As I mentioned in a blog post last year, I went to my first formal FIRE conference in March 2024: Space Camp for Money Nerds Econome. The conference was well run, and very fun. I give it two thumbs up.
My one “problem” with the conference was that I already knew much of what was presented at many of the educational sessions, and some of the sessions covered topics not relevant or of great interest to me. But that really was a “me” problem. No fault of the conference or organizers.
For those not familiar with the Econome format, it comprises social events and educational sessions. Some of the educational programming time segments have multiple events going on simultaneously. Attendees choose which one to attend and can hope from one to the other if they wish.
In 2024, one of the educational programs was on health insurance in the context of FIRE. I knew a lot about this, but decided to go anyway as the other session going on at the time was something I knew even more about, figuring that I should at least go to one session or the other. Put another way, I attended somewhat reluctantly and not expecting to learn much, even if the session was well presented, as I expected it would be.
Background, check
Before I go on, Dear Reader, lemme ‘splain our health insurance picture from the time I discovered FIRE until this year. At its most basic, I and the rest of The Family were covered by plans offered by our employers as part of their benefits package.
The aggregate price for the premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses rose over the years. A lot. By 2021, my last year of working full time, it’d gotten annoyingly high. Having read much about how many FIREd folks get their health insurance through Obamacare Affordable Health Care exchanges and, crucially, get yyyuuuge subsidies that drive the cost of said insurance way down, even to $0, I was all like gimme, gimme, gimme “Hmmm. That’s interesting.” As I approached my FIRE date, I figgered I’d apply for an exchange plan upon FIREing and save us mucho dolares.
When the time came, and with a big grin on my face, I called an exchange navigator to make the change. Visions of bigly cost savings danced in my head.
The navigator asked if I had access to health care through my employer. “Nope!,” I quickly replied. Then she asked if I had access to health insurance through my spouse. “Well, yes,” I replied, confused as to why this mattered if I wanted to decline that coverage and go on an exchange plan to save gobs of money because our much reduced, subsidy-qualifying income in 2022.
That’s when the navigator slapped the smile clean off my face. She explained that so long as I had access to health insurance through my spouse, we were ineligible for subsidies. Womp, womp! Although our FIRE numbers didn’t assume much lower health insurance costs, I’d still hoped that our health insurance costs would drop a lot, increasing the gap between our income and necessary expenses.
Although I could do little but grin and bear it, from time to time, I grumbled about this throughout 2022. In time, open enrollment for 2023 health insurance rolled around. Having not heard anything new on the exchange health insurance front, I didn’t even bother trying to get on the exchange.
Not long before the 2024 Econome conference, we finished our open enrollment for 2024 health insurance. The price for The Missus’ employer’s plan, already face-scrunchingly high by 2023, rose yet further. Worse, the coverage, which I’d always considered mediocre, got no better. I resigned myself to this unfortunate state of affairs. But my grumbling graduated into a wild gnashing of teeth.
Who new?
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming that health care session. As it turned out, I found myself learning more than I expected once the session started. I was engaged. Then came a moment that had I been less engaged I might’ve missed: someone said something that I took to mean that the rule that’d prevented me from getting subsidies in 2022 had been scrapped. “What the what?!” I thought.
Once the session ended, I approached the speakers and some attendees to clarify what I thought I’d heard. The answer: Yep, it be. “Holy Toledo!,” I thought to myself,
After returning home, I did some interwebs research and then spoke to a navigator, who confirmed what I’d learned but added a crucial nuance: to qualify for subsidies, the cost of our employer plan, family coverage premiums had to exceed a specified percentage of our household modified adjusted gross income (MAGI). Determining that with some planning, we could reduce our MAGI to a subsidy-qualifying level, I got to work.
I’ll spare you the details, Dear Reader (I may write a post on those details tho, as they’re pretty involved and interesting . . . for money-obsessed nerds like us), but we qualified for subsidies. Also, something I’d heard of but never really researched: cost sharing reductions. The smile so forcefully smacked off my face in 2022 boomeranged back.
Swing time
So, Dear Reader, you may be wondering what this all means in actual dollars and cents. Welp, between lower costs for health insurance premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses, we’ll likely save five figures of money this year versus last year. What’s more, the measures we took to address our 2025 MAGI will result in us saving and investing a far larger chunk of change than we have since I FIREd.
Considering cost savings, increased investments, average expected investment returns, and income tax savings, I estimate a positive financial swing in our favor in the tens of thousands of dollars. The number should be the same next year. Beyond that, things are less clear. But by then our circumstances may have changed in good ways.
My approximate all-in costs to get to and attend Econome were $750. Not pocket change. But not nothing. If I think of that sum as an investment in learning and having a good ol’ time, and consider the return on investment (ROI) coming just from our 2025 health insurance savings and increased savings stemming directly from what I learned at the conference, we’re talking potentially a several-dozen X return. Yowza! I dunno ‘bout you, but I’ll take that kinda return. Every. Day. Of. The. Week.
And in the end . . .
I mentioned that I already knew a fair amount about health insurance in the context of FIRE before attending Econome last year. That knowledge encompassed Obamacare the Affordable Care Act, too. What I found in my post-conference research tho, was that I understood a lot less about all this than I realized. I learned a ton in the process. I don’t profess to understand it all now. But I sure understand it better than before.
