I received our tax reporting statement from Fidelity on Saturday, February 8. That’s the day Patti and I left for a week in Jamaica. I started and completed our returns on Sunday, February 16. The IRS deposited our refund on February 26. Ten days! This

The best time to convert traditional IRA shares to Roth is when stocks stink. You get more shares for the dollars you convert. I would not judge that stocks stink right now, but my FSKAX hit a high of about $170 per share in early

We got a breather on inflation. Inflation for February was half the rate for January. The most-widely reported measure, seasonally adjusted inflation, increased about 0.2% in January; the last six months point to about 3.6% annual rate. Core inflation, the measure closest to the one

Every January I track what happened to the $2,000 I contributed to my IRA many years ago. I contributed to my own IRA the first week of January for at least 20 years starting in 1980. I look back at my contributions to my IRA

January inflation for the measure the Federal Reserve favors was issued this morning. Since inflation is a hot topic in the news, I show the January data for three inflation measures: seasonally adjusted inflation, core inflation (excludes food and energy), and personal consumption expenditures (PCE)

I previously stated that you save A LOT in taxes if you delay taking Social Security (SS) and replace your SS benefit with a distribution from your traditional IRA. (See here.) You’re saving because the distribution that replaces SS is taxed at roughly 5%

I was hoping that January 2025 inflation would be low and replace a high inflation month of January 2024: this obviously was not the case. The most-widely reported measure, seasonally-adjusted inflation, increased nearly 0.5% in January; that’s about a 6% annual rate; it was the

My niece and her husband will be the perfect candidates to delay starting Social Security (SS) until age 70 – gaining 8% real increase in benefits for each year that they delay: they will have a MOUNTAIN of traditional IRA at age 65 that will

 I updated my two favorite graphs this week.

• The first graph shows the cumulative real return for stocks and bonds since January 1, 1926 – the last 99 years. Stocks have averaged ~7.1% real return per year; stocks double in real spending power

I logged into TurboTax, and it gave me the target of 1½ hours to complete our Federal tax return. This will be my third year with TurboTax, and I don’t think I’ve met the time targets before. I’m determined to hit that target this year.