That’s illegal, @partyof5 , and one of the insurance industry boondoggles. If you make your yearly appointment, your doc cannot bill for any medical discussions and it should be handled under a separate appointment. Primary care ends up giving away lots of free medical care during yearly appointments.
Add us to families cleaned out by medical bills. We still owe both sets of parents, and most of it was more than 10 years ago. My insurance, which I pay 100% from payroll deduction, is 60/40 split after $1500 for each family member. It’s really only worth it for the discounting.
So is finding that your employer’s defined benefit pension plan is severely underfunded to the point that it is unlikely to be able to pay out the promised pension without bankrupting both the pension plan and the company. It is easier for employers to promise future pension benefits than to actually fund the pension plans sufficiently so that the future pension benefits can be paid.
This. I save and plan for the future because it makes good fiscal sense, but I also know that these are the things that I can control (to some extent). In reality, there is so much that I cannot control (like mental illness or even serious physical illness); often, those are the things that can set one on the road to traveling the countryside in an RV looking for minimum-wage jobs.
I don’t think the people highlighted caused the financial crisis, the housing bubble, or the fact that wages haven’t gone anywhere for 40 years. The minimum wage has lost 30 percent of its buying power. We have the most expensive health care system in the world. Private pension plans are going the way of the dodo bird. We don’t take care of the mentally ill well.
I just didn’t get the idea the people highlighted caused these issues.
Not everybody is a money maker. What’s that story we read to our young children? The story about the animal sniffing flowers or something while the game is going on? It’s been awhile.
I feel for the woman in the article, but the essential and original problem was that she hadn’t saved anything for retirement. She retired in 2007 at the age of 70, and a year later her home was in foreclosure and she’d sold all her household possessions. That tells me that the problem was not the downturn in the economy. She was banking on the $40,000 she expected to make from the sale of her doublewide to finance her retirement, and when, through no fault of her own, she couldn’t sell the trailer and couldn’t stay she was sunk. However, if she was so close to the edge that losing that $40,000 put her in a situation where she needed to work carny jobs and still would be end up $50,000 in debt her retirement plan was darned rocky to begin with.
Last night I went to bed with worry on my mind and this morning I woke up with the feeling my heart was sunk to my stomach. I read the wedding thread and I think how am I going to save for my dd wedding in the future. How are we going to pay for grad school.
@raclut why do you have to pay for grad school? Your financial security is more important than your child’s grad school. Your child/children will be adults at that point, let them worry about grad school. I would even question spending a lot on a child’s wedding if it puts you in financial worry.
@magnetron, fortunately after I had a few choice words with the billing dept of my docs office, they resubmitted the bill. My GP is a wonderful woman, and she is very thorough, and I hate the fact that going forward I will be guarded because of insurance issues or I will have to preface my answer with “is this going to cost me?” >:/
There are jobs folks can get that can pay all or part of the cost of grad school, and if you get certain jobs after grad school (public interest, public service jobs), your debt can be forgiven. We do no one any favors if we bankrupt ourselves trying to help our kids. As Romani did, weddings can be as inexpensive as the couples choose. My cousin had a lovely wedding at a park. I have presided over weddings at a variety of settings, most of them very modest, including at parks, beaches, a lighthouse, wherever the couple is so inclined.
It is really important for all of us to save so that we will have some comfort and financial cushion as we age, because none us really knows how long we will be employable–health, changing labor market, and other factors can force us out of jobs we are in long before we expect.
I think children would much rather not worry about how to keep mom and dad financially afloat than have a lavish wedding and having mom and dad empoverish themselves to put them through grad school. These costs, in my mind are WANTS, not NEEDS. Saving for old age is a NEED and needs to come BEFORE any WANTS.
I don’t know enough about any of these people featured in the article to know what particular thing tipped them over the edge into such tough plights, but working minimum wage jobs as we get older is not easy on our health or our pocketbook. Living close to the edge financially makes saving for ANYTHING very difficult.
BunsenBurner–Re post 44-- Did YOU read the rest of the story?
“Should she go to the dentist, or take a guided tour of buildings designed by her favorite architect, Frank Lloyd Wright? Each cost $100.
She picked Frank Lloyd Wright. Her teeth could wait.”
REALLY?
