I think many retirees hang on, hang on, and hang on to their nest egg waiting for their heirs to get their money after they are dead. They keep thinking about the step-up in value on death that avoids capital gains taxes. This makes very

I finished my tax plan for 2019 this past week. Have you? I’ve written about tax traps – tripwires and breakpoints – in several posts. (Maybe too many! Most recently  here, here, and here.) I combine all the key tripwires and breakpoints

We retirees with Traditional IRA accounts will record increasing taxable income over time. That’s due to RMD, a big component of taxable income for those over age 70½. At expected returns for stocks and bonds, your taxable ordinary income will DOUBLE in real terms

Patti and I are +11 months into our performance year for my calculation of our Safe Spending Amount (SSA) for 2020: I use the 12 months from December 1 to November 30. My snapshot in this post tells me that we are just shy of

The purpose of this post is to describe seven hard-to-see tripwires for landmines that can result in taxes that you might be able to avoid. If you stumble on a tripwire and set off a landmine – cross a specific amount of income you record