Healthcare is one of the more difficult areas to navigate as you get closer to retirement. With so much focus on saving enough for retirement and ensuring that your investments will keep up with inflation, many people fail to square away their healthcare affairs before retirement age. However, if you want a greater chance of enjoying your retirement, getting your healthcare priorities in order sooner rather than later is critical.
Seek Out Care as Soon as You Need It
While still working, pushing aside treatment of minor ailments or even routine screenings and appointments may seem easy. It is common to think all of these can wait until later in life. Unfortunately, this mindset may lead to more significant medical problems during retirement. Without proper preventative care and screenings, you may find yourself retiring with a major medical issue that may be costly and harder to manage as you get older.
Staying on top of your health will also help you during the coverage gap between working and Medicare eligibility. During this gap, healthcare may be more costly, and if you have a major health condition that has not been taken care of, you may need to spend more on coverage to ensure you get the proper treatment.
Prepare Yourself for Growing Healthcare Costs
On top of keeping yourself as healthy as possible by maintaining regular appointments, you will also want to be prepared for potential medical issues in retirement. Look into long-term care policies and other medical savings programs that will allow you to access needed funds when major medical events happen. You will also want to make a plan to put away money for any interim coverage from when you retire and begin receiving Medicare so that healthcare costs don't throw a wrench in your budget.1
Take Care of All Medical Needs as Soon as Possible
If you know you have a medical procedure or need surgery and have been delaying it, now is the time to get it taken care of. While it may seem easier to wait until you retire, healthcare costs and coverage continue to change, and you may find that the procedure is more costly than you anticipated. If your medical professional is comfortable with doing surgery now, get it scheduled while you still have your current healthcare plan in place.1
Important Disclosures:
The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
All information is believed to be from reliable sources; however, LPL Financial makes no representation as to its completeness or accuracy.
This article was prepared by WriterAccess.
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Footnotes:
1 Funding health care when retiring before Medicare, Journal of Accountancy,https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2023/apr/funding-health-care-when-retiring-before-medicare.html
