Comment by CGMthrowaway

> the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.

Maybe not, if you take into account the >$500/month subsidy of your Medicare Part A benefits (assuming you had the minimum number of calendar quarters paid in). And your Part B payment (the one usually deducted from your Soc Sec payment) is also partly subsidized unless your income is high enough to trigger IRMAA adjustment.

> defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit

People repeat this but when I ran the math on earlier Social Security payments it seems like the accrued $, by the time you're eligible for the higher benefit, is plenty similar as bonus income.

But is Medicare as good as the insurance you had before?

I know this is a joke. But when I was at Vanguard, something like 95-99% of our users literally just logged on, checked their balance and logged off. A decent percentage of the user base does that every day. So only a few percentage a day actually made a trade or anything else. I always found it pretty odd before I realized I only make a trade 1 or 2% of the time.

"Should I use a 3.5% or a 4% safe withdrawal rate? My house is paid off and I got a company pension, two dogs and a partner. Cars are paid off but our iPhones are on a payment plan till 2028. Net worth around $2.5 billion but highly concentrated in one company"

exactly right - how funny is that to think about? His mental bandwidth to run Apple being overwritten by FIRE needs.

I can't stop laughing about this hypothetical.