AARP Bulletin Feature: Your Secret Retirement Investment
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Written By: Stephanie AuWerter.
We're excited to share that we were recently featured in the May 2018 issue of the AARP Bulletin! The article, Your Secret Retirement Investment, was written by Stephanie AuWerter and discusses how a Health Savings Account (HSA) can be a terrific planning tool you can use to cover healthcare expenses in retirement. She covers the basics, what you can do if you have access to an HSA and why it's such a great tool can use to plan for your future. A big thank you to Stephanie for including us in this piece!
In our experience, a big mistake many people make when planning for retirement is not accounting for how healthcare will affect their plan or figuring out what they need to do about it beyond signing up for Medicare. Healthcare expenses are the second largest expense in retirement and as we discussed in this Knowledge Center article featured on CNBC from September 2017, the average couple will spend $275,000 on healthcare in retirement! Not planning for how to handle it is simply not an option.
Among the many ways we help teachers plan in this areas, an HSA is a strategy that if available to you, can be a great tool to utilize. Our clients with HSAs look at it as their retirement healthcare bucket, a pool of money, tax-free money by the way, that's specifically earmarked to cover those costs. And having that bucket can bring a great peace of mind that healthcare expenses won't end up ruining the great things they have planned for their retirement.
Our President, Mychal Eagleson, was quoted at the end of the article warning against making a mistake when it comes to choosing a health insurance plan that includes an HSAs, because they can backfire, especially for those people with a chronic health condition. Like most strategies, HSAs have their pros and cons and it's important to evaluate what to do based on the context of your specific situation and seek the assistance of an expert that can provide you with guidance on how you should proceed.
We encourage you to take a few minutes to read Stephanie's article and learn about HSAs and if you have any questions don't hesitate to reach out to us. Many teachers still don't have access to HSAs, so if that's you, there are still plenty of other strategies that can be utilized to ensure you have a plan to cover healthcare expenses when you retire.
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