Calculating Health Care Cost into Your Financial Independence Number - Episode 6

Are you worried about how you are going to pay for healthcare if you retire before Medicare age? This conundrum has stumped early retirees and entrepreneurs for decades. Part of the problem is that we just plain unclear about how much healthcare coverage will cost. Lynn Frair and Ryan Connell have an answer. They have created a a healthcare calculator to help you estimate your costs. This is the nation's first healthcare cost calculator of it's kind through the lifespan for entrepreneurs and early retirees. And it’s available totally free.

About our guests:

Lynn Frair is a nurse and healthcare expert and personal finance enthusiast who started investing at age 12. After a brain tumor in her 20s wiped out her savings, she re-built up her investments and retired at age 40. She is covered by major media outlets including the WSJ, and MarketWatch. She is the founder of FI Healthcare, where her mission is empowering individuals in the financial independence community with knowledge to choose the right healthcare option for themselves. She is also the Founder of thefinanciallysavvynurse.com where she works with nurses using knowledge of personal finance to empower them to live a life with more time freedom and in alignment with their values.

Ryan Connell worked for 15 years as a systems engineer identifying the heart of complex problems and leading teams to solve them. He left his engineering career in 2022 to start living more deliberately and find a new path in life thanks to FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early)

fihealthcare site: https://fihealthcare.com/

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Naseema: What's up everybody? Welcome back to the Financially Intentional Podcast. I have two very special guests adjoining me today, and one of these guests is actually the reason why this podcast exists in the first place. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Lynn Fre and Ryan Connell. We are gonna talk about.

Super duper incredible revolutionary calculator that they came up with, invented and put out into the public. But first I'm gonna give them a chance to introduce themselves. And we're gonna Kiki and giggle and talk about why this calculator is so important. So let's start with you, Ryan. I wanna hear a little bit about your backstory how you got roped into this project with Lynn.

I know she is. Super I wanna say just everybody loves her, so it's, she's super charismatic. And so , I know how easy it is to kind of get pulled into her little projects. So, Ryan, tell us a little bit about yourself and , how you ended up working on this calculator with Lynn.

[00:01:12] Ryan: Yeah, so my name's Ryan.

I'm a system engineer by background. I was working for the last 15 or so years as a system architect in aerospace. Found fire in about 2016 and last year I went to Camp five for the first time and had an amazing experience and decided that I was going to The year after actually leave my job on the day that I went back to Camp pfi.

And so that evening, while we were all introducing herself ourselves, Lynn also introduced herself and brought up the fact that she was really trying to get this calculator in into the world. And she had some ideas with the math, but coming from the nurse background, she knew all the healthcare side, but she didn't know all the math side.

So I volunteered to sort of shepherd all the cats and we got lots of different people in the. A diverse set of backgrounds and I was basically the person holding the marker. So my role in all this has kind of been to shepherd the technical stuff like I did in my regular career with trying to get the calculator out into the world and make sure that everyone was confident that we were giving people a number that was pretty close to what you could expect to see.

So that

[00:02:16] Naseema: was my role. . That is pretty cool. So you were a lot of the brains behind , the engineering component, which nurses unfortunately aren't that great with. So I love how you were able to support in that capacity, but it sounds like a lot of people were involved in this process, which camp I is really all about, and if you guys don't know about Camp pfi, learn about it.

It's one of those places where it's a life-changing experience where you get to sit in a room full of people that. Have a similar mindset as you, but are in different steps of the financial independence journey. So it's super supportive. People come around and brainstorm and you get to just Interact with people on so many different levels and get to know people.

So lifetime bonds are formed there, and also some incredible projects apparently come out of the campfire as well. So let's go to you Lynn. And the reason why I say that this podcast would not exist without Lynn is because literally, Lynn. Was the one who kind of like put the fire under my butt to start the podcast because I had kind of been like wavering on when I was gonna start and she was just like, just do it.

And I was like, okay, well I will and you're gonna be my first guest. . So Lynn was the first guest on the Nurses On Fire podcast and still her. Is one of the most, and she has a few episodes on there, but her episodes are the most popular episodes just because of, again, how charismatic and original her story is.

But Lynn, give us a little bit more about your background. For people who don't know you don't know that we are actually sisters . Yep.

[00:03:59] Lynn: We, we say same mom, different dad, cuz we look a little different. But I don't think I'm charismatic at all. I'm pretty awkward, and I think people find that charismatic to some degree, but I just love and appreciate Naima.

I, we did start a podcast or we see, look at, I'm taking credit for it, but I just said, let's try it and if it's horrible, we'll throw it out. And I think that's just sort of what we did here with the equation. So I am a nurse. I started investing when I was 12 years. You know, I think that most people should with their babysitting money, cuz it compounds over time.

