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Have you heard that the average retiree couple may pay as much as $280,000 in total healthcare costs in retirement? That certainly is a big price tag to mull over. And as Vanguard notes in a recent report, cost-of-retirement-healthcare estimates as a lump sum often keep people in a stop-and-shrug zone.
Such a substantial sum seems hard to account for. Not only that, a number of national healthcare cost surveys leave out the costs of long-term care in their estimates. Others treat long-term care as a separate area of expenses from retirement health costs. Either way, many Americans don’t know where to even start with planning for potentially high-cost health events during their golden years.
Well, here's some good news: planning for retiree health and long-term care costs is well within reach. In that Vanguard report, researchers found a more palatable way for educating people to take action about their retirement health needs: framing healthcare costs as annual expenses, not as a substantial lump sum.
