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| What Happens When Life Blows Up The Plan? Four Women Get Honest About Personal Finance, Trade-Offs, And Starting Over |
Here's a number that should stop you cold: the U.S. spends roughly $13,000 per person per year on healthcare. Most other wealthy nations spend $6,000 to $7,000. We're paying double – and getting less.
On the HerMoney Podcast, Jean sat down with Dr. Jordan Grumet – a hospice physician who's spent two decades watching families drown in medical paperwork and debt – to talk about his new book, The Healthcare Heist: How Physicians and Patients Can Unite to Transform Healthcare.
Grumet says the main reason care has gotten so expensive is that there are a lot of middlemen looking to be paid – insurers, pharma companies, private equity firms, etc.– and they’ve all wedged themselves between doctors and patients, extracting profit without delivering care.
The good news? Grumet says there are three moves you can make to cut costs, starting with opting for generic prescription options.
If your doctor is prescribing birth control, hormone replacement, or any other medication, always ask whether a generic is available. "You’re basically thumbing your finger at the pharmaceutical industry," Grumet said, explaining that generic drugs are often chemically identical to their brand-name counterparts. |
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| This Week In Your Wallet |
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Elder care could wipe out the inheritance you’re planning to leave. A Washington Post analysis of thousands of seniors’ finances found that costs are eating into – and in a growing number of cases, obliterating – what families hoped to pass on. Some adult children are even spending their own savings on parents’ care, instead of benefiting from generational wealth. According to the Post’s analysis, the share of people left with nothing after paying for elder care rose from 6% among those who died between 2006 and 2010 to nearly 11% among those who died between 2017 and 2022.
Those "best by" dates on your food? They’re lying to you about safety and actually, just track freshness. California just passed a law requiring food makers to use two separate labels – one for quality, one for safety – to cut down on the confusion (and the wasted money). "The date labels guarantee quality up until that point," says Donald Schaffner, a food safety expert at Rutgers University. "They are not about the safety of a product." Looking to stretch your food’s shelf life? Here’s a tool that can help.
Women don’t have it easy when it comes to retirement. For starters, we live longer, so retirement costs more. On top of that, the wage gap puts us behind. For many, "Will I run out of money?" is a constant fear. This week on HerMoney.com, we’re covering 10 ways to calm those worries, starting with tracking down every account you've ever opened. Old 401(k)s and forgotten accounts go missing more often than you'd think. "Young people move and change jobs frequently; women may change their names, and it may be that you didn’t get your statements, and the company wasn’t able to track you down, and you forgot," says Tammy Butts of Equitable Advisors. "Make a list of everything you have now and everything you had from previous employers. Where are the gaps?"
📖Want a full playbook for making your money last? Pre-order The Forever Paycheck, Jean’s new step-by-step guide to spending more, worrying less and never running out of money. |
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| Things That Make You Money |
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| Ask Jean |
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| Q: |
Today’s question comes from Kira. She writes: "After I update my will, what do I do with the old version?" |
| A: |
The last thing you want is for an old will to confuse the executor of your estate. In your new will, you’ll revoke the old document by including a sentence indicating the new document overrules anything included in prior documents. The legal language is usually something along the lines of "I revoke all previous wills."
You’ll also want to take it a step further by destroying all copies of your old will – shred it, burn it, or write "I revoke this will" on each page along with your signature. |
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