."Her key ring is crowded with plastic discount tags for supermarkets and places like Staples and Books-A-Million
KICKER:
“Thanks to a surprise $1,000 limit increase on one credit card, she had a bit of headroom, but $400 of that was already spent.”
SHE HAD A BIT OF HEADROOM? BECAUSE HER CREDIT LIMIT INCREASED!!! AND 400 was ALREADY SPENT? Does ANYBODY see that as a GOOD thing? The author seems to.
Sorry for the yelling but it’s INANE that the article is written so irresponsibly to suggest that increased DEBT is equaled with freedom.
She used an inheritance of 20K on a gamble of traveling around in a RV? After abandoning her investment in a mobile home (true, not a great investment).
I am NOT condemning her (she sounds like a great person)–people find themselves in bad situations all the time which is the point of the thread.
Many need guidance and leeway to extract themselves from a myriad of financial situations. Some through no fault of their own (health care problems mostly–don’t get me started… it’s a mess.) and other times through ignorance of how money works.
Yes, it says she spent a ton of dentistry and if she had $100, she really needed to protect her teeth and see the dentist, IMHO. Yes the Frank Lloyd Wright tour was great (we went on it), but her priorities are different from mine. For us, health has always been a NEED and other things are WANTS. I have never paid much attention to credit limits because we have rarely ever maxed them out and never spend more on CCs than we will pay off every month. We have never paid interest or finance charges–it we can’t afford it, we don’t buy it, period! Getting a speeding ticket is another costly, poor decision. I tend to drive only 5 miles above the speed limit all the time, just to avoid having any speeding tickets–it’s worked for decades.
It is the fact of life and it has always been - when you retire , you become poor because your income is cut substantially. I do not see anything new here, just the fact of life. The financial side is not even the biggest threat. Several people in my department died relatively fast after they retired. The depression may trigger many “dormant” physical conditions. it is very underestimated threat. This is what I personally fear the most, getting poor is a secondary concern on my mind. Yes, I am well past full retirement age, I am scared to death to retire, but it is looming over in some 2.5 years, we have plans, I will retire and I do not know what will happen after, but I feel that the financial side will not have as much negative effect as the psych condition.
Actually, your “facts of life” aren’t unalienable “truths.” Much depends on planning and circumstances. We always assumed we would be MUCH poorer in retirement than we were when H was working full time, since his pension is significantly less than his salary was. To our surprise, we have more money in retirement than we did when H was working full time, due to a lot of saving, an unexpected inheritance, and saving a lot when we could. It has been a very happy surprise for us.
@partyof5, I hear ya. The current medical system is not sustainable. The middle class is sinking, and one of the reasons are healthcare costs. I can’t tell you how many people I know are one serious illness away from bankruptcy. And these are people who work, many in/for small businesses that offer no benefits, certainly nothing like subsidized health insurance, 401Ks much less pension plans.
The safety net is inadequate and stretched thin as it is. It’s scary. And it’s wrong. We are not a third world nation, yet an increasing number of Americans are living just a notch or two above their third-world counterparts. It shouldn’t be like this.
Yes, having good affordable insurance coverage for ALL people would go a long ways toward helping with a lot of the precarious situations many find themselves in. It’s wrong that people have to choose health as a want instead of a basic need and defer healthcare with awful consequences–financially and physically. Treating preventatively has been shown time and again to be MUCH cheaper and better than treating in the ER for crises.
When I worked full time my company was very generous in our 401k, 10% to profit sharing, and 100% match up to 7%. I always said I would forgo some of those contributions if they would offer retirees health insurance. I am very healthy barring this last set of tests, and it appears to be nothing so far. Im in my late 40s and Im on no medication, however one major illness can zap your savings.
Yes, there were several years when our medical expenses were high and earnings low and we qualified for medical deductions. Yes, we got deductions but would have much preferred not having chronic health conditions and expensive medical care, including having to travel to see appropriate physicians to help in our care. There is a very scary gap for people while they wait for be old enough to qualify for medicare and hope that medicare covers most of their medical expenses. Sadly, it may not cover as much as folks hope and expect that it will.
We are currently trying to have our US Senator try to figure out why the federal Office of Personnel Management is taking so many, many months to resolve forms that we sent them in September that was only supposed to take a short while. It has left us in limbo, not knowing what insurance coverage we have for our D and has caused a great deal of stress. It’s awful to not know how medical bills will be resolved.