How does getting subsidized insurance work after quitting a high paying job to live off savings?

We live in California and my husband currently works for a large tech company making a bit over 200k a year, not including bonus/RSU/stock refreshes. This job is sucking his soul dry and we are trying to plan for him to take a sabbatical and just live off our savings (if his department doesn't get cut or he get laid off, which is always looming and adding to the stress) for 6 months to a year.

He is our sole income earner for our family of 5, and I know the insurance we carry through his employer is very expensive and would be more than a typical mortgage if we tried to use COBRA for it, or buy any plan for full price off the marketplace. I am seeing mixed information when it comes to what they use to calculate the subsidy that's applied.

If we go off "annual income," counting Jan – Dec 2024, I think we would be over the limit for any subsidy and need to pay full price? Sometimes it says "low income" and even half a year I don't think is in that category. I'm using the covered CA website and I can't seem to find anything that says "here's how much you get off if your income is X" but also, the prices were lower when I put our income at 110k vs 230k? (ballparking half year vs full year) so it seems there is some discount applied still, even at that income? Decent insurance would still be like $1k/mo so I would like to not pay that if possible, as we won't have any/much income moving forward

But if we go off "monthly income" or calculated annual income for the time that we would need coverage if he quits (so no UI) we'd only have ~$300/mo "income" from dividend payments from the portion of our savings that are currently in stocks and paying dividends and thus would obviously qualify for lower payments. I'm consistently seeing information that says it takes income, not assets, as part of it's calculations, so even though we are "budgeting" our monthly "income" as spending down some savings, it's not actually "income," but I can't figure out if that's the correct way of looking at it. Would we qualify for subsidized insurance or even Medi-Cal if he quits, regardless of what we have in savings to live off of?

Also, how would something like contract work play into that? He currently commands a ~10k/week contract fee that FinTech companies are happy to pay and we've tossed around the idea of him taking on a few contracts from time to time to supplement this sabbatical, but I'm not sure how that factors into the calculations.

submitted by /u/alwaysusepapyrus
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