Tag Archives: budgets

Budgeting for Retirement: Dental Costs for Hygiene, X-Rays, and Fillings

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Another perq we won’t have in retirement is a corporate dental plan. Given the way they savaged our plan to almost death during the latest round of work budget cuts, it won’t make that much difference. The big change will be there won’t be any pay cheques coming in to fill the cavity in the bank account after the appointment. Here’s what I’m considering for our retirement budget for our basic dental costs for hygiene appointments, X-rays and fillings.

What Does It Cost Us Now for Basic Dental Care?

If anyone ever told you basic dentistry was cheap, they didn’t live in southern Ontario. My family has what most dentists would consider “average” teeth: No weaknesses; no caps; no implants; no dentures; no grinding; no serious alignment issues. We brush and floss daily. (Yes, I do floss daily (or more) now. Yes, I hate it. But if you want your kids to do it you have to lead by example.)

Yet here are our costs so far this year, not including the kids:

  • Hygiene appointments: $165 x 2
  • Recall dentist exam: $31
  • Exam of special area: $60
  • Composite Filling: $225 (Keeping my wisdom teeth was an expensive choice, apparently.)
  • 4 radiographs (bitewing X-rays): $45
  • Panoramic radiograph: $108
  • Polishing: $18 (No, they didn’t look any different afterwards.)

What Did Basic Dental Care Cost Us in 2009?

Does anyone else remember when dental offices were gloomy small rooms above retail stores that had a shabby carpet in the waiting room and worn linoleum in the dentist’s office? I even remember when the dentist did the hygiene work not a lower-paid assistant. Of course the best thing about visiting the dentist in those days was he also stocked the waiting room with a huge pile of comic books. Now I’m stuck watching my BNS stock plummeting on the omnipresent TV: hardly as amusing.

Anyway, I dug through some old records to find out what we were paying for our basic dental visits in 2009.

  • Hygiene appointments, each: $149.72
  • Filling on one surface: $125.94
  • Filling on two surfaces: $185.33
  • Recall exam: $54.38
  • Full radiographs: $112.10

What Should We Budget for Basic Dental Care in Retirement?

Ok, now the guessing game begins.

How many hygiene appointments will we be able to afford when we retire? How many should we have? We’ll have to plan on somewhere between those two extremes of 0 and 6.

How about

  • 1.333 hygiene appointments per year? (Assuming one visit every 9 months.)
  • 1 recall exam per year
  • 1 polishing per year (so skip it at some of the hygiene appointments)
  • 4 radiographs per year
  • 0.5 cavities per year (we can hope, right? We do have years now with no cavities but I’m assuming things get worse.)

Now we have to double it for the two of us.

  • 2.666 hygiene appointments @ $165 = $439.89
  • 2 recall exams @ $31 = $62
  • 2 polishings @ $18 = $36
  • 8 X-rays @ $45/4 = $90
  • 1 cavity @ $225 = $225

That comes to a nasty total of $852.89.

But that’s in 2014 dollars.

It’s hard to estimate how fast that will go up because I’m not sure what the inflation rate is for dental work.

What Rate of Inflation Should I Use for Dental Expenses?

Dental costs are quite often set by what the insurance companies will accept which is based on a table of charges. It’s not very predictable. Unfortunately, I don’t have many directly comparable bills from 2009 and 2014.

The only bill that I have that claims to be identical is the cost for hygiene visits. For the same amount of time and the same procedure, the cost was $149.72 in 2009 and $165 in 2014. That’s an increase of $15.28 over 5 years. That’s a little less than 2.5% per year.

So for pension planning, I might want to increase my $852.89 annual cost by 2.5% a year for each year.

Remember this doesn’t include any money for

  • Root canals
  • Extractions
  • Caps
  • Implants
  • Gum transplants, etc.

So we’d better hope our teeth stay fairly healthy.

What Can I Conclude About Dental Budgeting?

  • I’d better hope that they come out with an alternate to the internet that’s much cheaper than we have right now. Because as it stands now I’ll have to give up the internet and a bit of something else to pay for our dental costs.
  • I may want to start checking whether any dentists near here have lower fees or have a lower fee for patients without a dental plan.

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Other articles in the Budgeting for Retirement Series:

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Have you considered how you will pay for dentistry when you’re retired? Are you already struggling to pay for it even though you’re still working? Please share your views with a comment.

Budgeting for Retirement: Reduce How Much You Must Pay on a Fixed Schedule

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Like many Canadians, we won’t have much steady income in retirement. We don’t have any defined benefit pension plans. Yes, CPP and possibly OAS will pay us a certain amount per month. But most of our income will come from dividend and interest payments from our investments and those are not all paying monthly. (We do have some money invested in stocks that pay a monthly dividend though.) So one of my goals has been to reduce the number of bills we must pay on a fixed schedule.

