Support our online development, and advance our onground research initiatives in free market economics, as we seek to showcase the brightest Next-Gen minds.
THE ME-P DISCLAIMER: Posts, comments and opinions do not necessarily represent iMBA, Inc., but become our property after submission. Copyright © 2006 to-date. iMBA, Inc allows colleges, universities, medical and financial professionals and related clinics, hospitals and non-profit healthcare organizations to distribute our proprietary essays, photos, videos, audios and other documents; etc. However, please review copyright and usage information for each individual asset before submission to us, and/or placement on your publication or web site. Attestation references, citations and/or back-links are required. All other assets are property of the individual copyright holder.
By Rick Kahler MS CFP® ChFC CCIM www.KahlerFinancial.com
Does about $40 a month for a fitness center membership seem beyond your budget? Do you cringe at the cost of fresh fruits and vegetables? Is your wallet too lean to let you buy lean protein? And the cost of a medical checkup is something you don’t even want to think about.
At first glance, the cost of staying healthy might seem way too high. Certainly, maintaining good health comes at a cost. Yet in the long run, maintaining poor health will cost far more.
Good Health Finances
Let’s look at some of the ways it pays financially to take care of your health.
1. Exercise. Before you decide you can’t afford a $40 gym membership, consider this: What do you do with the time you don’t spend exercising? Shop? Watch movies? If you’re like most people, you spend some of that time spending money. Maybe even enough money to cover the gym membership. There are also plenty of free ways to exercise, like running, biking, or walking. In Rapid City, all our hills provide a great workout at no extra charge.
2. Diet. Eating a healthy diet doesn’t have to mean adding expensive organic produce to your grocery bill. You can buy plenty of real food that’s canned or frozen. At the same time, subtract highly processed foods and junk. You may even end up saving money. You’ll save even more if you eliminate health-destroying habits like smoking or excessive drinking. This is a two-for-one: you improve your health and save money at the same time.
3. Preventive checkups. Check your insurance coverage. Under current health care laws, some preventive care is fully covered. And if you think a routine visit to the dentist is too expensive, check out the cost of a root canal or getting a tooth pulled.
Every penny you may save by not exercising or eating right, you’ll eventually spend in additional medications, doctor visits, medical co-pays, medical equipment, transportation, and housing costs.
Poor Health Finances
Poor health will directly affect your health insurance premiums. It will indirectly raise your taxes. Even if you’re healthy, you’ll help pay for those with poor health through Medicaid and Medicare taxes.
Probably the greatest cost of poor health, however, is one most of us never consider. This is the decrease in one’s earning power. For most people, their greatest asset is their capacity to earn. Poor health may hold people back from reaching their potential, or even make them unable to continue to earn any income. A survey of pre-retirees found that 80% of them planned on working after 65. Yet only 19% of people over 65 are actually working. Why? Over 40% are unable to work because of poor health.
Poor Health Financial advantages
There is one financial advantage to poor health: it reduces your life expectancy so you run less risk of outliving your money. However, don’t think that dying younger means you can live more lavishly. A recent study shows the number of unhealthy years—with their related health-care costs—are the same regardless of life expectancy.
Assessment
There are many ways to define wellness, most of which include a combination of financial, emotional, and physical health. If a person isn’t healthy, money alone isn’t of much value. But take money out of the picture, and good health is almost impossible to sustain. Our health and our money have a direct impact on each other.
Since good health is such a vital asset, it makes sense to use some of your financial resources to support it. Part of good financial planning and money management is doing what you can to stay healthy enough to enjoy your financial independence.
Conclusion
Your thoughts and comments on this ME-P are appreciated. Feel free to review our top-left column, and top-right sidebar materials, links, URLs and related websites, too. Then, subscribe to the ME-P. It is fast, free and secure.
