tweak this before we go live (some of you got a sneak peak of this last week, and we used your comments to make the type bigger – thanks). Note that only the Blog pages are testing the new format so far.

Please write any comments you might have below.