I lost all my investments. I had to go to medical bills and I was terribly in debt. Had to rebuild in my late twenties cuz I had the brain tumor. And back then there wasn't medical out-of-pocket maximums like there are, so it could just really wipe you out. And it did for me, that drove my passion and frustration for healthcare and the cost of he.

And I rebuilt to the point and I worked as a nurse, lovely husband, not highway journeyer. He worked as a chef and then he was a stay-at-home dad for the last 10 years. And then we got to fire in my late thirties. And I've been passionate about this very, very inefficient healthcare system we have and how to calculate the cost of it in early retirement.

That's the number one factor for folks preventing them to going into early retirement. And so I wanted to solve for that. So Ryan was key, absolutely pivotal. I don't think that it would've come to fruition without him. There were 10 people total involved, and so that's why we're here today is because we actually made it happen.

[00:05:44] Naseema: I think it's important to start with the fact that a lot of people don't retire when they technically can by the amount of assets they have, because health insurance is one of those big questions that kind of looms over in the air because health insurance can be very expensive in this country and with preexisting conditions or even if you're healthy, it's kind of one of those things that you're like, well, How do I factor this into my number?

And sometimes it's just easier to work, , continue to work, yeah. And get the benefits. And so at the first thing you did was you kind of created this space where people could figure out what their options were as far as healthcare in early retirement, and then that turned into this calculator that you created.

Talk about what the calculator does and exactly how it works.

[00:06:37] Lynn: So the idea really is to, when people figure out their fire number, often what they'll do is they'll take a look at what are their expenses, and then 25 x, whatever that is.

The theory is actually, I'm gonna get a little technical, but just bear with me. It's the opposite of the 4% rule. Basically, if you take a lump sum of money, you invest it often, investments will return over time, seven or 8%. So the idea is if you withdraw 4% of, let's say a million dollars, so that would be 40,000 a year, then you would be able to sustainably take the cream off the top and still keep your original amount.

So that's a pretty well known fire equation to figure out how much do you need to retire. But the big question mark was around healthcare. So we were trying to figure out how much do you need for healthcare? And there's two different areas before Medicare and after Medicare. So we were seeking to develop an equation that was a good estimate of what that would.

And I think that there's a difference between precision and accuracy, so we could get really precise, but the future of healthcare is unknown. So we were looking to find an equation that had efficiency and simplicity, but also a, a decent amount of accuracy based on the information that we know.

Right. Jump on

[00:08:11] Ryan: top of that for a second. Mm-hmm. . One of the things that we talk about, if, if you're in a STEM career field and things is getting to an order of magnitude, When it comes to healthcare, people are getting lots of information from people one, two generations ahead of them when they're looking to retire early, better, telling them, oh, you have to do all this stuff for healthcare.

You have no idea what's coming for you, and they don't know if they need tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars set aside in their investments to cover all those healthcare expenses. So one of the big goals of this formula was to get people in the right ballpark so they understood what that number was, and when Lynn was talking about people taking their current expenses and multiplying it by 25, There's actually a lot of inherent potential fallacies there for people that are just running their numbers.

To give you an idea of some of them, when you're young, you tend, and especially twenties, thirties, forties, you don't have a lot of health expenses relative to other parts of your life, so you may be extrapolating the healthiest moment of your life and that may not be a great fit. There's other issues where if you're working in a career field where your employer is providing your, he.

They're subsidizing it. They're pulling the premiums out of your paycheck. They're possibly pulling the HSA or FSA kind of things outta your paycheck, and you may never see that if you are just looking in Mint or Y Nav or personal capital and trying to propagate what you're. Out of pocket expenses are on a day-to-day basis, you don't even realize that that's missing from the formula entirely.

And those expenses are gonna show up for you when you leave your job and now you are the one who's paying all the bills. Mm-hmm. So it's important for people to understand these aspects of health insurance and not just take the simple rule of thumb, especially as they get towards the end and are ready to make the leap.

[00:09:50] Lynn: Yes. One of the things, so I, I did first wanna make sure to thank the other folks that were involved with this, and the beauty of this equation that was created was that it was converted into a usable calculator, so you don't have to know the math behind it. The person who did that, her name is Erin Ostfeld.

and without her, this calculator wouldn't be in place. We also wanted to thank Steven Bauer, Kevin Carter, Erin Gentz, Sam Ferguson, Keith NuGen, Joe Olson, Ralph Stike Leather, and Jason Yam Netz because they were also formula contributors. But the beauty of it, which is found@fihealthcare.com, under Calculate Healthcare Calculator.

It's healthcare cost calculator is the extension, and we can put it in the show notes, is that you don't have to worry about all of these calculations, but if you want to, we have a lot of optional values you can enter and you can also download a copy of the spreadsheet. So if you're a engineer or worked in aerospace and you really wanna refine it, there is the option with that calculator to do

[00:11:00] Naseema: that as well.

