Want to save a cool $824 to $1,874 annually on health care costs after retirement? Want to be both healthy and wealthy and happy in retirement? What is the secret? Keep exercising or start exercising. One of the easiest ways to save money in retirement is to exercise. That’s it! Imagine having extra money in retirement. Even better if you have Medicare Part C or Medigap plans you can get your gym membership covered for free through Silver Sneakers. Check your eligibility at the Silver Sneakers website.
A study in the BMI Open Sport & Exercise Medicine[1] wanted to see if it paid off to exercise throughout your life in terms of hard cash in your pocket. That is cash you are not paying for deductibles, medications, and other related medical bills.
These smart people from the National Cancer Institute, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and a bunch of other institutes got to work on analyzing and crunching the data. They got the people from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) which has a large database of more than half a million people. The AARP has given detailed questionnaires about the lives and health of these half a million people who belong to AARP. You are right. There is a bias because the group at the AARP was mostly white and who knows how accurate all the self-reporting information is. It is a big group so even if there were a few people that embellished their info, it could not have influenced the results too much.
Then they compared the Medicare claims data (between 1999 and 2008) linked to the National Institutes of Health-American Association of Retired Persons (NIH-AARP) Diet and Health Study. And the numbers were in.
The researchers found that people who were active when they were young and stayed active saved the most. This group’s average savings was $1,874 a year in retirement. Even people who started exercising after age 40 and stuck with exercising saved $824 on post-retirement health care costs.
The study was led by Diarmuid Coughlan, who is fond of saying, “It’s never too late to start” exercising. Diarmuid Coughlan is a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute and a research associate at Population Health Sciences Institute Faculty of Medical Sciences Newcastle University in England.
I was at my yoga class and there were two spry 70-year-old women in my class. I overheard one say to the other, “I wished I discovered this yoga thing in my 60s.”
It is never too late to start.
Since the study was such a large group and the questionnaires were so detailed the results clearly show exercising pays off. In terms of cold, hard cash. The cash you won’t be wasting on your health care, but you can travel with.
Photo by Eva Darron
Retirement is supposed to be the time in your life when you can enjoy all the benefits that come with not having a full-time job. But if you don’t take care of yourself and maintain an active lifestyle, then those golden years might end up feeling more like being on parole. The key to retiring happy is staying physically fit enough for retirement so that you can keep living independently.
So, start planning those fabulous vacations now that you are going to enjoy retirement! Nothing like having more money to travel in retirement. You can have the money in health savings, and you will be active enough to keep up with everyone else! Healthy and wealthy – that is my kind of retirement.
1 Coughlan D, Saint-Maurice PF, Carlson SA, et al
Leisure-time physical activity throughout adulthood is associated with lower Medicare costs: evidence from the linked NIH-AARP diet and health study cohort
BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine 2021;7:e001038. doi: 10.1136/bmjsem-2021-001038
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