Health Insurance in Our Early Retirement

hey it's Tim and it's amy from GoWithLess welcome to our channel we're happy that you're here we are gonna tackle a topic today that we get asked about more than anything else when Tim and I retired back in 2015 we said goodbye to corporate health insurance and we've had to figure it out on our own and we get so many questions that ask what do you guys do for health insurance now that you're early retired so we are finally gonna tackle that today Amy handed this ball to me and so I'm the reason that it's taken us so long to put this together and I think part of the challenge has just been it seems like every day something changes with our health insurance so it's this ever-evolving thing we have an answer for today and so it continues to change next year our answer is going to be different so it's just taken us a while to come up with what did we want to share with our audience and we will answer what did we do for our health insurance but you'll see that it's kind of a messed up I don't think it's not like a straight and narrow path is let's just say that but we will answer that question today and we hope that you will

watch the video so as I mentioned Tim and I retired back in 2015 our channel is about early retirement it's about a lot of travel including budget travel travel hacking house-sitting as a travel hack stuff like that and we hope that you will subscribe over here because you come out with a new video each Wednesday so with that let's tackle what do we do for health insurance man this should be easy this is not an easy topic so one of the things that we could have done whenever we were looking in insurance is not have any insurance I guess that really wasn't an option for us so I'm 51 I forget how old I am Amy's 50 and so certainly one trip to the hospital here in the US that could be $100,000 $200,000 for a simple trip to the hospital so crazy you have to have health insurance here in the States if you have any assets that you're looking to protect and so we have health insurance one of the things that we realize sort of through this course of

trying to figure out what we we're gonna do is even after we had insurance and we wanted to see doctors that are outside of our specific network some of the doctors won't even see you if you have insurance but you're not in their network they won't visit with you my doctor of 15 years wouldn't accept me in the past year because my plan didn't include him yep so what we started out doing back in 2015-2016 2016 is we signed up for the Affordable Care Act the ACA are plans that are a part of the ACA every state has an exchange some states don't they rely on the federal exchange here in Colorado we have an exchange and that's where we go to purchase our health insurance yeah and we get a subsidy that's based upon our income 2016 was the first year that we were without our corporate insurance so that was our very first year on the ACA and Tim had some consulting income so we had income that year that kind of was something to consider in this situation I will say we

have a lot of viewers who ask about the potential of them retiring early I get that this is like a very scary thing and back in 2015 the Affordable Care Act was pretty solid and it was very predictable for us so we knew what our out-of-pocket would be we knew what our deductible would be that has changed quite a bit we're not gonna get into a political conversation but we kind of had to roll with the changes and that's what we're gonna be talking about of how we did that today that's right so something of note is that with the ACA it varies in pricing and the offerings from county to County even within a given state so what we're looking at is going to be completely different if we were to move to Phoenix if we were to move to Texas if we were to move to Washington the pricing would be completely different the offerings would be completely different and it's down to the county it's different so it's hard to put something out there as this is what you should do because the offerings vary across the country in 2016 we signed up for a normal plan on the ACA the plan that we signed up for happened to allow us to have access to an HSA which is a

health savings account and you actually have to pay a premium in order to have HSA capabilities on your plan the plan has to be qualified for an HSA we wanted to put money in an HSA for various tax reasons and also it's just a good strategy for savings and so we signed up for a plan that had that as an offering our monthly premiums were very affordable somewhere in like it was based upon our income but maybe even a three hundred four hundred dollar range this was a couple years ago and Tim had back surgery in one of those years and he ate up his entire six thousand dollar deductible I was probably somewhere around three or four hundred dollars out of my deductible for co-pays and things like that so super reasonable for me but when Tim did have a big back surgery it did cover that and that was really nice he also had physical did you physical therapy I did try a practice the nice thing back then and even today is we knew sort of what the worst case was going to be for our premiums and if we both had to blow through our deductibles what that would present so basically it was $12,000 worth of deductible if we

both happen to get really sick and we had about three thousand dollars a year or maybe four thousand dollars a year worth of premiums for the for the plan we were prepared to spend $12,000 a year for our deductible and fortunately we didn't and that's probably why we're coming so far under budget because we budgeted for high deductible $12,000 a year possibly so it's nice to know at least what the worst case is going to be and we had planned for that yes so as 2018 rolled around and we were looking to sign up for our health insurance we realized something that we hadn't known previously and that was that the insurance we had been on for the two prior years did not cover us when we were outside of the state of Colorado and it wasn't just that plan that didn't cover us all of the ACA plans were not going to cover us outside of Colorado so that was a really big thing to learn it was huge and we were really lucky that we hadn't found out the hard way okay so here it is the beginning of 2018 we're ready to sign up with our same insurance that's been working for 2016 and 2017 that same insurance company

