Yesterday Glenn and I were invited to a dinner/meeting at Mimi's Restaurant in Colorado Springs by our financial planner, Doug. We've known Doug for years now and he takes care of our "little nest egg" (let me emphasize the word LITTLE) for our retirement! We meet him about once every year to go over things and he thought we would enjoy the speaker at this meeting since it was for retired people and people THINKING about retiring!
I'm always game to go to things like this - after all, any new information we can gather about retirement is a good thing! And Doug was right - the speaker was great and I jotted down all kinds of things I didn't know!
But two things in particular stood out - 1) Nursing homes - the cost - WOW - I had NO IDEA of the current price of being in a nursing home - and our spread sheet showed, along with the cost of inflation, what a month in a nursing home would cost in the next 10, 20 and 30 years!! It was downright scary! But what really shook me up, is that if you do NOT have private insurance to cover it, and you would want to go on Medicaid for the spouse that is in the nursing home, you would have to get your assets down to a bare minimum (which I understand) BUT, and this is a big BUT, the spouse left living in the house is ONLY allowed to keep a total of $109,650.00 to survive on the rest of her or his life!! THAT'S THE SCARY PART!
2) Do you have any idea what a trillion dollars are??? I was listening so intently at this point that I forgot to write down the national debt but Glenn thinks it was about $12 trillion or something like that but I DO remember that we are adding $1.4 trillion dollars per year to it - doesn't surprise me in the least! But the speaker asked if we could visulaize the trillion dollars and here's the example he gave us - if he would give me a $1 bill per second, how long would it take him to give me a trillion dollars???? Are you ready??? 32,000 YEARS!! Now that is hard to imagine!!
After hearing about all those things we SHOULD be thinking about at this point in our life, we were served a great meal! It was well worth the trip down the pass and yes, we're meeting with Doug next week to go over things ONCE AGAIN!! You can never do TOO much planning!
2 comments:
Yikes! It's a good thing you'll never have to live in a nursing home... (you're too darn healthy!). I can't believe a trillion dollars is that much - crazy!
Makes you want to plan to stay healthy until you decide to kick the bucket. Let's hope things get under control before we hit that age (we are all young - right?)
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