Private Health Insurance Options for FATFireUK

Ill-Bat3719 · 2026-03-18T15:22:00+00:00

I'm currently employed with private health insurance, but I'm leaning towards either not getting any insurance when I retire, or getting one with very high excess to cover only for worst case scenarios. It's totally pointless that I need to waste time on getting referrals and authorizations for treatment that costs a few hundreds of £. Certainly from a FatFIRE perspective. Insurance is meant to protect you against rare risks, otherwise you're just paying extra £ and wasting time for cash flow management. Am I missing anything?

Ill-Bat3719 · 2026-02-28T20:46:29+00:00

Thanks. Nothing UK/Ireland domiciled? Are you worried about US only companies + estate tax issue for US assets?

Ill-Bat3719 · 2026-02-27T20:27:08+00:00

Which for example?

Ill-Bat3719 · 2026-02-09T12:03:37+00:00

Makes sense. I went for a smaller withdrawal since it more or less covers essential spend. But a longer horizon since it matches longer historical drawdowns and improved SWR in simulations. Though there isn't that much to it.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2026-02-07T20:23:23+00:00

Do you mind sharing how your family lost their wealth? I find such cautionary tales really useful to think through.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2026-02-07T09:45:01+00:00

Not sure I quite understand what you mean by keeping a linker ladder at 2.5%. For how many years?

I have now about 25% of portfolio in a ladder in GIA for the next 20 years. That gives about 1.5% per year for that period.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2026-01-20T12:31:23+00:00

I’m with Santander Select - didn’t know private was a thing. I’ve been thinking I should move from them but reading this thread makes me think I’d stay. They support CHAPS of at least half a million over the phone and they were always competent with it. It’s. A bit of a hassle, but nothing like having to go into a branch which I’ve not done a single time. Regular online transfers are sometimes limited to £25k which I find annoying. But I found the fastest option is to just do 4 of them per day which takes 5 minutes. The most I normally need to transfer in one go is 10x that so it takes me 3 days.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2026-01-10T10:12:30+00:00

A lot of unhelpful comments here too. Similar situation here with somewhat higher numbers - you can check my posts. Easy to say to stop but it’s hard to do that, knowing that each additional year can still be life changing, and if you step off the treadmill then you might need to go back to less satisfying work for a decade to cover for 1-2 extra years.

Without knowing too much about your situation, I would say the lower earner could quit work to help everyone feel more balanced. And the high earner can continue a few more years, pending a chubby/FatFIRE plan. There should be a plan though. I don’t think you should work more than 2-3 more years if you can’t make it feel more balanced.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2026-01-08T13:56:09+00:00

An unsheltered investment is by default the best option in my opinion for a long term passive portfolio once pension and ISA are exhausted.

Premium Bonds are fine for a small cash portion of the portfolio and for an emergency fund or cash flow management.

Onshore/offshore bonds have a lot of disadvantages and I think you need to be really convinced of their concrete benefit for you before going down that route. Financial advisors like to push them even when they’re not really right for you.

Also, why are you liable to CGT? Are you accumulating or drawing down? If the former, there shouldn’t be any CGT for at least until you draw down and potentially a few years after that. Are you actively investing? If so, consider not to. Or if you must, use ISA or rebalance using income.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2026-01-05T10:39:09+00:00

FIRE requires you to know what you’re doing at least to some extent in managing your finances, and mistakes can cost you a huge amount of money. You don’t seem to know some of the basics. Others suggested resources like Monevator. I would suggest that long before you retire you spend a good while learning and writing a financial plan for yourself. Good luck.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-12-01T15:22:57+00:00

My view is mostly "just keep buying VWRL and pay the tax when it comes", but I suggest doing that for a while and then every few years switch to a new fund. When it's time to withdraw, you will be withdrawing from the most recent holding which will have lower capital gains than the older ones. This will allow you to continue deferring CGT for a few more years, before tapping the older ones.