Speaker: If you need a moderator or speaker for an upcoming event, Dr. David E. Marcinko; MBA – Publisher-in-Chief of the Medical Executive-Post – is available for seminar or speaking engagements. Contact: MarcinkoAdvisors@msn.com
OUR OTHER PRINT BOOKS AND RELATED INFORMATION SOURCES:
- PRACTICES: www.BusinessofMedicalPractice.com
- HOSPITALS: http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466558731
- CLINICS: http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781439879900
- ADVISORS: www.CertifiedMedicalPlanner.org
- FINANCE: Financial Planning for Physicians and Advisors
- INSURANCE: Risk Management and Insurance Strategies for Physicians and Advisors
- Dictionary of Health Economics and Finance
- Dictionary of Health Information Technology and Security
- Dictionary of Health Insurance and Managed Care
Our New Textbook Release
Learn How to Profit and Thrive in the PP-ACA Era
Share this:
Filed under: Career Development, LifeStyle | Tagged: Rick Kahler CFP®, Why You Can’t Afford Poor Health Habits |
The Leading Business Education Network for Doctors, Financial Advisors and Health Industry Consultants 
CDC: Smoking Rate Dropped From 20.9% (2005) To 17.8% (2013)
According to new data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR):
• The number of cigarette smokers dropped from 45.1 million in 2005 to 42.1 million in 2013.
• Those who smoke every day decreased from 80.8% in 2005 to 76.9% in 2013.
• Cigarette smokers who smoke only on some days increased from 19.2% in 2005 to 23.1% in 2013.
• The average number of cigarettes smoked by daily smokers declined from 16.7 in 2005 to 14.2 in 2013.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
LikeLike
Helping people work their way out of poverty
Helping people work their way out of poverty isn’t just about money. It requires addressing the beliefs and culture around money that may be keeping people stuck both financially and emotionally.
Like many of my financial planning colleagues, I have an interest in finding effective ways to help middle- and low-income people increase their financial health. One method I’ve used from time to time is teaching community classes.
I’ve offered classes on basic financial skills like managing money or the fundamentals of investing. I’ve also tried offering classes focused on money scripts or other aspects of money psychology. Guess which classes fill and which ones don’t?
No matter what their income level, people tend to shy away from looking at the relationship between money and emotions. There seems to be a widespread money script of, “More financial knowledge is all I need in order to have more money.” Yet I’ve seen time and time again over the years that this simply is not true.
Helping low-income people increase their financial literacy is a start, but it isn’t enough. This was confirmed for me recently, at the annual Financial Therapy Association meeting, when I heard a talk by Louis Barajas, CFP®. A noted author and expert on giving financial advice to the poor, he said, “All the financial literacy in the world is not going to help the poor.”
Born into a poor family in East Los Angeles, Louis managed to become the first Hispanic CFP® in the US and pull himself out of poverty. After a successful career, he returned to the barrio to live his passion of helping his community transcend poverty. It turned out to be far more challenging than he ever dreamed.
As Louis said in his talk, he discovered that, “Most people in poverty are unaware that their cultural beliefs hold them back.” He described some of those beliefs, which I would call money scripts.
A few of them are:
• A sense of fatalism, that “this is just how things will be.”
• An assumption that working for someone else is the only option.
• A group dynamic where anyone who reaches for too much success is pulled back down into the community’s financial comfort zone.
• A victim mentality of blaming and feeling powerless to change.
• Relying for financial advice on the wealthiest or most successful person in the neighborhood, without the knowledge to evaluate the validity of that advice.
Barajas has found that telling someone about a better way doesn’t work. He had to find a way to experientially expose them to it. As he said, “If you don’t see a brighter future, you won’t plan.” But even before that, people need help to take care of their urgent needs first before they can even consider that a future exists.
Hearing Barajas’s talk only confirmed for me how important it is to consider people’s beliefs and emotions about money. This is essential knowledge for financial advisors, debt counselors, social workers, volunteers, and anyone working to help people get out of poverty. More money or more knowledge about money is simply not enough to help people who seem stuck in poverty or in a repeated pattern of financial missteps.
The easiest way to advise people who are struggling financially is to focus on the mechanics of managing money. Yet anyone who really wants to help people make lasting changes in their money behavior needs to find ways to help them look deeper. Ironically, the need to look beyond the money in order to build financial health is one important thing the poor and the wealthy have in common.
Rick Kahler MS CFP® ChFC CCIM
http://www.KahlerFinancial.com
LikeLike
MEDICATIONS
Dr. David E. Marcinko MBA
LikeLike