offered a plan but all of the doctors that we had been using were no longer part of that plan so that was kind of not a great thing and there was an option to have a difference to go with Blue Cross Blue Shield it was an additional thousand dollars a month to have a plan that included our doctors $1,000 a month that we'd they're only like maybe three two doctors for me and one for him where it wasn't so crazy so we decided like I guess we're just not gonna keep our same doctors anymore which really stinks so we signed up for a new plan I'm not gonna mention them cuz I don't want to be sued because we were really unhappy with them but this plan when we did our research before choosing them we went online and saw that there are all kinds of doctors in our area that we could go to no problem and it looked like they were accepting new patients online no problem so we sign up for our plan for the year and we get on the phone maybe even the first month or so to get an appointment just to have a relationship with a doctor and turns out we couldn't find one that were accepting this program nope I think I had a physical that was I think the only

advantage we took of that insurance was I got a physical from a doctor that I did happen to find here in Parker just randomly yeah I didn't I don't think you even liked that person so much so I didn't go and yeah and so we decided to add on an additional health care coverage provider I guess I don't know add something on for 2018 so that we could go to the doctor so we continued our ACA plan for 2018 and then we add it on another plan so we signed up for what's called a health sharing ministry in June of 2018 it's called Liberty health shares and it's very affordable it's three hundred and fifty dollars for the two of us with a deductible of seventeen fifty for the pair of us total they don't like these health insurance terms because they are not a health insurance company they're a health serang minister so it's kind of some way different things than you will find with the ACA plan terminology wise they use completely different terms now I am able to go to my doctors however I'm still not so sure

that those are covered because we're waiting for those bills to be processed from the fall of last year I still have a primary health insurance company on the ACA even though I'm not using it I don't know that I'm allowed to like bypass it to go to Liberty I think if I only had Liberty that might be a different situation so that's kind of a little tricky I do have the ACA I do have Liberty we have both and I still want to go see all my doctors who aren't covered by my ACA plan I will say that Liberty isn't that quick to process things we are waiting waiting waiting waiting it is our experience when we originally signed up we were hoping that Liberty was going to be our sole insurance provider unfortunately they considered my back surgery that I've had two years prior pre-existing condition and they excluded my spine completely they will not cover my spine however they said that we'll take you on board we just won't cover your spine in any way shape or form so what that left us with is I at least still had to have the ACA I couldn't rely on them solely because my spine wouldn't be covered so we had to have or I had to have two

types of insurance in order to have my whole self covered and the reason why I went with Liberty Healthshares is I wanted to get in there before I had a pre-existing condition Tim had some other things like a little skin cancer thing removed so they said we're not gonna cover that for something like a year or two years but his spine was a totally different thing they said we are never going to cover anything with your back no matter what it doesn't even have to be about the thing that was operated on in the past never gonna touch that so that required Tim to hold the insurance for his back and I don't think it cost me anything extra to be on that plan so I stayed on it so it's still a little bit of a mystery because we're waiting to be paid on things and and we're not quite sure how this Liberty is gonna shake out but there's a really cool thing about Liberty that we didn't have with our ACA plan and that's that we could use it outside of our state we do travel all the time not only outside the country but also all around America and as long as a bill is in English and billed in US dollars Liberty will cover it which is pretty sweet so the end of 2018 came and it was time

to pick a plan for 2019 on the ACA and we dumped that plan that we couldn't see any doctors with and we started a new plan we're with Kaiser Permanente we don't plan to use them though so even though we're paying for them it's only fourteen dollars because we're able to keep our income low enough to have those premiums be very very low and we're maintaining Liberty Healthshares so for the moment we have Liberty and Kaiser Permanente and Kaiser Permanente also has a pretty high deductible per person likes it fifty five hundred bucks so yeah it's similar to the same plans we've had before the interesting thing about Kaiser is you can only see doctors that are in their network no other doctors you can see and I really like my doctors after 15 years and I'm getting older I want to see my doctors two things to note about the ACA when it comes to subsidies is there are cliffs there's a cliff at the bottom I don't know if you call it a cliff and there's a cliff at the top so at the top if you make here in Colorado if you make over $66,000 roughly then your subsidies go to zero so if you make 65 thousand

dollars in our situation our subsidy would be eight hundred and thirty dollars a month if we made sixty six thousand dollars the subsidy goes to zero so that is a big cliff at the bottom it's 23 thousand dollars if you make less (as a couple) if you make less than 23 thousand dollars then you are qualified for Medicaid and again you would get no subsidies so for us what we want is basically to have our income just be a little over that Medicaid cliff if you will special threshold so a little over $23,000 would qualify us for the most amount of subsidy that we could possibly qualify for so you may ask how in the world you keep your income so low you say that you make thirty six thousand dollars...so how do you keep our income so low... and so the nice thing about our situation is we're living off capital gains and just money that cash that we simply have in savings and so we don't have any earned income at all the only way that we make income is when we sell our assets and we have capital gains or