So at what point did somebody. Include these numbers into their FI number? Like do these things align or are they to be done separate?

Yeah.

[00:11:15] Lynn: Oh, this is part of the whole bundle of things to save for when you're in retirement. Cuz you wouldn't say, well, What do we do about food? Well, food's part of what you're gonna do, I, unless the future changes so much that we no longer require food, which is unlikely, or that we no longer require healthcare, which is unlikely, Ryan put a very nice and simple equation up, which is the cost of fire outside of healthcare.

The cost of healthcare equals your total fire number, and that cost of healthcare after fire is the biggest variable, this biggest unknown that we're trying to solve for. And the beauty of this, this is what I wanna really inspire people to think about. is, I think people get so terrified. What if something bad happens?

What if I miscalculate healthcare? You know, they don't worry about this with food because then they think, okay, well then I won't order Uber Eats five times a month. Right? And I'll have, I'll have bananas when they turn a little bit brown, like three times a year and that'll solve for that. And healthcare, what do you do?

It's just so opaque. And I think that's a problem, but it's actually not hopeless because if you calculate incorrectly with healthcare, you will on average have a couple of decades to see that you're a little bit off and adjust for that. So maybe you don't take seven trips that year in retirement. Maybe you take five trips because maybe your calculation's a little off.

So we recommend recalculating every two years or every. if something changes, and then you'll be able to see. My projections are slightly different. I just might take three trips this year instead of seven and make up for the difference because I think we have this huge fear that if we don't know this unknowable future, there's futures unknowable before fire and after fire that we shouldn't take this risk, but really it's gonna be

[00:13:14] Naseema: okay. So. When I was looking at the calculator, I still am a little confused because.

Like every year that I go to, and you know, my insurance is through my employer. So every year kind of our out ofp, pocket maximums change, like all these things change. And so like I have this fire number in mind, right? And so this is what this, I'm just gonna tell you how like I compartment, car, compartmentalize things in my brain.

Is that okay? I already know my fire number and that's locked in and like 25 x. , but now there's this healthcare calculator, and of course now that is part of, so that becomes part of my expenses, right? Mm-hmm. Like my current expenses. But I've still confused on how you plan for that in retirement.

If you don't know what your insurance is gonna look like, especially if you've had an employer sponsor plan the whole time.

[00:14:18] Lynn: Oh yes, we can talk all about this, so, okay. Do you have any portion of that fire number? Are you thinking about healthcare expenses or do you have zero kind of planned when you think about your fire

[00:14:29] Naseema: number?

When I think about my fire number and my healthcare expenses, I'm thinking, . Either I'll work for the rest of my life just for health insurance, or I will be an expat and kind of have travel insurance. Like that's how I figured my, like my healthcare. Cause I'm just like, in America, it is just so crazy.

I'll probably retire in Portugal or something like that, or somewhere where I'll, it'll be, I would just p be part of the national healthcare system and not have to worry about crazy insurance in.

[00:15:01] Lynn: Yes. Well, most people, so you're special. No, just kidding. I think most people are overwhelmed and so they're like, I'm just gonna not solve for this problem because it's overwhelming and unknowable.

But most people have some idea that they're gonna spend something, so they've already accounted for something. What we're d trying to do is get an order of magnitude approximation of what it actually is, rather than it just being some nebulous number. The way that you do it is not the amount that you have now.

We're presuming you won't work in retirement, because then that would be not retirement. And the way that most people are going to do it in the US is going to be probably a traditional insurance plan. So if you think about it, most people actually don't have employer-based insurance. Most people are gig workers.

They're entrepreneurs, some of them are uninsured. So what do the entrepreneurs in the world do? They buy something often on the exchange, is what we call it. You can also buy outside of the exchange, but for simplicity, you could go to healthcare.gov and then it will take you to your state specific exchange.

Or I actually prefer Health Sherpa, which is a private partner to and I think it has a better interface. And so for the calculator you would use, what you would use when you're not employed, when you are buying it just on the exchange, and we walk you through it and there's a link on there.

It takes about 10 minutes, 15 minutes to see what your healthcare costs would be right now, and we recommend starting with that. Then you can adjust it every year as you get different numbers. But that'll give you a good starting point. So we don't recommend you use your current employer amount because that's subsidized.

Somewhere between 75 to 90% is subsidized by your employer. So that's not gonna be an accurate predictor, but I think people will be really pleasantly surprised at what they see. And once they just look and get some real solid numbers, it helps 'em plan, it helps 'em demystify it helps 'em see potential and possibility.

And that's really what I want for people.

[00:17:16] Ryan: And I wanna jump for a second on that too, because I think your. Sort of fears, viewpoints that you raised are, are common for a lot of people that are working for their employer. And it's provided, it's, it's the, the statement of I'm here for the benefits is a statement you do here quite a bit.

