The Health Care Expenses We Face in Retirement

by Tom Damron
(Plano, TexasHealth cost projections from random states:)

Health Costs Projections

The Health Care Expenses We Face in Retirement

As retirees we may be forced to amass a small fortune to pay for our health care in the coming years. It's a little frightening to realize that lifetime forecasts of costs typically range from $150,00 to more than $400,000 depending on the location where you're spending your retirement years. The unknown to us is the question of what those numbers really mean for our planning purposes.

All those numbers we see swimming by us will vary greatly depending on our health, how long we will live, and a slew of other factors, some under our control and others not manageable by us. There are estimates by the experts that tell us that males should expect to spend somewhere around $110,000 on health care; and for females, the totals come in at around $156,000.

Those estimates are at the lower expectation level, there are others who are saying that the numbers are headed to a much higher level of possible costs being $315,000 for males, and $365,000 for females. And guess what---those figures do not include any expected costs for long-term nursing care facilities.

On the other hand fortunately, those estimates do include some of the out-of-pocket expenses that Medicare doesn’t cover such as Medigap and Medicare co-pays, and some expenses for optical and dental coverage.

A survey indicated that many retirees don’t fully understand all the risks they face from health care costs. Some studies show that most citizens greatly underestimate what the expenses of health care will be by a large number of dollars. Many of them expressed their cost opinions to the researchers to be an expected cost of sixty thousand for males and nearly thirty thousand for females.

Those figures are vastly underestimated and show that health care future costs are the one thing that Americans retirees know the least about in their retirement years.

As you can quickly see, the Table of projected lifetime retirement costs above gives a much higher cost estimate than those discussed here. Health costs are similar to real estate in that the cost is determined by location--location--location.

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