a little bit of interest in dividends we have from our assets most of our assets are actually tax deferred assets so those don't count at all for this equation so let's say for instance that in 2015 we invested $50,000 and then it had grown in 2018 to $70,000 well that's $20,000 worth of gain when we go to sell that $70,000 worth of investment we're only gonna pay tax on the $20,000 that's gonna be the only income we have is that $20,000 so we can control our income a little bit to make sure that we are where we want to be to maximize this subsidy and we're figuring that out at the end of December for the tax year that's exactly right so for 2019 we have Kaiser Permanente which only costs us $14 a month with an extremely high deductible and we don't plan to use that and there's Liberty healtshares which is $350 a month with a deductible of 1750 so that's where we are now we're going to be nomadic in a

year and we are changing things up again yep we sure are so we found a plan by this company called azimuth we're gonna put it underneath risk solutions and what they offer is plans that's sort of designed for people that are nomadic or people that are going to be out of the country people that are going to be expats things like this so there is a requirement to have access to this insurance that that you are out of the country for a minimum of six months over of the course of a year they have two different flavors there's one flavor that will cover you anywhere except for the US or Canada then they have a flavor that will cover you for the entire world including the US or Canada and they also have a range ...and Canada not or Canada...right if you're in either of those two places why Canada's lumped into this I'm not sure but these are the two places that they have in this plan where you have to have a higher premium if you want to be in those two places and have health care and it's pretty affordable the interesting thing on this is that women are so much more expensive than men I'm

50 years old Tim said it's because women can have babies who's having babies in their 50s anyway and women are supposed to be healthier than men but maybe it's because women go to the dr. more often than men I don't know that makes absolutely no sense but we're looking and they're they have huge ranges of a deductible on azimuth so it's anywhere from $250 deductible to $10,000 deductible and it's probably about four thousand dollars per person to nine hundred dollars per person that kind of both ends of the range and it's age dependent and it's deductible dependent and it's where do you want coverage US Canada or not so averaging it out if we have a middle-of-the-road deductible say $5,000 I think it's gonna cost us about six thousand dollars a year to have access to this insurance that would cover us when we're abroad as well as when we're here at home the azimuth plan also has something that we're gonna have to go through that's underwriting so I don't know if my back will make it so that I'm not qualified to have this insurance and we may have to look elsewhere I did have a

conversation with a broker just a few weeks ago about worldwide sort of insurance plans and there are options that are available that are quite a bit more money that allow you to have pre-existing conditions and so I don't know...this to me my back issue happened multiple years ago to me it's no longer pre-existing conditions but Liberty thought it was so I'm not sure what yeah it isn't so I don't know what other providers are gonna consider about what's going on with my back whether that's a pre-existing condition...i don't think they care what you think I don't think they do either and this would replace both our ACA plans so we would walk away from our ACA plan we would probably also walk away from Liberty depending upon how things work out this next year yeah so we are still figuring this out but the azimuth isn't final either if you are a nexpat traveler who are you using for your health insurance we would love to know down below this is really only probably maybe just for us people I don't know if it matters because we know a lot of our viewers are international yep and what we're talking about with the expat health insurance is true

health insurance it's not trip insurance for the first time we bought trip insurance this past summer when we were gone for nine weeks with Allianz and that's really trip insurance it's about coverage of your stuff and I mean a variety of trip cancellation things like that and we I think only did the health piece of that it was very affordable but it's not designed to be your health insurance so we are very interested in what our audience is doing if you are nomadic for your health insurance we understand that it is very affordable to potentially go to the doctor outside of America with excellent care we totally get that and we may just be paying for a lot of this out-of-pocket as a full time traveler do you have extra health insurance you pay for are you just doing only out-of-pocket our health care landscape continues to evolve it seems like it changes every week we find out something new whether it's changes things we didn't understand was Liberty or changes to the ACA usually not good changes it's usually unfortunately that's true so we

don't have good answers where we can just say this is what you should go into we wish we had those answers we wish we had those answers for ourself we think that this azimuth plan is gonna be something that we're looking forward to having something we thought that Liberty was gonna be great we're still trying to figure out what that's gonna look like for us so it's just it's an ever-changing beast and it's more uncertain for us today than it was when we retired back in 2015 that's exactly right yeah we want to know what you're doing for your health insurance if an employer isn't managing your health care please let us know down below in the comments especially if you are a traveler especially especially if you are a US citizen if you're from another country make us so jealous and tell us about your fabulous health care that's free down below and we will just be green with envy and maybe you understand why Americans are so obsessed with health care because it's insane and that's it we ask you for a thumbs up on the video and if you haven't subscribed

yet we come out with more fun topics than health insurance hopefully you subscribe and you'll learn that next Wednesday we want to hear those comments down below about what you're doing and if you have anyone else who's kind of questioning what the heck to do with their health insurance and early retirement please share this video with them it probably will only make them more confused unfortunately that's probably but at least it's honest so with that we'll see you next Wednesday thanks for watching