How's that "Hope and Change" working?

[bradford]

Spare that sucks man.

I'm wondering what I'm gonna do next time mine goes up. Maxed out at the most I'm willing to afford now. My flood insurance about doubled this year too. Never had a claim. The policy is administrated by my old insurance company. My new guy told me NOT to switch it over to him because he's had others go up 4-5 times what they were paying! If I didn't have family that counted on me for certain things I'd seriously go John Galt. Check out of society and refuse to play the game. Find an old trawler to live on and not own anything.

[spareparts]

the worse part is, if my wife were on this policy, it would be an additional $759 per month. Luckily she is on her companies policy(its gotten pretty crappy as well). My health insurance is by far the most expensive thing we have. I have a reasonable house payment(far less than the insurance), our vehicles are paid for(newest one is an 02 with 165k miles) We have one credit card with less than a $500 balance and thats it. I just paid out $1400 for dental work as well. Right now I'm considering closing my business if I can get on with a plant maintenance company that services Google and Boeing. I've had to go back to school to get the classes I need to get hired on. The money will be less but they offer family insurance policies that will offset the income difference(I'll still keep Kendall on her same policy). We are witnessing the demise of the middle class and small business.

[THEFERMANATOR]

I feel your pain. We don't pay nowhere near what you are, but it is sad that health insurance is also our biggest out of pocket expense, and has just about put us in the poor house. My wife is a teacher, and it used to be you became a teacher for the benefits, well not no more. She is now paying $60 a month(I know not much, but her pay is very low because she is supposed to get benefits to offset it and bring it up to what other public teachers make), we pay $380 a month for mine through the exchange(Hated doing it, but had to so we could afford groceries), and our son is through the state. Before ocare we could all have PREMIUM insurance through her work that covered EVERYTHING for under $250 a month, now there crappy coverage(that meets ocare guidelines) is $800 a month for a family. We spend more on insurance than anything else in this world if you really think about it. Health, dental, vision, life, burial, auto, gap, homeowners, finance, mortgage, and so on. It is scary to think of what some people really pay out in insurance every month. We don't have that many coverages, and we spend close to half of our income on insurance alone every year. We don't make much, but we barely skim by. You shouldn't have to make a $100K a year to live a decent life, but anymore it looks that way.

I remember as a kid our family didn't make but about $40K a year, and we lived a very nice life, and weren't wanting for much. But today $40K a year is barely living above poverty if you live by the rules.