Calculators / Health insurance bridge
The health insurance bridge, priced
Medicare starts at 65. Retire at 52 and you are buying your own cover for thirteen years. This is the question that stalls more early-retirement plans than market returns do, and most retirement calculators ignore it completely.
Your estimate after any subsidy. Get a real quote for your state, age and income — see below.
Deductible, copays, prescriptions. A bronze plan trades premium for this.
Above general inflation. Health costs have historically outrun CPI; 0% assumes they stop.
The thing that surprises people: your premium depends on income you control
Marketplace subsidies are calculated from your modified adjusted gross income, not your net worth. An early retiree with $1.8M invested can have a very low reported income, because selling shares only creates income to the extent of the gain, and Roth withdrawals of contributions are not income at all.
Which means the same person, in the same year, can face wildly different premiums depending on how they fund their spending. Drawing from a taxable brokerage with a high cost basis looks different to converting traditional 401(k) money to Roth, and the second one raises the premium while it lowers the future tax bill.
This is the genuine tension in early retirement planning: Roth conversion ladders and ACA subsidies pull in opposite directions in the same years. Optimising one alone usually costs you more on the other.
Bronze or silver
A bronze plan lowers the premium and raises the deductible. For a healthy household with cash to absorb a bad year, that often wins. Silver plans can carry cost-sharing reductions at lower incomes that bronze plans do not, which sometimes reverses the answer entirely. Run the total, not the premium, which is why the calculator above takes both.
What happens if you get this wrong
Underestimating the bridge is the quiet way an early retirement fails. Thirteen years at $1,400 a month all-in is roughly $218,000 before any real cost growth — the difference between retiring at 52 and retiring at 55 for many households. It belongs in the FIRE number from the start rather than as a surprise in year two.
NestEgg carries the bridge in the projection
Rather than bolting it on afterwards, the app runs pre-65 health cover as its own line in the year-by-year projection, alongside which account you are drawing from and what that does to your reported income.