Rising health and food bills hit older Australians very hard

The weekly expenses that older Australians face rose much faster than those of other people over the past year.

This is confirmed in research that the Australian Bureau of Statistics has just published.

The main reason for this is that rapidly rising food and health care bills take bigger slices of the incomes of older people than from those of the general public.

Age pensioners were  hit hardest.

The bureau reports that their costs rose by no less than 3.2 per cent, over the 12 months to the end of December.

The Consumer Price Index, which measures the costs faced by the general public, rose by just 2.1 per cent over the same time.

Self funded retirees, whose incomes are mostly higher than the age pension, did a little better than age pensioners.

The bureau reported that the cost of living, for this group as a whole, rose by 2.8 per cent over 2009.

The Bureau also reported that the living costs of both age pensioners and self funded retirees rose by 0.6 per cent in the December quarter of last year.

In this area, they did slightly better than Australia’s employees households, which saw their cost of living rise by 0.7 per cent in the final three months of last year.

The CPI rise, for the quarter, was 0.5 per cent.

Remarkably, the bureau’s “employee households” saw their living costs rise by just 0.4 per cent last year.

The bureau noted that their electricity prices, rents, insurance charges, hospital and medical fees and beer prices had all risen in this time.

However, those rises had been offset by reduced interest charges, cheaper petrol, lower audio and television prices and lower insurance costs.

The Bureau’s report strongly suggests that all Australians would be wise to review their retirement plans, to provide for the bigger health bills Australians, generally, are facing in their later years.