Reduction One: Getting Rid of our Rental Water Heater

In a recent gas bill from Enbridge, I received a flyer called “Information for Direct Energy’s Customers about Residential Water Heaters.” Although I’m not a Direct Energy customer, I read it anyway.

First it had the usual fear factors listed under the heading of “Typical Water Heater Repairs:”

  • Ventor motor $827
  • Gas valve $526
  • Flame sensor $342

I call this fear mongering. A brand new GE 40 gallon natural gas water heater with a 12 year warranty (the longest available) is $688.50 from Home Depot in Toronto. I know you’d have to pay installation on top of that, but even so a brand new tank would be cheaper than the repair for the ventor motor!

Anyway, it says that
a CV40 is $15.59 a month,
a PV40 is $24.49 a month,
a DV40/50 is $25.49 a month,
and a PDV 40/50 is $29.99 a month.

I believe a PDV is a power direct vent, a DV is a direct vent, a PV is a power vent, and a CV may be a conventional (or convection?) vent. Direct Energy doesn’t provide any explanation for these tank descriptions on the flyer.HST is applied on top of those prices.

Another asterisk points out that “unlisted tanks will be subject to an average 2.5% increase over the 2013 rates.

2.5% in one year! For a tank that’s one year older and in many cases has long since paid out the capital and installation costs. Robbery!

I believe that means that we would be paying $25.49*1.13 or $28.80 for our tank if we were renting it.

Fortunately, we bought and installed our own water heater tank with the help of Home Depot and a local contractor several years ago. That removed another fixed monthly bill of over $28.80 a month from our budget.

Yes, we have to save to replace the tank and/or to fix it if it breaks down.

When we paid to have everything done the last time, from delivery to installation to removal of the old tank, it cost $910.90. Based on the price we were paying to rent a tank that was almost 20 years old, it would have taken 5 years to pay that out. The payout compared to a new rental tank was 3 years.

Which means it paid out 3 months ago. Cool!

It’s been working fine and the maintenance is the same as for a rental heater (just draining it once a month to help reduce the buildup of scale.)

So by replacing our rental water heater with one we purchased, we have removed the need to pay a fixed monthly bill of about $28.80 a month.

Reduction Two: Eliminating our Cable TV Bill

So far our experiment with switching to an Over the Air indoor antenna has been working well. We no longer have to pay a monthly cable TV bill. Since we are not huge sports fans this has not been a problem for us.

Cutting our ties to Rogers has removed a fixed monthly bill of over $40.50 from our budget. (And it was steadily increasing. It grew from 26.44 a month to 40.50 a month in 10 years with no change in the channels we received or the quality of our signal. In fact, I just checked online and basic cable would be $43.37 not including a digital or HDTV box, plus an asterisk says that rates will increase on March 24 2014.)

What Other Fixed Monthly Bills Can We Eliminate or Reduce?

Some of our bills can’t be eliminated easily. We’ll have to pay for water, electricity, and natural gas.

I plan to check the details of our property taxes, car and house insurance, though. We pay those monthly. I have a bad feeling that we may be paying more than if we just paid them with a lump sum annual payment. If so, we’ll switch to annual. That wouldn’t really fit into this category of eliminating a monthly bill, but it might be a good idea just to save money.

Other Fixed Monthly Bills We’ve Avoided or Minimized

  • Monthly condo fees: We don’t live in a condo.
  • Security and alarm fees: Our police officer friends say that alarms don’t stop break ins. (We leave our drapes open so thieves who are shopping can see we don’t own anything of value.)
  • Voice mail fees: We have a machine that cost $20 over 20 years ago. It’s still working beautifully.
  • Other telephone fees: We don’t pay anything for “features.”
  • Internet fees: We just use our neighbour’s Wifi. (Oops. I hope he doesn’t read this blog.)
  • Gym fees: We have some weights and an exercise bike for the off season and regular bikes and sports equipment for the rest of the year.
  • Golf/Tennis/Racquet/Yacht Club fees: We’re more “pay as you go” people than club joiners.
  • Gasoline costs: Have feet will travel.

Right now, we tend to focus more on increasing our earnings than on decreasing our costs. As we shift into retirement in a decade or so, though, I expect that will change. These steps are gradually taking us to where we want to be.

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Have you eliminated any monthly bills to simplify your retirement spending? Which bills could you banish? Please share your experiences with a comment.