From your post:

> As luck would have it, global healthcare plans seem reasonably priced. My partner and I got covered under Aetna's MHP Exclusive plan (their most comprehensive package) for under $300 a month total (not $300 per person).

As an Australian, this figure seems ridiculous, even if it were in $AUD! To give you an idea, I pay around $45 AUD/mo (but I've never had to use it because free healthcare).

That sounds nice, but does your insurance cover treatment in the US? Singapore?

I pay about 600 EUR a month and that only covers up to 3 months abroad (but abroad can be anywhere) — for longer trips I still do at least a “major medical” policy and I have MedEvac insurance, so my effective price for an ad-hoc global insurance is probably more like 700-800 per month.

Which on the one hand is horrendous, but on the other hand very competitive with serious global policies that cover everything everywhere for someone my age.

I'm curious what your tax rate is. Most countries with way lower health care premiums have it offset with higher "middle class" taxes than we have in the US. This is the big issue with changing the system here, people are convinced that their taxes will go up without their premiums actually going down. This is a reasonable concern because it kind of is what happens / happened with middle of the road (arguably worst of both worlds) solutions like the ACA.

Presumably, the tax amount is 0 if you're taking a year off from work and not earning any income, regardless of what the rate is.

Middle class tax rate is about 30%.

In my experience [1], these global insurances can either have limited coverage amounts, limited coverage duration, or will recalculate your premium every year as if you just joined. Regular health insurance would put you in a bucket and use the bucket's general risk to price everyone's insurance, leading to steadier premiums. They often offer little to no coverage in the US and Canada.

These are great for getting temporary coverage while you wait for a residence permit, but there are few use cases for them outside of that. In Germany, I actively try to steer people away from them.

[1] I wrote this: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/german-health-insurance

Good on you! I took six months off after my last job - might have taken more, but living is expensive and I felt like if I had declined the offer I got as COVID started I might not have other chances soon after.

If you feel so inclined a nice project would be a RSS feed for your blog :)

I threw one together: https://kayce.basqu.es/feed.xml

Please make a follow up post. I’d love to learn from your experience.

I'm doing weekly updates [1] and I've set goals to do a few retrospectives (e.g. 1-year after, 2 years, etc.)

[1] https://kayce.basqu.es/sabbatical/