I have everything pretty much ready to launch full time. Time, skills, customers, support from family. But I’d leave my current job behind and with it my family’s health insurance for the foreseeable future. I can’t afford any of the options I’ve seen. It’s the one thing holding me back. Any ideas for affordable health insurance for startups? If you’ve been in the same situation, what did you end up doing?
If you can’t afford health insurance then you don’t have everything ready to go. Myself, I’m holding my job to keep my health insurance until my business can support my family and our needs. It’s a bastard and a half but worst case, I’ve still got my job.
But if all you need is money, do you have a way to get some to pay for health insurance in the interim? Do a tiny “family and friends” seed round for six months runway, or however long you think you’d need?
Yeah, that’s also what I’m thinking. It’s just so sad that the US healthcare system is the thing that’s holding back business. Seems counterintuitive. I was just hoping someone knew of a good workaround.
I guess one option is to save more and risk losing the business opportunity.
It’s holding back your business. The wealthy do not have this problem.
This is working as designed.
barrier to entry
Could you do your startup in a different country?
The only good option I could think of to do this is to utilize the DAFT between the Netherlands and the US. Pretty much every European country has a self-employment visa/permit with lax requirements though – usually they only require you have like 10-20K€ stored in a government bank account that you aren’t allowed to withdraw from.
An issue with this is that, on such visas, you have to have your own private insurance and can’t rely on the government’s welfare/social safety whatsoever, or else your visa won’t get renewed. Of course the healthcare will still be affordable unlike in the US, but it’s something to keep in mind.
An added bonus to doing it in the Netherlands is you won’t run into many people who can’t speak English well. Obviously if you’re moving somewhere else, you should use the primary languages spoken there and not just talk to everyone in English, but it can’t hurt to be able to use English when your Dutch skills are lacking, especially if your customers are primarily English-speaking or if you want to hire the people who live there.