Hi, I'm Platy

[platypus19]

Hi guys, I'm just checking in to introduce myself. I've been happily non-employed for a bit over a year now.

I had a good 30 year career in software, including 14 years doing the startup and entrepreneur thing. What a wild ride.

The diligent savings and investment approach to retirement didn't work for me. Every few years something came up to wipe me out. But looking back it was the inclination to thrift and the ability to be frugal that let me start up that company and hold on through the lean years until it prospered.

I sold out a few years ago. I tried to keep working for the new owners but I never could get with their program.

About that same time the kids left home, my wife passed away, and I had one of those wake-up calls in the form of a heart attack. I just sort of sucked my thumb for a while. Then I started to see an opportunity to rebuild an entirely new life to suit myself. So I've been doing exactly that for the past year.

 

[sgeeeee]

Hi Platy,

Wow. . . What a story. I'm looking forward to hearing more about your financial rollercoaster history. It sounds like you'll have a lot to teach us. Hope we can help too.

And congratualtions on your retirement.

 

[platypus19]

Thanks fer the welcome, SG. Getting out of the rat race has been a real pleasure. Working had its satisfactions, but y'know you reach a point where you've accomplished all you want and you would be just mechanically going through the motions to keep on.

I'm targeting an annual retirement budget of $24K. Some of the lifestyle adjustments I have made are large, such as not owning a car. Others are medium, such as persuading the doctor to switch my prescriptions to older, unfashionable off-patent drugs. And of course there seem to be hundreds of small adjustments such as lowering the temperature of the water heater, cooking more or less from scratch, and spending the time to search out the phone plan that best matches my actual usage. (I guess that's the dryer sheet aspect of non-employment?)

The real reward of course is that the hours of my life belong to me again. I've been able to do things just because they are fun. Perhaps best of all I seem to have actual friends again, not just buddies from work.

 

[dex]

Platy,
Congrats. It looks as if you are succeeding in life.

 

[platypus19]

Thanks, dex!

I just spent the afternoon pondering what to do about health insurance when my Cobra runs out. I guess that question hasn't ever come up here before, huh. What would suit my individual situation would be a PPO with a 100% copay. To clarify, that means you pay all the charges out of pocket, but the fees get billed at the PPO's highly discounted rate (around 60%) instead of the inflated Fee-for-Service list price. I think this is called "buying the discount" and it is rumored to exist but I certainly haven't been able to find such an animal.

 

[Lancelot]

Hang in there Platy. I wish you the best of luck.

Lance

 

[sgeeeee]

Thanks, dex!

I just spent the afternoon pondering what to do about health insurance when my Cobra runs out.  I guess that question hasn't ever come up here before, huh.  What would suit my individual situation would be a PPO with a 100% copay.  To clarify, that means you pay all the charges out of pocket, but the fees get billed at the PPO's highly discounted rate (around 60%) instead of the inflated Fee-for-Service list price.  I think this is called "buying the discount" and it is rumored to exist but I certainly haven't been able to find such an animal.

Hi Platy,

I've not heard of the PPO with 100% copay, but I agree that this would be my idea of ideal insurance too. When I researched this problem about a year ago, I did find policies that were 100% copay till you hit a threshold, then were 100% covered. If I remember correctly you could set the threshold to $10,000 per person per year. Golden Rule offered one of these policies. I think they called it Plan100.

I ended up with another high deductible policy because Golden Rule managed to screw up the paperwork and miss my deadline to have insurance.

Good luck.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Might be in the ballpark of what you're looking for, if theres a doctor near you

http://www.simplecare.com/index.htm

 

[wabmester]

Ugh, I looked at their WA directory. Nice idea, but it looks like most of the participating docs are the type you couldn't pay me to see (acupuncture, chiropractic, etc).

BTW, Platy, 30 years in software is pretty impressive. You started back when there were only a handful in the craft. Now all of India is in on it :-/

 

[platypus19]

Thanks, Lancelot, SG & TH!

As far as I can tell, the U.S. healthcare system is broken. Last week I asked my cardiologist how much certain specific treatments might cost a patient. He had NO IDEA. He knew what his part of the charges would be, but that was a small fraction of the total.

That same week I asked my financial planner about going bare and taking the Full Fee for Service approach. He recoiled in shock and told of a case where one of his clients passed away, and then the undiscounted medical bills started to come in (750K). He said he called around to get an idea of what the typical insurance company discount would be, made a settlement offer for the discounted amount, and had it accepted the same day. That's what led to my search for a 100% copay health plan. It doesn't solve the pure insurance problem of limiting one's exposure to a predictable maximum amount, but you can easily see how it would be a big part of a solution for some people.

Wabmester, no kidding, the software biz has changed a lot. There are now maybe ten million cooks working on that particular broth now, and man is it a mess. Oh yeah, the attorneys are getting involved now, too, and that always helps things. For a dinosaur like me it looked like a good time to make a getaway.

 

[Cut-Throat]

Hi Platy,

I also had 30 years of software. The first computers that I worked on had core storage of 12K and 16K. Actually wrote a few simple programs in 1's and 0's

 

[platypus19]

Hi Cut-Throat

Sounds like we both have our computing roots in the same era. I did 1's and 0's style programming as recently as two years ago when I wrote some software to let a little single chip controller boot up a bigger microprocessor by instruction jamming. So machine language isn't completely dead yet!

A lot of the old style techniques are still used in digital signal processing and programmable gate arrays. As software technology passed me by I found myself specializing more and more in those areas.

 

[Cut-Throat]

Platy,

I got into the manufacturing application software area about 5 years into my career and did everything from R&D, Customer Service, and Management

So, that is my fallback. If I had to, I could get a job, but I think, after being out for 3 years, it would literally kill me!

I never kissed Corporate Butt, so I did not succeed as well as some of my co-workers. But I can still look myself in the mirror!