Don’t discount the importance of health and medical care when it comes to retirement, a group of retirees said at a panel for Pensions & Investments’ Defined Contribution West conference in Pasadena, Calif.
“In my career, the last thing I thought about was health,” said Steve Ferber, former senior vice president, account manager and CIT strategist at PIMCO, at the Oct. 22 panel.
Ferber recalled getting hit by a car while walking across the street on a business trip, in which he was thrown 15 feet by the impact.
“I got up, checked my bones. Nothing seemed to be broken; I wasn't bleeding. And so, what did I do? Go to the hospital? No, I did my two meetings, of course. Then I went to hospital,” he said.
“So, if I had to do it over again, I would take better care of myself,” Ferber added. “Being able to reach retirement and (reach it) healthy is an extraordinary thing.”
Kathleen Strukoff, former Pacific Southwest market leader at Aon, noted that people often delay retirement because of medical costs, and there’s a lot of misinformation about Medicare out there.
Keith Overly, former executive director of the Ohio Public Employees Deferred Compensation Program, echoed this, adding that there’s often “misinformation or lack of understanding about Medicare, about how Social Security works (and) spousal benefits for Social Security.”
Strukoff recommended one solution for addressing the confusion.
“If you care about your employees and you want to reward them for having a long-time career at the company, I think it'd be worth it to have something like a retiree concierge,” Strukoff said, which Overly agreed would be helpful.
