Interview With Captain FI
Recently I “sat down” (i.e., called over the internet on the opposite sides of the planet) with Pete at CaptainFI.com to do an episode for his podcast, and I think we were both amazed at how much we had in common.
Impact of FIRE on Social Security Income
Ever since I started diving into social security income analysis, I’ve had one question that kept popping into my head: how will retiring early via FIRE affect your social security (SocSec) income?
This is a site about hitting Financial Independence ASAP after all!
Will you still get SocSec? If so, how much lower will it be? Can you offset that lost income by saving a bit more? How much longer would you need to work to get that needed savings?
Now that I have the tools to compute future SocSec for any scenario, I can finally get some answers!
Our Second Quarter 2023 Expenses
The last expenses post I did was for our first quarter 2023 expenses, and that seemed to work pretty well, so now it’s time to review our second quarter 2023 expenses.
Is It Worth Letting Your Warehouse Club Membership Expire?
Have you ever wondered if you could save much money by stocking up in your last month of a warehouse club membership (e.g., Costco, Sam’s Club, BJ’s) and then waiting to rejoin some number of months later?
And is it worth the hassle of doing so?
When Should You Start Social Security?
When to start taking social security benefits is by far the most requested topic I’ve received.
But I couldn’t really tackle that question until I had a social security income model in place. Which I now have!
So let’s take a look.
Part-Time Work after FI and Social Security Computation Diagrams
This week I spent my time working on building some illustrative diagrams for a couple of my previous posts: Part-Time Work After Financial Independence and Computing Social Security Income.
Computing Future Social Security Income
The past few weeks I’ve worked on a new tool to compute social security income (which the Social Security Administration (SSA) refers to as retirement insurance benefits (RIB)), which I’ve also done my best to validate against other available calculators.
This week I extended my tool to provide future RIB estimates – which is what I ultimately care about for doing the FI/RE financial analysis I’ve discussed previously.
Comparing Social Security Calculators
After building a tool to compute social security income, I really wanted to check it against other social security income calculators out there before diving into the analysis I want to do.
Validation is critical! I really want to make sure the results I get are trustworthy.
So I found a bunch of online calculators and got busy doing comparisons.
Computing Social Security Income
I’ve been wanting to code up a tool to compute social security income for quite some time now, and I finally made some significant progress on that front!
To build this tool, I had to gather all the relevant steps and calculations from across various ssa.gov and third-party sites – which was not trivial.
So, the objective of this post is to have every calculation and table needed to compute standard social security income, which the Social Security Administration (SSA) refers to as retirement insurance benefits (RIB), in a single page.
Fat Flamingo FI
I recently came across a comment on a Mad Fientist post that referenced something called “Flamingo FI”.
Now I’ve been following the Financial Independence (FI) community since around 2015, and I’d never heard of such a thing.
So of course I had to investigate!