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

This post puts the second largest actively managed mutual fund – Fidelity® Contrafund® (FCNTX) – in the same barrel that I put American Funds Growth Fund of America (AGTHX) in two weeks ago. How well has FCNTX performed over the

Is this a crazy question to ask someone who is retired or nearly retired? No! Mortgage rates now are low, low, low. The average 30-year mortgage now is about 3.7%. I summarize data from this graph that shows rates are within .4% of their lowest

This article states that in July the amount invested in passive index funds passed the amount invested in actively managed funds: roughly $4.2 trillion each. The first Index Fund started in 1976. That means it took 43 years for Index Funds to win 50% share

Year ago I remember two actively managed funds battling it out in terms of top rank of size of mutual funds – the amount of money investors have in them: American Funds Growth Fund of America (AGTHX) and Fidelity Contrafund® (FCNTX). Both these funds had

These two articles (here and here) in the New York Times were helpful in giving me an idea of where Patti and I rank in income and net worth. The purpose of this post is to give a bit of explanation and to