Avoiding High Health Care Costs as Part of Your Financial Plan - Ep.14

Financially Empowering Women

Many of you have heard me say that when we plan for retirement, we should look at the things that we can control and put together our best plans to increase our probability of success. Well that is all well and good but there is one thing that we cannot control and it is an area of life that scares us all. Yes, we are talking about rising health care costs. Many people find the idea of planning for these costs so daunting that they choose to ignore these costs altogether when planning for retirement. Well, you know that ignoring something doesn’t make it go away, and furthermore, the idea of ignoring this problematic issue is incongruent with our philosophy of claiming our financial power.

One problem is that most people overestimate what Medicare will cover. Medicare in general covers much less than traditional employer plans and it certainly does not cover long-term care needs if we are unable to help ourselves with the major activities of daily living.

So how do you plan? There are calculators online and ways for you to figure out how much you need to save, depending upon your health – for example, if you are a smoker, drinker or diabetic, and also your longevity, based upon family history, but in the end this is the single largest unknown in everyone’s financial plan.

In finance we talk about risk and how you deal with risk. The textbooks tell us that we can deal with risk by either

1. Accept – Not very empowering
2. Transfer – This is what insurance is about
3. Avoid – We would like to do this but not so easy
4. Reduce – This is empowering!

Sure most people in the financial world focus on transferring risk to an insurance company. But today we are going to address the risk of high health care costs from a different angle. Instead of transferring the risk, why not reduce it all together. Now that is empowermentand to help us talk about this risk reduction we have Dr. Karen Portale, MD, an emergency room physician for 20 years and Christopher Stepien, D.C., a chiropractor and crossfit gym owner and trainer www.heroesjourney.com.