It’s easy to think that homelessness while not comfortable or enjoyable must at least be simple. That topic has been front and center in my mind as we prepare for our international adventure where we will rent out our house and lack a permanent residence. We’re finding the lack of a permanent residence has several headaches and unknowns. People living on the street would face these same issues and I found myself wondering how they deal with these things. I imagine they have an entire top 10 list of bigger problems though.
If we don’t reside in our house, we can’t receive mail there. We need some way to get mail pieces that we weren’t expecting and didn’t update our mailing address. The strategy we’ve found is to sign up for a virtual mailbox service, which can provide a real street address in the vicinity of our house (or anywhere really). While it’s a real street address, it’s not a residential address. These mailboxes show up as a commercial address which prevents them from being used to establish bank accounts and things like that. In combination with the virtual mailbox, we will have USPS forward our mail to the virtual mailbox. These mailbox services have nice features like opening and scanning mail, and physically sending to you any important items.
Residency
Will Colorado still consider us residents if we lack a permanent address in the US? The conclusion I have come to is an unreassuring “maybe”. In a situation like ours it seems to be about your intent to return to the state. The concept of intent sounds like a silly thing to try to measure. I guess I just want a more definitive standard than what is used in the NBA to determine the severity of a flagrant foul.
The factors that work in our favor in establishing intent to return are:
- Still own our house
- Keeping CO drivers licenses and voter registration
- One year lease to the renters of our house
- Keeping our belongings in a storage unit in CO
Apparently the more things you can rack up like that, the more it helps your case to retain residency.
Health Insurance
Health insurance is the most perplexing issue we’re facing. Since we are leaving our jobs we will no longer have employer provided health insurance. That means buying our own plan, and that cost has to fit within our budget. In other words, whatever that cost is can’t explode our annual expenses so much that our investments fall short of the required 25 fire units (25 times annual expenses). The options for health coverage are vastly different between having a permanent residence and lacking a permanent residence. The core of the issue breaks down to whether Affordable Care Act plans are accessible or not.
Affordable Care Act
If instead of renting our house we keep our house, we can get a health plan through the Colorado ACA marketplace. Those plans are amazing because they are forced to meet many requirements where insurance companies of old would screw over their members (e.g. pre-existing conditions). On top of that they are CHEAP. I’m talking $270/mo for our family of four with tolerance for a high deductible. It’s no coincidence that the FIRE movement kicked off in earnest in the 2010s when the ACA was established. Yes people were pulling off FIRE earlier than that, but you either went without health insurance or paid a lot for a shitty health insurance plan. The ACA is possibly the most important thing that has happened for FIRE.
Worldwide Coverage
If we lack a permanent residence, we can’t get an ACA plan. I so desperately wanted this NOT to be true that I had multiple conversations with Connect for Health Colorado (CO marketplace) about our situation. I also started an email conversation with a broker for ACA plans who ghosted me after I explained our situation. They seem to be confused and they may not even have clear answers since our situation is uncommon to say the least. In the end they kept coming back with “no you can’t have a CO ACA plan if you don’t physically reside in CO”.
There are possible workarounds to get an ACA plan, like establishing a domicile in a nomad friendly state like Texas. We aren’t willing to do that though because we would have to give up CO residency, our CO drivers license, etc. All of that only to come back and reestablish those things.
The dead end with ACA lead to researching the alternatives. What I found is there are many companies that sell health insurance plans to US citizens living abroad (expats). While I don’t like the term expat and don’t consider us to be expats, our insurance needs are very expat-like.
Top Contending Products
- SafetyWing
- It seems people actually use this as a primary health insurance while traveling. Really it is only providing emergency medical coverage, so depending on what you expect it to cover you may find gaps. It is cheap though, especially if you’re young. If I were in my 20’s with no kids I’d probably roll the dice on this plan and save some money. In the small chance we actually keep our house, we would buy this as an international adjunct to our ACA plan.
- Cigna Global
- This seems like a nice product for worldwide health insurance. It’s a recognizable name for what that’s worth. Maybe that’s worth nothing if you recognize it as a name that dicked you over on a claim. What I like about this product is the a la carte approach where you can manipulate the price by tailoring it to your needs. This includes picking your deductible, coinsurance, whether you want US coverage, inpatient coverage, emergency evacuation, etc. This is most likely the plan we will go with including inpatient and emergency evacuation so we don’t have a need for SafetyWing in addition. The cost is a kick to the balls though, $725/mo for our family of four. If you multiply that monthly cost by 300 to get the investments need to cover that cost, it’s a substantial $217,500.
- Geo Blue
- From another recognizable name, blue cross blue shield. This is competitive with Cigna Global when compared feature for feature. However this is more of a comprehensive-only offering to Cigna’s a la carte. This is just more than we can fit in our budget at 1K+ per month.
- Others
- There are MANY other products out there. I did surface level research on a few and it was a lot of sameness between these providers. I didn’t feel the need to go any deeper on alternatives.
Driver’s License
I mentioned in the residency section that we are keeping our CO driver’s license. To make sure we aren’t violating some provision of CO motor vehicle law we called the DMV to run our situation by them. They said the only thing we need to do is make sure our driver’s licenses aren’t set to expire while we’re gone. Besides that nothing else is required.
Bank Accounts
Do banks care if you lack a permanent residence? Yes they do, but some (Chase) care more than others (Schwab). It also matters more when first opening a bank account. The patriot act requires you to have a physical address for identity verification and anti-terrorism purposes. After you get the account open though, it’s a little more confusing on how important our physical location is.
I called Chase who we have checking with, and they said we MUST have a physical residence. That means not a P.O. box and not a virtual mailbox. They suggested using a friends address which seems dumb as hell. I don’t understand why that would be ok and leaving MY RENTAL HOUSE address would not be ok.
Schwab where we have brokerage accounts (and now checking) had a much more reasonable response. They said we could simply update our mailing address to our virtual mailbox service, and leave the physical address as-is given our plan to return. Schwab also has checking that has no foreign transaction fees and unlimited ATM fee rebates worldwide.
A Work In Progress
We’re working through these issues and still learning more, but we don’t consider any of these to be major road-blocks. These issues related to the lack of a permanent residence shouldn’t be taken lightly though. Health insurance is a significant cost when giving up a US address and therefore removing the ACA option. The cost for a global health plan will be our #2 or #3 highest budget item (food eclipses it in some locations). Things like bank accounts are an important factor. I want to run zero risk of an account being frozen while traveling internationally due to a procedural address issue.