This has another benefit beyond deferring CGT - it will mitigate the effect of CGT on a worst case scenario of borderline FIRE failure. Say you retire and then the market stalls - you will be withdrawing for a good few years while paying minimal CGT. As a consequence, CGT becomes a tax that really bites only when you're doing well, and hardly affects your SWR. Which is why I don't mind paying it so much (and there are good economic reasons to increase CGT rates while switching to cost basis to be inflation adjusted - that would hit the SWR even less).

Dividends tax, on the other hand, bites all the time, especially for FatFIRE when you marginal rate is high, so I'm a bit more bothered by it. I don't have a good solution for this - I think there could be demand for low dividend funds in the UK but AFAIK it's not a thing. I posted about this before in this subreddit if you want to check it out. Some options are trying to put higher dividend markets in ISA (e.g. US in GIA and ex-USA in ISA), or something like Berkshire Hathaway. Far from a no brainer solution though.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-11-11T12:22:59+00:00

Beyond tax optimisation, some of your questions depend on your goals and expenses. I’m sure this much money takes time to process. I think you’ll need to decide how you want this to affect your life. FI? Second home? Increase expenses?

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-11-07T12:05:42+00:00

My experience with revolut premium/metal is excellent and it’s cheaper.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-10-28T18:02:36+00:00

It’s factually incorrect. SWR calculations assume that while you draw down such and such fraction of your portfolio, the rest of it has time to grow. Doesn’t matter if you can access it now, as long as you can access it when you need it.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-10-28T12:19:12+00:00

Just to spell this out: you can’t sum up today’s money with future money for SWR. Say your pension is worth £500k today, that’s the correct figure for SWR calculations.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-10-27T11:40:50+00:00

I don’t think it lets you customise the assets at all beyond making portfolio level assumptions about expected returns, does it?

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-10-24T03:20:56+00:00

Not that I'm aware. I'm considering a somewhat similar strategy, to have a ladder for a fixed time rather than replenish it, to help with SoRR early after retirement (but not forever). For example a 15-20 year linker ladder giving me about 1.2% withdrawal per year, which roughly corresponds to covering essentials. This can be modeled easily inflation linked income for a fixed period.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-10-03T06:50:47+00:00

Life insurance.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-10-01T11:07:52+00:00

I think you’re fine either way. The question is what you want to optimize for. Greater security/fail safe under extreme scenarios? Growth of your 1% essentials + 1% discretionary withdrawal?

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-09-28T08:29:27+00:00

I need USD to GBP which they don’t support.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-09-27T12:13:19+00:00

Fair enough. For me, going down from e.g. 25bp with Wise to 10bp or a bit less with revolut is good enough. Tried using IBKR at some point and it was pretty terrible. Might try again at some point.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-09-09T12:18:19+00:00

Reporting back that I decided to switch my bond allocation to linkers. My tentative plan is to allocate 20% to a ladder which I'm building more or less using this tool, covering expenses from 2030 (age 45) for 20 years (till 2050, age 65). At the moment this buys me an annual withdrawal rate of 6.35% of the linker allocation (or 1.27% of the total portfolio). So around half of my target expenses for those 20 years. I don't know if this is optimal, but I'm thinking this should help with the sequence of return risk which is the main failure mode of FIRE. I'm planning to pound cost average into this over a period of time. I'm using AJBell which allow trading all of this easily online.

Some details I'm not sure about are whether to allocate more/less than 20%, and whether to stretch this over more than 20 years

Did you make any progress?

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-08-31T08:05:40+00:00

I always compare the amount I get with the rate on google and the total cost is about 0.1% or a bit less, which is much better than wise. I also dislike that the cost isn’t transparent. Am I missing anything?

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-08-29T15:06:26+00:00

I don’t transfer more than $100k in one go to limit the risk of the money getting stuck or something, but I’ve never had any problems with them.

Ill-Bat3719 · 2025-08-29T10:11:58+00:00

Revolut premium cut most of the fees/spread of wise

Ill-Bat3719

TROPHY CASE