What’s the biggest risk to your retirement security?
I’ll give you a hint: It’s something you may take for granted when it’s good and that can be life-changing when it’s less than good.
It’s your health, and more specifically, health-care costs. In fact, health care in retirement could cost you and your spouse more than a quarter million dollars. Yet, in a 2014 BlackRock study, fewer than half of Americans surveyed called out health care as a stress point.
This tells me that many people planning for retirement could use some guidance on their potential out-of-pocket health costs, along with insight on the ins and outs of Medicare.
While certainly not comprehensive, here are three key points to think about:
1. A 65-year-old couple would need $270,000* to have a high probability of being able to cover health-care costs across retirement, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C.. That figure is for “typical” medical care. Couples with “above-average” medical costs are looking at out-of-pocket expenses in the area of $325,000. And that doesn’t include long-term-care costs.