what do you guys do for health insurance now that you're early retired sowe are finally gonna tackle that today Amy handed this ball to me and so I'mthe reason that it's taken us so long to put this together and I think part ofthe challenge has just been it seems like every day something changes withour health insurance so it's this ever-evolving thing we have an answerfor today and so it continues to change next year our answer is going to bedifferent so it's just taken us a while to come up with what did we want toshare with our audience and we will answer what did we do for our healthinsurance but you'll see that it's kind of a messed up I don't think it's notlike a straight and narrow path is let's just say that but we will answer thatquestion today and we hope that you will watch the video so as I mentioned Timand I retired back in 2015 our channel is about early retirement it's about alot of travel including budget travel travel hacking house-sitting as a travelhack stuff like that and we hope that you will subscribe over here because youcome out with a new video each Wednesday
so with that let's tackle what do we dofor health insurance man this should be easy this is not aneasy topic so one of the things that we could have done whenever we were lookingin insurance is not have any insurance I guess that really wasn't an option forus so I'm 51 I forget how old I amAmy's 50 and so certainly one trip to the hospital here in the US that couldbe $100,000 $200,000 for a simple trip to the hospital so crazy you have tohave health insurance here in the States if you have any assets that you'relooking to protect and so we have health insurance one of the things that werealize sort of through this course of trying to figure out what we we're gonnado is even after we had insurance and we wanted to see doctors that are outsideof our specific network some of the doctors won't even see you
if you haveinsurance but you're not in their network they won't visit with you mydoctor of 15 years wouldn't accept me in the past year because my plan didn'tinclude him yep so what we started out doing back in2015-2016 2016 is we signed up for the Affordable Care Act the ACA are plansthat are a part of the ACA every state has an exchange some states don't theyrely on the federal exchange here in Colorado we have an exchange and that'swhere we go to purchase our health insurance yeah and we get a subsidythat's based upon our income 2016 was the first year that we were without ourcorporate insurance so that was our very first year on the ACA and Tim had someconsulting income so we had income that year that kind of was something toconsider in this situation
I will say we have a lot of viewers who ask about thepotential of them retiring early I get that this is like a very scary thing andback in 2015 the Affordable Care Act was pretty solid and it was very predictablefor us so we knew what our out-of-pocket would be we knew what our deductiblewould be that has changed quite a bit we're not gonna get into a politicalconversation but we kind of had to roll with the changes and that's whatwe're gonna be talking about of how we did that today that's right so somethingof note is that with the ACA it varies in pricing and the offerings from countyto County even within a given state so what we're looking at is going to becompletely different if we were to move to Phoenix if we were to move to Texasif we were to move to Washington the pricing would be completely differentthe offerings would be completely different and it's down to the countyit's different so it's hard to put something out there as this is what youshould do because the offerings vary across the country in 2016 we signed upfor a normal plan on the ACA the plan that we signed up for happened to allowus to have access to an HSA which is a health savings account
and you actuallyhave to pay a premium in order to have HSA capabilities on your plan the planhas to be qualified for an HSA we wanted to put money in an HSA for various taxreasons and also it's just a good strategy for savings and so we signed upfor a plan that had that as an offering our monthly premiums were veryaffordable somewhere in like it was based upon our income but maybe even athree hundred four hundred dollar range this was a couple years ago and Tim hadback surgery in one of those years and he ate up his entire six thousand dollardeductible I was probably somewhere around three orfour hundred dollars out of my deductible for co-pays and things likethat so super reasonable for me but when Tim did have a big back surgery it didcover that and that was really nice he also had physical did you physicaltherapy
