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?”
For quite a while now I’ve been interested in figuring out how subsidies are calculated for Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance (probably better known as Obamacare, but I prefer ACA because it’s shorter to say and write).
Why? Because health insurance, and all the stress of how to get it when you don’t have access to employer-provided insurance, is a big topic in the Financial Independence (FI) community.
Wondering how best to withdraw money after FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early)? And/or standard retirement?
In particular, are you wondering how much to pull from each of your various retirement and taxable accounts?
I had the same questions, so last summer I started working to figure out the answer.
Finally! I’ve been wanting to do an expenses summary post for quite some time now. I’ve been discussing it in “Future Work” sections since the beginning of the year, and probably before that.
I already do a bunch of (fun spreadsheet) work to track our expenses every month and year, so I’m excited to share all that info in a more public way. I’m hoping this will be a great way to hold my wife and I accountable in our finances and lifestyle.
I’m also excited to show others what’s possible: if you’re spending more than us and are looking for ideas to cut down your expenses, hopefully this post will help.
This week I worked on a wide variety of things, instead of focusing on a single main task. Hence the long list in the title of the post.
It’s amazing how much you can get done when your wonderful spouse takes the kids out of town to visit family for the weekend!
And of course I’m sure everyone will agree that there’s nothing more fun than working on personal finance content all weekend.
This week I’ve been very focused on writing a new eBook titled “Ten Steps to Become and Stay Financially Independent”.
This week I did two main things: create a couple diagrams and fix an acronym mistake.
Doesn’t sound like much, right? How long can it take to put together a couple diagrams and fix a typo? I must be slacking!
Well, turns out those diagrams were some of the most challenging I’ve ever done, and that acronym mistake was spread across lots of posts, diagrams, and plots that I had to recreate. Bleh…