And I think one of the reasons for that, and you have to think about it psychologically, is we have dependence in our life in different ways. And when people talk about financial independence, they're nor normally talking about. Independence from their employer's income stream from that salary coming in the door.

But you could also be dependent on your employer to figure out healthcare for you because you aren't willing to go figure it out for yourself. And it's not as scary as people think. You know, Lynn was saying how the employers are subsidizing it and they're negotiating it for you, and they're providing maybe 75 plus percent of the cost of the premiums.

But as somebody who just came off of that system onto the sort of gig system now looking towards next year and coming off Cobra, the premiums are a lot lower for people in the marketplaces than they were claimed by my employers. So my employer's providing this really big benefit on an inflated premium cost for something that wasn't a good fit for me in some ways.

And so the numbers aren't as scary as you might think if you just assumed you had to pay the full bill that that employer was.

[00:18:31] Naseema: Well, you just said a word that was super scary to me, which is Cobra. Ooh, let's talk about that. Every time I get, like, you know, when you, you separate from an employer, they're gonna send you that Cobra statement, and those numbers are scary.

So for me, I paid $13 every two weeks to provide healthcare for my family of three. And so when I go from seeing $13 to $2,500 a month. It is intimidating.

[00:18:58] Lynn: Yeah, let's talk about Cobra and what that is and what it means and when it can be good. COBRA is an acronym for Consolidated Omnibus Reconciliation Act, and it really is just to keep

It really is to keep coverage for folks when they lose their employer, employer-based coverage. And the federal law says for 18 months, and some states like California will have it a bit longer, but. You are entitled to have your employer's coverage if you have a certain, and check with your HR department, but you have to take up their portion of what they're paying, and it's a lot usually so.

What that usually makes sense for is if people really love their coverage and or they've already met their deductible for the year. So if you're leaving midyear and you've already met your deductible, then it may make sense just math, you know, math it up, as we call it, and look at what your premium is, what your deductible is, and see if it makes sense to stay on Cobra or not.

But also compare it to Health Sherpa and what you find on there, cuz you may find a much more reasonable option with a really nice coverage. I think people assume it's so bad and it actually is a lot better out there than it was 10 years ago. And I'm not gonna get political or anything, but both bipartisan support often for healthcare, for the general population and entrepreneurs.

there's been some proposal of of taking that away cuz there used to not be preexisting coverage. There used to not be maximums for a lot of these things. And when people hear about what it could be unlimited, my out-of-pocket could be unlimited again, then they realize, oh, how it used to be. Many of these things were unlimited before and a lot of people don't wanna go back to that bipartisan.

So,

[00:20:55] Ryan: and I brought up Cobra because that's what I'm living right now. So I'll talk about my situation just for a second. I left in on July 1st. Went to Camp five, like I said, and we went on Cobra, my wife and I, because we had already hit out-of-pocket or, or at least our deductible and possibly our out-of-pocket maximum, I think by July.

So for us, it made more sense to have that. In place through the end of the year. And then when we actually went on the marketplaces and started seeing what was out there, we went from, we're gonna go from like an $1,100 a month Cobra payment for the two of us. And I'm 38. I'll give you a point of reference.

And we are gonna go to about $650 a month from the marketplace. So it's a big shift in terms of the price point for the plans.

[00:21:38] Naseema: Yeah. So I'm confused. So nasa, you decided to still pay the $1,100 a month even though you could have got the same coverage and started that, for 600, or is there some other factor?

I'm not thinking about.

[00:21:52] Ryan: So a couple things. When you make the transition out of your employer, there's a lot of things that are happening. There's a lot of moving pieces. It's sort of a major life event. And one of the things for us, because of my, my family's doctors and wanting to keep the same network and everything else, tackling healthcare and moving away from dependence on my employer was not something I was gonna bite off at that exact moment in my life.

And the extra. For Cobra for six months that I didn't even know was an extra cost, didn't frighten me. I already knew I hit the out-of-pocket maximum resetting That would probably. honestly have cost me more because we would've gone to a new plan and had a new deductible and had a new out-of-pocket maximum.

And so in hindsight, it still probably was a net win for us. But there were multiple things happening at that moment in my life. But when I finally got on the plan on the marketplaces, if you guys are worried about healthcare, go on the marketplaces. Do some homework, do some research, see if your doctors are on there.

Actually go hands on cuz it's very simple to put in some information, even fake inform. That's a future you and see what it costs and see, you know, put, put some real numbers behind these things because otherwise it's existential. I don't know what's gonna happen with healthcare that's gonna mm-hmm. keep you in the one more year syndrome.

