About six weeks back DW was diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer. We named the tumor Donald Trump because it’s lumpy, bad for your health, and only 2.4 centimeters. She is in the process of treatment and our prognosis is good overall.
Before the cancer we were discussing how frugality had built this cushion for us that allowed us to absorb disasters better than if we used that money to buy jet skis or a cable TV package. Mustachianism has been a big driver in our financial decision making for about 4 years. Given what happened, I have been looking back at the site and a few things came to mind about Mustachianism.
• Yay for frugality! We can shrug off thousands of dollars in medical bills because we bank 50% of our income. It won’t even affect our ability to pay other bills. Cancer treatment can bankrupt families and because we put aside the money and have good insurance, this will be a monetary speed bump.
• Yay for health insurance! All told, the cost of surgery and treatment is expected to run near to $300,000. We have good insurance so we’ll end up putting out $10,000 and only because treatment will straddle coverage years. If we had self-insured or purchased the cheapest insurance on the market, we could be out thousands of dollars before coverage even kicked in let alone hitting the max out of pocket caps.
• Yay for fitness! We don’t run marathons, but a consistent regimen of activity and healthy eating meant that DW is considered to be very healthy (you know besides the cancer) and we don’t need radical changes in diet.
• Yay for badassity! DW is fucking ironclad, she walked a mile and a half right after chemo to go get nachos and walked the block with our oldest boy and I this weekend to help him sell popcorn.
• Yay for progress! Even though this is fucking terrifying, there have been remarkable advancement in the last couple decades and the progress to improve treatment continues.
• Yay for luck! Yes, even really shitty luck like getting cancer has still has lucky parts like catching it relatively early, healing quickly, no major post-op complications and tolerating treatment well.
• Meh for a new targeted FIRE date. We talked about hitting FIRE in about 9 years. But private market insurance will be incredibly expensive after DW’s diagnosis, and that assumes the USA maintains a system where she can at least get coverage. This changes our math on FIRE considerably as we don’t want to leave a job with solid benefits until we have enough saved to pay the larger annual insurance cost and have funds set aside to cover treatment if there is recurrence. I can’t really complain though because we both enjoy our jobs and a few extra years is not an eternity.
Big thanks to MMM for the inspiration!