Join us here every week where we will be answering one of our most frequently asked questions.

How Do I Sign Up For Medicare?

 

 

Download Checklist  -  Download Contact list

 

 

Click the Link Below to Schedule a FREE 15-Minute Phone Appointment!

CLICK HERE

 

 

 

Video transcript:

Hi. Welcome to this week's Question of the Week. I'm Mike Kelly of Kelly Financial Group. And every week we try to bring you the answers to some of the most common questions that we get. Lately, we've been getting a lot of. You know, I'm getting close to 65. Do I have to apply for Medicare? How do I apply for Medicare?

What should I do? And it's a pretty reasonable question. I mean, this is over 10,000 people a day turning 65 right now. So it's something that a lot of people want to know about. There's a couple of different ways you can sign up. You can sign up through the Social Security website using your account. Hopefully you've set that up again.

We can show you how to do that. Or you can go right to the Medicare website. The Medicare website is medicare.gov. And when you go on to that website over in the top right hand side, there's a number of dropdown menu. If you go to the one that's called basic, there's a dropdown menu. And when you read that it's called Getting Started with Medicare.

Okay. So you want to click on that link there. And when you click on that link, it's going to give you four steps. Step number one is explaining how Medicare works, what it is, what are your options? What are the different coverages? Step number two is when you actually sign up, it'll tell you how to sign up. It'll tell you what you need for information.

What I have here is a checklist of the information that you're going to need if you want to get a copy of this checklist. When we're finished with this, just click on the link. It'll take you right to our website and you can load this down as a PDF. We can look at exactly what you're going to need, or if you want a more verbal explanation of what it is that you need.

Go to our website and go to the presentation that we have there. On signing up for Social Security. It's pretty much the same information, but I go through that step by step and explain to you exactly what information you are going to need to sign up for Social Security, similar information for signing up for Medicare. Or you can just download this PDF right here and it'll tell you all the information that you need.

But basically, when you're going through that, you sign up in typically what it's going to tell you just in short form is you should sign up at least three months before you turn 65. If you sign up on the day you turn 65, you are classified as late and there's a penalty if you sign up later than that.

There's a penalty that increases every month, never goes away the whole time you're on Medicare. So you definitely want to do that. There's also a tab there that if you're still working and you're over the age of 65, what do you do? So you click on that tab and explain to you how you coordinate your employer's coverage. For Part B, there's a number of different options there that you can do, but they're also going to when you click on the Medicare website and you go to sign up, they're going to recommend that you go to the Social Security website to sign up.

That's SSA.gov You should set up your account there. I set up my account years ago, and when I applied for Medicare, I went right through the Social Security website, very easy. It was right there. It was all very easy to use. And since I had my account set up, all my information was already in there. They knew pretty much everything about me.

It's kind of scary what the government knows about you, but it's all in there and it makes it a lot easier to sign up. But you want to sign up three months before you turn 65. You want it to activate on the month that you turned 65. Now, if you're currently working in coordinate your employer benefits, you will not have to pay Part B, part B is your doctor visits, services, things like that.

Part A is your hospitalizations. Those are already included. You've already paid for that. So they say it's free, but you've already paid for that. Part B does cost this year. It's $170 a month. A little bit of change next year. It's supposed to go down to $163 a month. Again, depending on your income. That could be a lot higher.

So there's some variables there. If you have questions about those, give me a call. Really, when you're signing up, you want to have the information. You want to know what you're talking about. Now, a lot of people have other questions. So on our website, you can also link on this PDF, which is a sheet that says where do I get the information?

Do I go to Medicare? Do I go to Social Security? It'll give you a link to the websites that you want to go to or a phone number to call and get the information that you're looking for. So I know there's a lot of questions out there right now about how do I sign up for Medicare? How do I sign up for Social Security?

What are the options that I have? We have a lot of those answers for you. We can provide them to you either in a written format or if you want, in a more verbal format. You can watch our presentations that are on there that explain how those work. And as always, you can always call us with the specific questions that you have.

Just in case it's outside the norm. And you just want to talk to somebody about what you should do or what you should know. Give us a call. Click on the link. It'll take you to our website that has our contact information for you, the emails and phone numbers. But you should get the answers that you need before you start the process of signing up.

So hopefully that helps you. If you know of anybody, this information would help. Feel free to pass it on. But what we'd like to do is make it easier for you to sign up and get the benefit you deserve.