Success Interview: Hugh McDonald of Atlantic College Planning

Hugh McDonald has been offering college planning for over 30 years. Through his firm, Atlantic College Planning, he built a practice around one of the most stressful financial events in a family's life: paying for college. More recently, he incorporated an IRMAA planning designation into his practice — and in this success interview, he shares how that decision helped him acquire new clients and enhance his business.

This interview was originally conducted under the IRMAA Certified Planner program, an education initiative that trained financial professionals on the rules and planning opportunities surrounding Medicare's Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount. The research and tools behind that program now live on through RetirementAdvisorPro.

Thirty years in college planning teaches an advisor two things: families make their biggest financial decisions around milestone events, and the advisor who shows up with specialized knowledge for that event wins the relationship. Hugh McDonald built Atlantic College Planning on exactly that premise.

But college planning has a natural time horizon. Once the last tuition bill is paid, the same parents who needed help funding college start asking a different question: how do we retire without running out of money — and without paying more than we have to for healthcare? That is where Medicare and IRMAA planning enters the picture.

By adding IRMAA expertise, Hugh extended the lifespan of every client relationship. The families he guided through college funding became retirement income planning clients, and the specialized-knowledge playbook that worked for college planning worked just as well for Medicare surcharges.

IRMAA — the Income-Related Monthly Adjustment Amount — is a surcharge that higher-income Medicare beneficiaries pay on top of their standard Part B and Part D premiums. What makes it powerful in a prospecting conversation is how it works:

• It is based on income from two years ago. The Social Security Administration looks at your modified adjusted gross income (MAGI) from two years prior to set this year's premium. See how IRMAA is calculated.
• It is a cliff, not a slope. Crossing an IRMAA bracket by even one dollar triggers the full surcharge for the year — often more than a thousand dollars per person.
• Almost no one plans for it. Most retirees discover IRMAA only when a determination letter arrives from Social Security, long after the income decisions that caused it.

For an advisor, that combination is a gift. Roth conversions, capital gains, required minimum distributions, and the sale of a home or business all flow into MAGI — which means ordinary planning decisions quietly set a client's future Medicare premiums. The advisor who can show a prospect their projected surcharges, in dollars, before they happen is having a conversation no generalist is having.

As Hugh describes in the interview, that is precisely how the designation helped him acquire new clients: IRMAA gave him a concrete, quantifiable problem to solve that other advisors were not even mentioning.

The IRMAA Certified Planner program was created to help educate financial professionals about the concepts, rules, and regulations surrounding Medicare's IRMAA. With industry research and planning tools, the program was committed to ensuring that each professional who trained through it had up-to-date information to help their clients plan and prosper.

Hugh McDonald was one of the professionals who completed that training and put it to work. The curriculum covered the mechanics that still define IRMAA planning today: the bracket structure, the two-year lookback, the life-changing events that qualify for an appeal via Form SSA-44, and the income strategies that keep clients from crossing thresholds unnecessarily.

While the certification program itself is historical, the underlying discipline has only grown more relevant. IRMAA thresholds and surcharges are updated annually — the 2025 IRMAA brackets are the latest example — and the number of retirees affected continues to rise as retirement account balances and incomes grow.

Hugh's experience maps to a repeatable playbook for any advisor considering a Medicare or IRMAA specialization:

1. Pick a problem clients can feel. A surprise surcharge letter from Social Security is visceral. Prospects do not need convincing that it matters — they need someone who can fix it.
2. Lead with education, not products. Hugh's college planning practice was built on teaching families how a complex system works. IRMAA rewards the same approach: explain the brackets, the lookback, and the appeal process, and the planning engagement follows.
3. Quantify the stakes. Generic Medicare talk is forgettable. A projection showing a specific household's surcharges over a 20-year retirement is not.
4. Use it to open new markets. For Hugh, IRMAA expertise reached beyond his college planning niche to retirees and pre-retirees who would never have called a college planner.

The education-first, specialization-driven approach that worked for Hugh McDonald is available to any advisor. Start by mastering the fundamentals — what IRMAA is, how the brackets move each year, and which client decisions drive MAGI. Then put tools behind the knowledge.

RetirementAdvisorPro gives advisors the modeling engine to make IRMAA conversations concrete: project a client's Medicare surcharges year by year, test Roth conversion and withdrawal strategies against the brackets, and show prospects — in dollars — what proactive planning is worth.

Hugh's story is proof that this expertise translates directly into business growth. The advisors who bring IRMAA planning to their clients first are the ones who win the relationship.