I read on Reddit that each year of dialysis shortens your lifespan by five years. I am fairly sure someone just made that up, but I tried googling anyway. There was nothing that substantiated that claim, but I did find this paper from 2010.
The expected mean survival of a 55-year-old American is 26 years.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3116337/#:~:text=The%20mean%20survival%20for%20all,is%20somewhat%20over%2065%20years.
According to the United States Renal Data System (USRDS) 2009
report, the expected survival for a 55-year-old person with a kidney
transplant is 15 years, but the expected survival of a 55-year-old
person on dialysis is only 5 years.
I am 53 years old. Not counting the three and a half years I was on dialysis, if we add 15 years, then I can expect to live to sixty-eight. If I were still on dialysis and waiting for a deceased donor kidney, chances are I would be dead before receiving a transplant. Sobering.
The most important question for me now is when I should retire. Since the study was more about frequent versus conventional dialysis, there is not much more detail on post-transplant life expectancy. If we use seventy-five as a stretch goal, I have 22 more years to live. A while back, I estimated that I can live comfortably on $50k-$60k per year. I do not have any debt: house, car, and student loans are all paid-off, and I pay my credit card balance in full every month. If we use $60k, then that is about $1.3M without inflation. If we assume a 2% inflation, then the total is $1.6M. At 5% inflation, the total I will need for 22-years is $2.3M.
Finally, the elephant in the room is health insurance. If I retire before sixty-something, I will need to purchase my own health insurance. Pretty sure that will be a lot with all my health issues. No idea what to do about that yet. Move to Canada?
Life with chronic diseases 