[00:23:02] Naseema: Yeah. And I was definitely thinking in living in that existential space, I have to admit, and as someone who's very financially intentional, like just kind of. I have not really thought into what like full retirement would look like for me, because I'm more of the kind of coast fire kind of girl and like I said, always gonna have some kind of employment, you know, and I mean, and that's right now, that's me thinking in my 41 year old, you know, with little kids.

And that's part of the problem too. I still got little kid children. Mm-hmm. , you know, and thinking like that. But it's definitely something that I have not like I, I, I wanna openly admit even thought about. And so it does live in this existential space for me, but, Now it makes sense for me to just go into the exchange and kind of just like see.

Yeah, because what we don't know what we don't know and we can't plan for the unknown, but we can plan for scenarios that we can see for our future. If we know the tools to do so. And so it's super. Exactly. So I just, I'm glad that you mentioned that. Like just go into the exchange and play around with the numbers and your situation and what your family looks like and see what it would cost and then you can accurately project.

And for me it might be like that wake up life. Oh, like then I might not work per diem like three months out of the year cuz I could actually afford this insurance that I was like so fearful of. So I like that exercise and I think that this is like a call to action for everybody listening to go into the exchange and play around.

You know, and create different scenarios of what healthcare costs could look like in your future if you do plan to retire early. And so I, I, I have to have like that practical application in order to like really, really understand things sometimes, just the way that I think. But I think it's like super helpful because I know I'm not the only one where, you know, sometimes where things are overwhelming, like healthcare costs, you kind of just push it off and not want, and, and you don't think about.

[00:25:14] Lynn: Yeah, I think Naima, you are with most of the population and so I'm so glad that you said that you're where I was. That's why, why I was so motivated to create this. To create Fi healthcare was really to post all the research that I had done and people wanted me to share with them because this was a scary idea.

We have two little girls, what are we gonna do? And what we ended up doing was we were also, we went on the exchange and we bought our own plan, just like you do when you're an entrepreneur. And I took, this was back in 2018. I put in my notice, we were, we bought our own health insurance. I was terrified, I'll be honest.

It's totally fine. You're just like an entrepreneur for a family of four. It's kind of expensive. So we got high deductible health plans and now after 10 years of my husband re being retired, so he's a. He got recruited, he gets recruited all the time to work and he's like, you know, the only way I'd wanna work is if you guys, if there's something with full benefits where I can work three hours a day, still pick up the kids from school, have summers and holidays off, and he got that job.

So, so, you

[00:26:31] Naseema: know what's crazy is that that's the whole thing. Financial independence that a lot of people take for granted because it's not just necessarily about the ability to retire early because work is optional. You put you, you say like, these are, these are the conditions on which I'm, we willing to work.

If not, then it just doesn't make any sense for me. So I love that. Called exactly. Did that big up, Carl. And .

[00:26:59] Lynn: Yeah, he, and we just assume the answer's no, cuz that's what he is been saying for like a decade. Here are the, you know, this is what I'm looking for and I don't think it exists. And it didn't. And then one day it did.

And so since November 1st, we've had employer based insurance for the first time since 2018. And I'm trying to figure that out cuz you always, whenever you go to different insurance, you try to figure out what's going on and , it's lovely, but it was fine before too. So that's the thing is. Life circumstances change and so often we think, well, it's gonna be catastrophic with healthcare.

Well, it could be or could actually be better than you think it will. I've had some situations that are literally catastrophic with healthcare and recovered within a couple of years. So you might meet your out-of-pocket max for a couple of years. Even with something like a cancer, sometimes that's not, you know, for 60 years, sometimes you have a really financially intensive few.

and then it's okay. So I had a brain tumor add a very financially intensive couple of years, and then I was okay.

[00:28:07] Ryan: And I wanted to jump on the, the exchange again one more time because when we were deriving the formula and it was, what was it, 1230 at night or something like that? Right. , when we were standing around the board at Camp pfi and driving all the math, but.

One of the beauties of having so many different people in the room from all across the country and from all different walks of life in the FI journey and income levels. Was that there were two big things from the exchange that was shared as we talked and, and everyone was talking about their experiences and we realized that one, the state that you're in actually matters a lot for healthcare because it's by state.

So Nasima, when you talked about geo arbitraging for free healthcare out to. , maybe Portugal or something like that, right? You can also do that from a state perspective and move to a state where your healthcare is lower. So when you're playing around in the exchange, if you're thinking about Gage, go play around in other states and see if it changes things.

The other thing that, that you, that people should play around with is when you go into an FI position, which is what this calculator is really geared towards, is, are you ready to make the leap? Your income level is likely going to change dramatically. And you may go from a position where you have to pay for your full healthcare to now it's gonna get subsidized in some way by credit on your taxes or something like that.

