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Why Healthcare Costs Keep Rising · How to Retire on Time

• 0:00
  Mike: Hi. Mike Decker, author of the book How to Retire on Time. Here's a question I was recently asked on my Retire on Time q and a. Check it out. Welcome everyone to How to Retire On Time, the q and a we've got every Tuesday.
• 0:16
  I'm Mike Decker, author of the book. With me is David Franson, as always. Thank you for being here, David. Mhmm. We're talking about healthcare today.
• 0:22
  But before we dive in, just a couple of things. First off, put your questions in the chat or retireontime.com/ask anytime during the week. A lot of you are putting questions in before our show. That's kinda nice. We can do a little bit more prep to answer your questions a little bit better.
• 0:36
  This show is all about getting into the nitty gritty. We want we we don't want that oversimplified advice you hear hundreds of times. There's a lot of nuance in retirement planning. So we wanna dive into the details here, have a little fun with it, call it good, kind of a fun casual setting here in our offices. So our our Kedrick Wealth studios,
• 0:55
  David: That's right.
• 0:55
  Mike: Dare we say. Yeah. So all that said, appreciate you being here. Don't take this as financial advice. We don't know you.
• 1:02
  This is a show, so don't hear something and then go implement it. It's better to, you know, seek information or guidance from a professional. This is educational only. Is that a good disclosure?
• 1:15
  David: I think so. Yeah.
• 1:16
  Mike: I mean, we say this all the time. Don't read an article, and then just assume it's for you. It could be for your neighbor, not you. We don't know. Anyway, chat's open.
• 1:24
  Let me know that you can hear us okay. We see a lot of you on the chat. Shate this. Let's talk about healthcare for a little bit, David. Yeah.
• 1:30
  Let's do it. Alright. So, healthcare, I wanna hit this in a couple of different ways. Alright. Because it's important.
• 1:36
  First off, what is healthcare? It's not an investment. Okay? Let's just get that out of the way. A lot of people when they're approaching retirement assume it's either this obnoxious bill.
• 1:48
  No. It's just really expensive, and thank you to your employer for paying that bill for many, many years. Once you hit 65, though, it gets a little bit easier to afford it. It's heavily subsidized. That's called Medicare.
• 2:01
  Healthcare is going up in cost.
• 2:03
  David: A lot. Seems like it always has. Right? I mean, my entire working career, we've been told, and we've seen in the premiums, oh, it's going up again. Oh, by this percent, it's going up.
• 2:14
  When is it ever gonna stop going up?
• 2:16
  Mike: I mean, that's like saying when inflation's gonna stop. Yeah. It's never gonna stop. Right. Right?
• 2:21
  And the more advanced our medicine gets, the more expensive it gets. I mean, the amount of money it takes to innovate a medicine is insane. Heavily subsidized, and then the pharmaceutical companies. Anyway, I'm not gonna go on long tangent there. All I'm saying is healthcare is a very real thing.
• 2:39
  It's not an investment though, because we're gonna talk about Medicare. We're gonna talk about supplemental plans. We're gonna talk about the Advantage Plans. We wanna talk about Affordable Care Act insurance as well. Yeah.
• 2:49
  Okay? So before '65. Right. Those that need to bridge that gap, or you can do... You know, there's there's options out there.
• 2:57
  But also, I wanna talk about long term care insurance too.
• 3:00
  David: Okay.
• 3:00
  Mike: That's a conversation that often comes up on this topic. So let's let's kinda dive right in. Here's what we got so far. Affordable Care Act, I mean, are just some basic things. Yeah.
• 3:09
  It it went up. Everything went up. K? Now whether that's justified or not, that's a whole another really fun conversation we could have at dinner. You know, they say don't talk religion and politics.
• 3:22
  Well, this one really gets people fired up too. I guess it's kind of a political conversation. But for better or for worse, it happened. Now, drug prices themselves gosh, it's so hard to speak overall because some prices have been able to be staying the same like they've been good. Other prices are not.
• 3:41
  Here's the one constant. None of this is gonna be constant. There's constant negotiations. There's going to be adjustments. Laws can get changed.
• 3:49
  So you just need to assume that your health care costs are gonna go up. Now, when we look at Medicare itself, I think it went up from like 189 to $20.02.
• 3:57
  David: Yeah. Was from 25 to 26, right? Yeah. And then from 26 to 27, it'll go up another few dollars. I think it's like gonna be $20.09 or $2.11, just something in the low twos.
• 4:09
  Mike: So it's gonna go up.
• 4:11
  David: Yeah. It always does.
• 4:13
  Mike: It always will. We need to plan for that. That's why when we do the planning, at least in our opinion, you need to have that cost of living adjustment. Yes. You don't say, hey, this is the money I need, and I'm just gonna enjoy it, and I'll just spend a little bit less each year to offset inflation.
• 4:26
  That's a very reactive plan.
• 4:28
  David: Mhmm.
• 4:29
  Mike: So, and this is why we highly encourage people to sign up for our planning process. Plan first, strategy second, then the products third. The tools in the toolbox. What tools go in your toolbox for your... The strategies you wanna implement and the plan you wanna follow.
• 4:46
  Go to retireontime.com/call,call, to get started. Schedule a call. Start that conversation. It doesn't cost you anything to get the first version of the plan, see the projections, and explore a couple of strategies before you have to commit to anything. And then if you do commit, it's a one time fee to finish the entire planning process.
• 5:05
  That's all the time we've got for today's show. If you enjoyed the show, thanks for tuning the podcast. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a rating, and as always, tell your friends, the larger the subscribers are, the better the content can be that fuels your preparation for retirement. We'll see you in the next show.