A few years back I created a post titled “Choosing Your Health Insurance Plan – With Math!”. Back then we were deciding between a high deductible and a standard plan at Mrs. EYFI’s employer (back when she was still full time).
This year we faced another tough health insurance decision: picking an Obamacare plan. Otherwise known as Affordable Care Act (ACA) Health Insurance. I’ll mostly use “ACA” below because it’s shorter/easier.
Last month Mrs. EYFI and I went to our third FinCon conference, and we had a great time.
This year it was located in New Orleans, which was my seventh visit to the city and Mrs. EYFI’s second.
Last week at FinCon (review post coming soon!) I had the privilege to meet Emily Roberts, who hosts the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast and has helped many PhD students with personal finance since she graduated with her PhD in biomedical engineering in 2014.
As far as I know, she is the first fellow PhD in engineering I’ve ever met at FinCon, which was really nice – there aren’t too many of us interested enough in personal finance to go to a conference about it!
One question we discussed was whether grad students should invest any savings they can scrape together in a Traditional IRA (which is fully deductible, equivalent to 401(k) “pre-tax” dollars) or a Roth IRA (which you contribute to after paying taxes, but grows tax-free after that).
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
