Did you calculate to a real pay increase for 2020? You should have! The returns have been that good this year. In this earlier post, I thought we were close to a real pay increase: the November stock returns of +2.5% put us over

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

If you are over 70½ you want to make contributions from your retirement accounts using QCD – Qualified Charitable Distributions. I wrote about this a year ago. You get the full tax benefit of donations when you make them from your retirement account. You

Depending on the amount of your income, 0%, 50% or 85% of your Social Security (SS) benefits is taxed. Retired folks under age 70½ have flexibility as to how they get the cash to pay themselves throughout the year – what is taxable income on

We retirees want to lock in a number of years for NO CHANCE of depleting our portfolio. A key decision – our Safe Spending Rate (SSR%) – assumes we will face the most horrible sequence of financial returns in history. We nesteggers use the actual

If you follow the evidence in Nest Egg Care (NEC), you know the key to investing when you are retired – really any stage in life – is to keep most all of market returns for yourself. To do this reliably you must solely