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.
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.
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.
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!
After publishing our 2022 Expenses post, I thought it might be good to publish our expenses a bit more frequently than once a year.
Initially I thought perhaps I’d publish monthly, since that is how most people think of expenses: yearly and monthly. And that’s how we organize our expenses as well.
But that also seems like a lot of posts, and it could easily get really repetitive. And thus boring for me to write and for you to read!
Sooo…. I’ve gone back to the land of the employed this week.
I know, I know… the math says I don’t need to. But there are still some very compelling reasons for me to do this. And of course some very compelling reasons for me to NOT do this.
In the last couple of posts we’ve discussed how to compute ACA (Obamacare) subsidies and marginal subsidy loss rates vs income (what I’m calling a “hidden” income tax).
Now let’s look at the next question I had regarding ACA subsidies:
Is it worth increasing your income via long term capital gains to take advantage of the 0% LT cap gains tax bracket (i.e., tax gain harvesting), even if it means a lower ACA subsidy?
In my last post I covered how to compute Affordable Care Act (ACA) (also known as Obamacare) subsidies, which wasn’t as tricky as I feared.
The next big question in my mind was “How much will your subsidy be reduced if your income grows?”
