re: Anyone retire early early?

People have different reasons for retiring early. I had a significant health scare when I was 47 and retired a month before turning 48. One of my parents had a long history of very early onset Alzheimer's on their side of the family, displaying significant mental decline and then dying in their late 40's to mid-to-late 50's. I earned two degrees and worked mostly in finance and large scale commercial lending while making a very good income and my wife made a good income working in healthcare. You could not pay her enough to return to healthcare. I had always been interested in investing and most years after we really got started we were investing over 50% of our incomes which is not that hard if you don't have kids and aren't big spenders.

I have had 3 cousins die from ALZ in their early to late 50's, fortunately none of my siblings yet. One of them was a doctor that retired at 58 and died from a heart attack 2 days after selling his ownership in a medical practice. His wife had his brain examined and it was riddled with ALZ. So yeah, I don't worry about getting bored, etc and have many things/activities keeping me busy.

The ACA is not that difficult to navigate as long as you have planned and have stacked enough financial assets properly over time. Need to have a good mix of taxable, Roth, TIRA/401k, HSA and other while targeting your current taxable income to be low enough to obtain max subsidies. I would not hold a lot of high dividend paying stocks nor high interest fixed income in taxable if you are planning on utilizing ACA. We paid less than $5/month for a good gold plan in 2023, and MLPs have been advantageous in that regard...unless they get acquired which is another can of worms.