I’m throwing down the gauntlet. In past years I might have said, “Ha! Beat That!”, but not now. When we’re retired, our challenge is to keep as much as we can of what the market gives. My challenge to you is to compare to see

All of us Nest Eggers will calculate to a real pay raise for 2020: that’s because of the excellent stock and bond returns this year. (I describe our pay increase for 2020 here and the prospects for another real increase for 2021 here.) In

Our portfolio – your portfolio – shouldn’t be viewed as one big pile of money. For almost all days in the year I can’t help but look at our total as one big pile: I see the total amount Patti and I have on the

Last week Patti and I calculated that we earned a small, real increase in our Safe Spending Amount (SSA) for 2020. I can now calculate that a 1% real return on our portfolio over this next year will result in another real increase in

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