And so you can play around and figure out, oh, if I'm making this much money, then it's gonna cost me this much for healthcare. And then it starts to fall off a cliff or something at a, at a certain point. So that's another great place where you can put in multiple different numbers in the exchange and see how these things play out and how, oh no, I didn't make as much money in my gig work as I thought it was gonna.

but now my healthcare expenses aren't as high, so it maybe isn't as scary as I thought it was. So have fun play and it's really important to get out there and see it. So you're not dependent on your employer for healthcare.

[00:29:48] Naseema: So when you play around with these numbers and you're calculating your income in fi, right, are you looking at your income, your like kinda Income after you adjust for, you know, maybe pre-tax contributions.

Is it, so what income are you basing it off of? Like what, what's the number that you're looking at? Does that make sense?

[00:30:12] Lynn: Yeah. Okay. So you're really looking at your. , what they call the maggi, your modified adjusted gross income. Okay? And so you won't necessarily know exactly what that is. So what I would do is look up what qualifies as Maggi, M A G I, and you'll see what types of your income will be factored into that, and then go from there.

And the biggest question is going to. Well, what is it gonna be? What if it varies? What if it, it will, but that's the thing is that it always varies, but you can adjust for it because much of the population is entrepreneurial with variable income nurses with variable income. So you report your income change and then it gets reconciled at the end of the year.

So this is all figure outable. That answer the question?

[00:31:09] Naseema: Yeah, it did. It did. Cause I was just like, oh my God, what if I contribute, continue to contribute? Like, is that, is that gonna well contribute to retirement? Is that gonna affect the number? Like, you know, so, you know, it's

kind

[00:31:21] Lynn: of stuff when you take stuff out to like oversimplify when you take things out that are.

Usable as income., and the reason I'm not listing it out right now is because it's possible things could change in the future as to what is considered modified adjusted gross income. Not a whole lot, but you just Google.

Is in

mag

[00:31:47] Naseema: yeah, that's important. Like just Google it because it's just like retirement contribution limits and, you know, all those things change every year. So that's something that you still have to look up every year and kind of adjust for. And so yeah, there are those things that are variable that you do have to factor in.

And so you, that's why it's important to constantly go in and read. So, yeah, I don't think, I don't think you have to say that just cause like I said, the, there's so many different variables that will go into explaining all of that and it's not necessary, so, but it's great to know that you just use your magic.

[00:32:24] Lynn: He's your, he's your magic to figure it out. Yes, yes, yes,

[00:32:28] Ryan: yes, yes. It's also another example of one of those dependent things where when you have a w2, your taxes are very simple and you don't have to understand a whole lot. And then when you go to gig economy or something like that, you're gonna get a little bit of an education on healthcare, which is gonna be good for you, and you're gonna get a little bit of an education on taxes, which is also healthy and good for you, so that you are resilient to whatever it is you want to do in.

[00:32:48] Naseema: and that that's important. Ryan, cuz I was gonna ask you, in just newly becoming in the semi kind of retired space, what are some things that you had to think about that you didn't know you had to think about before you retired?

[00:33:05] Lynn: Ooh, I love this question. What is he going to say? So

[00:33:09] Ryan: the one we just talked about, taxe.

my wife has stood up her own business and is doing really well, which is, which is wonderful, and I'm a def facto accountant now for her, in some ways, . So learning all about how business taxes work and what things are deductions and, and how all that math figures out and state, state taxes and things was a big education for me that I wasn't expecting to get.

This year, but was really healthy for me and really developed me a lot. A big thing with making the transition that I wasn't expecting is when you are working and you're focused on that. That five moment, everything's kind of focused and there's all these things that start to get pent up and I'm gonna do all this stuff and I'm gonna go live my best life and it's gonna be this huge like change and all this shift, and everybody else that's in your workplace also wants to go live that kind of life.

And so they're expecting you to basically leave your. Your job and then like the next day, go climb Mount Everest or something like that. Right? or go become like Bill Gates or do do some amazing thing they were never able to do because work's just taken up all their energy and all their time, and so all these things put pressure on you to go do everything and have all this energy.

And in reality, a lot of times it's, it's the opposite that create the effect you want. So doing almost nothing in some ways gives you a better mindset that you have all the time that you need because you are not racing to go do everything, and you're not trying to do 16 hours of stuff in one day. So giving yourself space time, I've really enjoyed, just like walking, listening to audiobooks.

I'm out here in Colorado, so the mountains are right there, and that's one of the best things that I've done. And I thought I was gonna go hike all these fourteeners and, and have a blast. And honestly, just walking around my neighborhood is just as much fun for me right now. So just taking it easy and slow and savoring the time that you have made for yourself is one of the best things you should do when you get started, so you can reset and then approach life from a healthier position than you were coming from.

[00:35:03] Naseema: But then on the other side, your wife has now started this like really successful business. Which like was that part of the plan or was it more like, I'm gonna do this thing and just kind of like see how it works out with No, expectations.

