Wanting to retire at 54?

[Haasds]

My husband and I live in Texas. We are 53 and 54 and hope to retire in a year or two. I am scared that we don't know enough about certain expenses such as Health care insurance.
Does anyone know what the average individual pays per month for decent health care insurance at our ages?
I also wonder how much more it will cost as we grow older?
We have retirement acounts and investment assets and our house will almost be paid off, but what I read about health care scares me.
Thoughts?

 

[REWahoo]

Does anyone know what the average individual pays per month for decent health care insurance at our ages?
I also wonder how much more it will cost as we grow older?

Welcome to the forum. Your concern about health insurance is shared by many of us here since the cost and availability can vary dramatically.

I'd recommend you take a look at the information http://www.early-retirement.org/forums/f47/buying-private-health-insurance-30756.html in our FAQ section as a starting point. Lots of good information here.

As to what you might have to pay for coverage, that varies widely depending on many factors. Living in TX, one thing you might do to get a "worst case" idea of costs is look at the premiums charged by the Texas Health Insurance Risk Pool. If you can't get individual coverage (or the coverage has too many exclusions due to pre-existing conditions), the pool is available to TX residents - but it's not cheap. You may note that those premiums are set at twice the 'standard' rates charged by insurers. So if you are in good health, you should be able to get coverage for half the amounts shown. And the rates for the pool have been going up 10-15% per year.

Hope this helps.

 

[jclarksnakes]

Welcome to the forum. Health care cost worries are keeping lots of people our age working. If you were 65 you could sign up for medicare and probably not have to pay too unreasonably high premiums on a medicare supplement. The problem for now is what to do between ER and age 65. We need to also consider that medicare will run into funding problems in another decade or two. Check the links that REWahoo posted to get a start on looking into things and then try searching the health forum here on ERForum to get some ideas about what other people are paying. Many couples keep one spouse working parttime solely for health insurance benifits. If you get all the health care expenses worries behind you then consider that during our lifetimes a lot of people retired and had serious problems with overall inflation. We have been lucky to have not had big inflation over the last few decades. A couple decades of inflation rates like what we had during the mid 70s could really mess up ER for some of us. I seem to be a nattering nabob of negativity this evening.
Cheers
Jeff