That so that required Tim to holdthe insurance for his back and I don't think it cost me anything extra to be onthat plan so I stayed on it so it's still a little bit of a mystery becausewe're waiting to be paid on things and and we're not quite sure how thisLiberty is gonna shake out but there's a really cool thing about Liberty that wedidn't have with our ACA plan and that's that we could use it outside of ourstate we do that so travel all the time not only outside the country but also all aroundAmerica and as long as a bill is in Englishand billed in US dollars Liberty will cover it which is pretty sweetso the end of 2018 came and it was time to pick a plan for 2019 on the ACA andwe dumped that plan that we couldn't see any doctors with and we started a newplan we're with Kaiser Permanente we don't plan to use them though so eventhough we're paying for them
it's only fourteen dollars because we're able tokeep our income low enough to have those premiums be very very low and we'remaintaining Liberty Healthshares so for the moment we have Liberty and KaiserPermanente and Kaiser Permanente also has a pretty high deductible per personlikes it fifty five hundred bucks so yeah it's similar to the same planswe've had before the interesting thing about Kaiser is you can only see doctors that are in their network no otherdoctors you can see and I really like my doctors after 15 years and I'm gettingolder I want to see my doctors two things to note about the ACA when itcomes to subsidies is there are cliffs there's a cliff at the bottom I don'tknow if you call it a cliff and there's a cliff at the top so at the top if youmake here in Colorado if you make over $66,000 roughly then your subsidies goto zero so if you make 65 thousand dollars in our situation our subsidy wouldbe eight hundred and thirty dollars a month if we made sixty six thousanddollars the subsidy goes to zero so
that is a big cliff at the bottom it's 23thousand dollars if you make less (as a couple) if you make less than23 thousand dollars then you are qualified for Medicaid and again youwould get no subsidies so for us what we want is basically to have our incomejust be a little over that Medicaid cliff if you will special threshold so alittle over $23,000 would qualify us for the most amount of subsidy that we couldpossibly qualify for so you may ask how in the world you keep your income so lowyou 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 capitalgains and just money that cash that we simply have in savings and so we don'thave any earned income at all the only way that we make income is when we sellour assets and we have capital gains or a little bit of interest in dividendswe have from our assets most of our assets are actually tax deferred assetsso those don't count at all for this equation so let's say for instance thatin 2015 we invested $50,000 and then it had grown in 2018 to $70,000well that's $20,000 worth of gain when we go to sell that $70,000 worth ofinvestment we're only gonna pay tax on the $20,000 that's gonna be the onlyincome we have is that $20,000
so we can control our income a little bit to makesure that we are where we want to be to maximize this subsidy and we're figuringthat out at the end of December for the tax year that's exactly rightso for 2019 we have Kaiser Permanente which only costs us $14 a month with anextremely high deductible and we don't plan to use that and there's Libertyhealtshares which is $350 a month with a deductible of 1750 so that's where weare now we're going to be nomadic in a year and we are changing things up againyep we sure are so we found a plan by this company called azimuthwe're gonna put it underneathrisk solutions and what they offer is plans that's sort of designed for peoplethat are nomadic or people that are going to be out of the country peoplethat are going to be expats things like this so there is a requirement to haveaccess to this insurance that that you are out of the country for a minimum ofsix months over of the course of a year they have two different flavorsthere's one flavor that will cover you anywhere except for the US or Canadathen they have a flavor that will cover you for the entire world including theUS or Canada and they also have a range ...
and Canada not or Canada...right if you'rein either of those two places why Canada's lumped into this I'm not surebut these are the two places that they have in this plan where you have to havea higher premium if you want to be in those two places and have health careand it's pretty affordable the interesting thing on this is that womenare so much more expensive than men I'm 50 years old Tim said it's because womencan have babies who's having babies in their 50s anyway and women are supposedto be healthier than men but maybe it's because women go to thedr. more often than men I don't know that makes absolutely no sense but we'relooking and they're they have huge ranges of a deductible on azimuth soit's anywhere from $250 deductible to $10,000 deductible and it's probablyabout four thousand dollars per person to nine hundred dollars per person thatkind of both ends of the range and it's age dependent and it's deductibledependent and it's where do you want coverage US Canada or notso averaging it out if we have a middle-of-the-road deductible say $5,000I think it's gonna cost us about six thousand dollars ayear to have access to this insurance that would cover us when we're abroad aswell as when we're here at home the azimuth plan also has something thatwe're gonna have to go through that's underwriting so I don't know if my backwill make it so that
I'm not qualified to have this insurance and we may haveto look elsewhere I did have a conversation with a broker just a fewweeks ago about worldwide sort of insurance plans and there are optionsthat are available that are quite a bit more money that allow you to havepre-existing conditions and so I don't know...this to me my back issuehappened multiple years ago to me it's no longer pre-existing conditions butLiberty thought it was so I'm not sure what yeah it isn't so I don't know whatother providers are gonna consider about what's going on with my back whetherthat's a pre-existing condition...i don't think they care what you thinkI don't think they do either and this would replace both our ACA plans so we would walk awayfrom our ACA plan we would probably also walk away from Liberty depending uponhow things work out this next year yeah so we are still figuring this out butthe azimuth isn't final either if you are a nexpat traveler
