Most retirement writing fixates on one number: the size of the nest egg. For retiring early, that’s rarely the number that breaks the plan. The thing that does is the stretch of years between the day you stop working and the day your safety nets switch on — when Social Security and Medicare haven’t started yet, and your portfolio carries the entire load alone. Call it the bridge. It’s the part of an early retirement that quietly fails, and it’s where the real cost lives.
The bridge has a definite length: from your retirement age to when Social Security and Medicare begin (Medicare at 65; Social Security whenever you claim it, 62 at the earliest). Retire at 55 and wait until 67 for full Social Security, and that’s a twelve-year bridge funded by savings alone. Our can-I-afford-to-retire calculator computes the portfolio side of it directly — this page explains the two costs that make the bridge the hard part, and why one of them is a decision rather than a fixed fact.
Cost one: the portfolio carries everything
During the bridge, every dollar you spend that isn’t covered by a pension or part-time work comes out of the portfolio. There’s no Social Security check softening the draw, so the gap between your spending and your portfolio income is pulled straight from the balance, year after year, until a benefit finally starts.
That’s why the bridge — not the long-run average — is the binding constraint. A plan that looks comfortable once Social Security arrives can still fail in the years before it, because those years front-load the withdrawals onto an untouched portfolio. And it’s exactly when sequence-of-returns risk bites hardest: a bad run in the markets in the first few years of retirement, while you’re drawing the balance down to fund the bridge, does far more lasting damage than the same downturn later. You’re selling assets to live on at depressed prices, and the portfolio may never fully recover. The calculator shows your bridge drawdown year by year — how much the balance falls before Social Security starts, and what’s left when it does — on a deliberately conservative, growth-free basis.
Cost two: healthcare before Medicare
The second bridge cost is the one people most often leave out of the math: health insurance before Medicare eligibility at 65. On the Affordable Care Act marketplace, insurers are allowed to charge older adults up to three times what they charge a 21-year-old for the same plan, so premiums climb steeply in exactly the 55-to-64 window when many early retirees need coverage.
The figures are large, and they vary widely by state, age, and plan — so treat these as ranges, not quotes. Without subsidies, a 55-year-old on a benchmark Silver plan runs roughly $977 a month in 2026 (MoneyGeek), and a 62-year-old often lands somewhere around $1,000 to $1,800 or more a month at full price. That’s on the order of $12,000 to $20,000-plus a year in premiums alone, before a single deductible is met — and it all has to sit inside the “annual spending” figure you hand the calculator, or the plan understates the bridge.
What changed recently makes this sharper. As of June 2026, the enhanced ACA premium subsidies that had been in place expired at the end of 2025. This is an active policy question, not a settled permanent state — it could be extended or altered — but as things stand, roughly 24 million marketplace enrollees are affected, and the group hit hardest is middle-income adults aged 50 to 64: disproportionately, early retirees. KFF’s analysis illustrates the scale: a 60-year-old with income just above the old subsidy line could pay around $9,600 more a year, and a 64-year-old’s costs could more than triple — one example moves from about $5,328 to roughly $16,500 a year. Because this is contingent on policy that may change, this page carries a review date, and the numbers should be re-checked against your own state’s current marketplace.
The most actionable piece is the subsidy cliff. Subsidy eligibility generally ends at 400% of the federal poverty level — about $62,600 for a single person in 2026 — and the drop-off is abrupt. KFF’s Marketplace Calculator shows how brutal it gets: a single 60-year-old in one example location at $60,000 of income could pay $0 a month for a Bronze plan (a subsidy worth roughly $827/month), while at $63,000 — just over the line — the same plan costs about $827 a month. A $3,000 difference in income swings healthcare cost by something like $10,000 a year. The exact figures depend heavily on location, but the mechanism is general and it matters enormously here: because subsidies are income-tested, how much you withdraw from your portfolio during the bridge directly controls your healthcare cost. Your withdrawal rate isn’t just a portfolio question anymore — it’s a healthcare-pricing question too.
The tension: when you claim sets how long the bridge lasts
Here is where the two costs collide, and it’s the part no single number resolves. Social Security rewards waiting. For anyone born in 1960 or later, full retirement age is 67. Claim at the earliest age of 62 and the benefit is permanently reduced — about 30% lower for the rest of your life. Wait past full retirement age and it grows by roughly 8% for each year delayed, up to a maximum of about 24% more at age 70 (the credits stop accruing after 70). Over a long retirement the gap is enormous: claiming at 62 versus 70 can differ by something like $1,118 a month on an average benefit — more than $268,000 across a 20-year retirement.
So delaying looks like the best “return” available in retirement: a guaranteed, inflation-adjusted increase of around 8% a year that no portfolio can promise. But delaying lengthens the bridge — and the bridge is precisely where both of the costs above land. Retire at 55 and delay Social Security to 70, and you’ve signed up for a fifteen-year bridge that maximizes portfolio drawdown and stretches your most expensive, pre-Medicare healthcare years to their longest. Claiming early does the opposite: it shortens the bridge, eases the drawdown, and — because a smaller, earlier benefit means lower income — can even help keep you under the subsidy cliff while you still need marketplace coverage. The price is a permanently smaller check for the rest of your life.
That’s the genuine tension, and it’s a three-way interaction: your claiming age, your withdrawal rate, and your subsidy eligibility all move together, each one pulling on the others. There’s no clean formula that optimizes all three at once for everyone — it depends on your portfolio, your health, your spending, your state’s premiums, and how long you expect to live. The calculator deliberately doesn’t pretend to solve that optimization. It shows you the portfolio drawdown for a given bridge length; the claiming-and-subsidy judgment is yours to reason through on top of it.
What the bridge means for your plan
The practical takeaway is that the bridge is a decision, not just a gap. Its length is something you set when you choose a claiming age, and that choice ripples through your drawdown and your healthcare cost at the same time. Working the numbers honestly means doing it in two layers: let the calculator show the portfolio drawdown across the bridge — moving the Social-Security-start-age slider lengthens or shortens it in front of you — and then layer in the two things it deliberately leaves to you. Put your realistic pre-Medicare healthcare cost inside the annual-spending figure, and weigh the claiming tradeoff yourself: a larger lifetime benefit against a longer, costlier bridge.
None of this is a forecast, and none of it is advice. It’s transparent arithmetic plus judgment — the levers are visible, but which way to pull them is yours, and depends on facts no calculator holds. What this framing buys you is honesty about where early retirement actually succeeds or fails: not in the headline size of the nest egg, but in the years before your safety nets begin.
This page covers a fast-moving area. The ACA subsidy situation described is as of June 2026 and reflects an active policy question that may change; premium and subsidy figures vary by state, age, and income and should be checked against your current marketplace. Healthcare and Social Security figures are sourced from KFF, MoneyGeek, and the Social Security Administration. Not financial advice. Reviewed June 2026.