[00:35:19] Ryan: So part of the long-term plan for both of us is to move towards something called Eki guy, which is a really interesting thing that people can look up.

And she's basically dialing that in right now. She was working full-time and now she works part-time on project work for things that she loves. And she was able to take her job where 80% of it she didn't like and 20% of it she loved. And now she comes in as a consultant and just does the 20% that she loves.

big brands and big companies and does all this work and she's amazing. And so she's kind of dialing her life where she wants it to be. She's, we're going on lots of trips. She's got lots of travel and time that she can escape. She's about to take like three or four months off straight and just put everything on pause, so it's wonderful for her.

And. , I'm giving myself space to explore and figure out what things interest me so that I can find like what Lynn's husband was talking about, where I find that sweet spot where it's like, wow, I can, I can do this with my day and, and you'll pay me a little bit of money. That sounds wonderful. Right? So right now I'm giving myself space to explore, to move towards where she's already gotten to.

[00:36:22] Naseema: See and say that concept, I want people to look it up for themselves. Yeah. But I just want you to give like like a one sentence like summary of what? Itchy, oh, I can't even say it. Yeah. I, I was like, itchy guy. Like, what is it? , it's,

[00:36:36] Ryan: it's a Japanese concept. Mm-hmm. that I thought comes out of the Okinawa area.

In, in some ways, and that's a blue zone for people that underst in Blue Zones, which is another Google term that you can go look up. But I k I G A I, and if you look up, is actually a really great image of it, which is the easiest way for people to understand it. Mm-hmm. . But it's sort of the, the mixture of what do I love doing?

What am I doing to make the world a better place? What are people willing to Pay me for, and then there's one more, but it kind of incorporates flow, impact on the world. Passion as well as getting some recognition back in the form of monetary or something that the world says, Hey, we really appreciate that you are doing this for us.

That makes it something where I, I believe the actual meaning is like the reason for getting up in the morning and. , it's, it's the thing that drives you forward. So once you find the icky guy, you can do that to your 90 or a hundred. And it's just like, I want more, I want more. Like I don't want this to stop.

This is who I am. It's something that I think is a really good in the fire community, everybody's focused on getting financially independent, and that's kind of, An end zone that just stops when you become financially independent. I think of EK guy as maybe underlying what people are trying to move their life towards, and it's something that doesn't have an end.

So I really like that as as what I'm moving towards.

[00:37:51] Naseema: That's how I look at nursing, because there's a, like, again, there's 80% of things that you just don't wanna deal with. But the reason why a lot of people get into nursing is to be an advocate because they really care.

Because they're that compassionate person. And that's why I always say I think nursing is a cheat code to fi and that's why, like I, I told you I probably always have a nursing job, but when you can come to work and you don't have to deal with that 80% of Bs and come and do what you love, like me, I deliver babies.

I love that. Right? I don't wanna necess. Give that up. Right. But I don't wanna have to deal with the bureaucratic BS. And I can craft my job. So I can just come and deliver babies and go home. Mm-hmm. . And so and I, so I love that concept and this is my first time hearing about it. I might have heard about it years ago, cuz it's kind of ringing a bell, but like, it's my first time like really, really hearing about it.

But this is. Like what I say, like with nursing. And I, I love that and I love that your wife is doing that.

[00:38:53] Lynn: Oh, I just love the EK guy concept and I present about it. I love it that much. And it's really, it is the reason for waking up and. It, it is everything that Ryan said.

What I find in you when you get to retirement, the part that's eliminated is what you can get paid for. So in, in the world, like in your work life, you would look for the intersection of these four things, and then once you get to fire, you don't have to look for the thing that somebody will pay you for.

And so it opens up this world. These things that you could do, which opens up a conundrum too because then there's a lot of possibility. But if you continue to follow it, often what I found is people will want to pay you cuz you're working in the area that you're good at, that you love, that the world needs, and then eventually somebody might wanna pay you for that and then you can use that money for other good.

So some people will say, oh, you're not retired any longer. What if I can take that money that somebody wants to pay me to do the things that I exactly love and do thoughtful, considerate things for other people. Hire somebody to clean my house top to bottom, which is what I did on Friday. You know, for example,

There are great ways to use that. . And I think that if we close our minds to the possibility of earning income after fire, we really close our minds to the possibility of doing even better in the world, to be

[00:40:20] Naseema: honest. And I think that's what's important and that's where I think a lot of people get confused about the re, re in fire.

And I don't think it's so much about re it's really about you. You set a goal so that work is now optional. But I mean, like, if you don't have to tap into, you know, your, your investments that you, that you save for this time, the more, the better the more you can do in this world. And I think it's our responsibility.

