Finish line is in sight now, fine tune my plan

[REAL WORLD EXPAT]

Hello! After years of putting our heads down and saving I think I can see the finish line in sight and wanted to run some things past the knowledgeable folks here in the group for some feedback. Some background:

DINKS 47 and 42 - both US citizens (living in MCOL location in the Midwest USA) and I am also a UK citizen

Current FIRE date September 2022 - for purely bragging purposes I wanted to say I'd FIRE'd in my 40's and this is about as late as I can leave it in 2022 to be able to do that. So plan was to max out the IRA and 401k catchup I can do the year I turn 50. Another reason is we have a couple old dogs that probably have less (but we don't know how much less) than 2 years left with us, so September seemed a good date to put out there for now.

We'll both have the option of COBRA but that'll be expensive and I'm going to educate myself about subsidies for ACA to see if my tentative date needs to be moved (either back or forwards a few months only) to qualify for cheaper health care. Any high level advise here?

Our plan is to sell our house and travel for a while and I'm trying to see if there is any tactical advantage to where I travel first. We'd like to do Aus, NZ, SE Asia, Japan, Europe, North/South/Central America over a period of 2 years. Still a lot of planning on how we plan to do this, but from a health care perspective I was wondering if we should do North America first while on COBRA or ACA, or go overseas first with separate travel insurance and look at ACA when we return to the states?

On the note of returning we have a couple options - return the US but to a lower cost of living area, move to the UK (a big plus for this is the healthcare cost and stability, I do worry ACA will get wiped out one day here in the US, I have less worry about the NHS, though of course it has it's problems too) or move to another country, Spain tickles my fancy at this early stage.

I estimate out FIRE yearly available budget to be about $75,000 that has to cover everything and that is at about a 3.5% draw rate. This is not bare bones and we could easily cut back on some expensive budgeted categories if we had lean years.

So lots to plan and research but if anyone has any high level feedback on my plan, or timing with respect to ACA and travel I'd welcome some feedback!

Thanks in advance and I look forward to posting more as we progress towards FIRE that is now visible in the future.

Real World Expat!

[lhamo]

Is your insurance/the medical system good in your current location?  One thing we did while we still had gold-plated expat medical insurance was to get full physicals and get any urgent medical needs taken care of (gallstones in my case).  Same with dental/vision if you have those coverages.  If you have things you can't or don't want to deal with while still working, look into medical tourism options in places like Thailand (have heard excellent things about Bunrumgrad hospital in Bangkok) and India -- sometimes what you pay for procedures + living costs in those places will be less than you would pay for deductible and co-pay in the US.

In my state I had to physically relocate before I could sign up for an ACA plan, and we ended up with 2 month gap in coverage.  Not ideal, though if something awful had happened we could have retroactively been covered by Cobra (though the "family" premium for that would have cost $1800/month and only covered the two of us who were in the US -- my DH and DD stayed overseas longer than DS and I).

Good luck with your transition!  Look forward to following your progress.

[Monkey Uncle]

If you leave work in September, you likely will make too much money for that year to qualify for an ACA premium tax credit.  At your age, three months of unsubsidized ACA coverage will probably run you in the neighborhood of $5,000, although that might vary depending on your location and the plan you select.  You should probably compare the cost of ACA to the cost of COBRA for those three months.  Or, if you're a bit more of a risk taker, you could do without insurance for those three months and activate COBRA retroactively if some catastrophic health event happens during that time.