Whether you need to buy exchange health insurance for 2019 or you’re just planning for future years in early retirement, it’s worth doing your homework now on health care costs and factors. To make that easier, I’ve highlighted the most important factors to consider and how to do the best research based on your situation.
We are officially covered by an Affordable Care Act (ACA) / Obamacare health insurance plan. Though getting covered was not as easy as we’d expected, and there were some big lessons we learned that all early retirees should know. Plus we talk about the challenge of projecting our income and revisit the benefits of keeping income low for health care purposes.
When we first formulated a real early retirement plan, it was based on the rigid belief that we’d never, ever work again. Or at least never *have* to work again. And while that’s still true — we haven’t expedited our plan by forcing ourselves to earn income in the future — we now expect to get a much more diversified set of income streams in early retirement. In part because life happens and we’ve made some different choices along the way. And in part because that recession hasn’t hit yet, health care is still up in the air, and it makes sense to keep hedging against sequence risk and health insurance uncertainty.
Things have been moving quickly in the health care debate, which many of us on the verge of early retirement have been eyeing closely. Just this week, the latest Senate proposals to reform the Affordable Care Act and the later proposal to repeal it altogether were withdrawn. So where does that leave us all? What do we know? And more importantly, what do we still not know about health care and costs for early retirement? Let’s take a close look.
The world is full of rankings telling us where the best places are to retire, but they tend to focus a lot on state tax rates and weather, even though surveys say that people care less about taxes and weather than other factors like overall cost of living and health care quality. This post explores the health care quality factors we should all be weighting more heavily in deciding where to live in retirement, including some factors that none of the rankings take into account.
