Day two of my long-weekend thank-you notes, and this one goes to a team most of you know by voice, not by face. Our client care team.
If you are a client, sometime in the last two weeks you got an email from us with your own personal link. Click it, confirm your date of birth, and you land on a short review: your doctors, your prescriptions, your pharmacy, your phone and address. Fix anything that changed since last year, hit submit, done. Most people finish it in a few minutes.
As of this weekend, more than 2,000 of you have.
I want to explain why that number makes me happy, because on its own it sounds like housekeeping. It is not housekeeping. It is the whole ballgame.
What your check-in actually sets in motion
Every year, the official information for next year's Medicare plans comes out on October 1. Then the Annual Enrollment Period opens October 15 and runs through December 7. Somewhere in those seven weeks, just about everybody on Medicare gets to decide: stay on my plan, or change it.
Behind the scenes, that is when our advisors take your check-in, line it up against every plan available to you for 2027, and check the two things that actually decide whether a plan works for you. Are your doctors in it, and are your prescriptions covered at a price that makes sense. Then you get a recommendation from us. Stay, or here is something better and here is why.
We cannot do that homework with last year's doctor list. We cannot do it with a prescription that was added in March and never mentioned to anyone. The check-in is how you hand us the current facts, and the earlier you hand them over, the earlier your research gets done, and the earlier you know exactly what to do when the season opens.
The people behind the link
Here is the part I actually wanted to write about. A link does not help 2,000 people by itself.
From what I have watched over the last two weeks, our client care team has answered the phones when a link would not open, walked people through it one screen at a time, chased down emails that bounced, fixed the misspelled last name that was stopping someone at the door, started working the list of clients who do not use email at all so nobody gets left out, and flagged the handful of situations that needed an advisor's eyes before the season even starts. Quietly. Every day.
That is the job the loud commercials never mention, and it is the reason the recommendation you get from us in October is built on your real life instead of a guess.
If you have not checked in yet
No worries. We are gearing up to help thousands more clients as the season gets closer, and every week more of you finish the check-in.
- Look for the email from American Retirement Advisors with your personal link. Check the spam folder. It happens.
- Cannot find it? Call the office at 602-281-3898 and client care will send it again.
- Want a human on the line while you do it? Same number. They will walk you through it.
Ten minutes now. A recommendation you can trust in October. A December where nothing sneaks up on you.
Thank you to the team. And thank you to the 2,000 of you who went first.
Tomorrow, on Labor Day, I want to talk about why this whole thing feels so much harder than picking a plan ever did at work. My wife just went through it. The difference is not what you think.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only. It is not sponsored, endorsed, or otherwise representative of Medicare or the federal Medicare program. American Retirement Advisors is not a government agency. For official Medicare information, visit medicare.gov or call 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227).