And I think like for building wealth. is because with wealth you can impact so many other people. And so I really feel like, you know, building wealth is like something that we should aim for. Not for the sake of accumulating money, but for what we can do for other people. But I did wanna ask Ryan this final question,

like how much of your fi number that you saved up and thought you were gonna be pulling or drawing down from, your investment accounts, are you actually having to use now that you guys are now still currently generating income. So it's a

[00:41:24] Ryan: little bit, a little bit confusing for that.

for one, we're still trying to figure out what lifestyle we want. Part of creating this space was to go explore. Hmm. So with all the time now, we're doing things that we weren't doing before. A lot of people talk about they, they go fi and their expenses go down. I think ours are basically going up right now because we're, we're cranking up all these things to figure out what it is we want to go do next.

Mm-hmm. . And so there's some uncertainty on that side. My wife's doing better than we thought she was gonna do, and so that's going great. But the other piece that's important in all this, and I've heard this a few times from different people in this community that I think people should think about is when you make the leap and you're dealing with all that life change and things, having one or two years of expenses sitting in a a liquid form, like a checking account is really calming for everybody.

So that's been really great for us is that's just there. And I haven't had to actually exercise my spending muscle in the concept of actually pulling money out of the investments. Which has been great because this isn't a great year to be exercising your spending muscle. So from, from our perspective, everything is going really well right now.

The markets haven't done as well this year as they have done in past years. But at the same time, the other things that we have as part of our, like safety net system, if you will, as part of making the jump, has done better and it all kind of works out in the wash. So I think we're doing okay right now in the.

[00:42:46] Naseema: and I love that. And to be fair, you're just like a few months into it. So, you know, I think there's still a lot of things to figure out, but I just am fascinated by people that are in this position. And so it was more of like just me being nosy and you know, , . You could do it in Naima. Wow. Wow. You can do. I know I can, I, I know I can, but the thing is, is that the way my mind works, it's like I always have to think about like being busy, like I'm a zero or a hundred person.

Like if I'm not doing anything, I mean, if I'm not like, Doing everything. Mm-hmm. , I'm not gonna do anything. And so in, that's in that not doing anything space is kind of scary for me. . Mm-hmm. . And so that's how I have to like, kind of, there's things that I have to re rework, but that's something that therapy fixes and not math.

Right. ,

[00:43:40] Ryan: well, there's, there's a lot of value. Even if you just take one year and just take a pause and see where life takes you. And not focus on making any in income. It's not gonna change the big picture at all for you financially probably. But just one year to take a step back and pause could be very different for you from a mindset

[00:43:58] Naseema: perspective.

You know what? You are a hundred percent correct. And I think that that's a lesson that other people can take away too. Like I. Like, think about like what taking a one year off would be like. And for me it's actually something that , I might just have to do for other reasons that are coming up for me soon.

Like it would be a really good time to just take the one year pause. And so yeah, I think. Not only is that a lesson for me, but something somebody else needed to hear out there. Mm-hmm. . So thank you for saying that, Ryan, but just to sum everything up, I really appreciate you guys coming on because.

it kind of brought this reframe just for me, and this is something that a lot of people, like I said, like let live in this existential space and this is something that's super important in that we need to think about. And it's not that scary and it's not that scary because we. Me, you guys made it not that scary because you gave me actionable items that I can, you know, look into and I'm a nerd.

And so when you give me a tool that I can play around with, I will just like, I love to play around with compound interest calculators. Mm-hmm. , now I'm gonna go in and play around with this health. Care cost calculator, because I wanna see like what life would be like without having to be benefited or, you know, and having to think about healthcare outside of, you know, my employer.

So it's given me some really helpful tools that I'm, and I know the general audience will like really benefit from it because, I just think that it's something that we is not touched upon enough, and if it is touched upon, people aren't given the practical tools to be able to do something about it and to think about it in the future.

And so I think this conversation is really critical to have and it's right on time and I just appreciate you guys for the work that you did in building this calculator, but also in coming and explaining. The practical use of it and why it's important for us to start looking at these things now and often as things change.

Mm-hmm. So thanks for, I appreciate you guys in final, any final words, ?

[00:46:16] Lynn: I'm just glad what you're doing to get the word out about these topics that are sometimes taboo to talk about and they really are the ones that could clarify people's lives, so thank you.

[00:46:30] Naseema: And thank you guys so, so much. So the calculator lives@fihealthcare.com.

Mm-hmm. um, And all these things. So it'll be in the show notes. I'm gonna put the, it, I'm not gonna say any wrong again cuz now it's stuck in my head as itchy guy.

[00:46:50] Lynn: guy. Icky guy. Our friend Diana calls it icky man, but it's icky guy.

[00:46:57] Naseema: Yeah, so I'll put the e i some E i resources in the show notes as well. But again, thank you guys for being on here. This was such a great conversation, super important to have, and I'm just glad that you guys can break it down in a way to make it approachable for most people.

So I definitely appreciate you. Thanks,

[00:47:18] Lynn: Taima.

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