Withdrawing Money After FIRE

What income should you target after FIRE with Obamacare?

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?

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New RMD Starting Ages and Tax Brackets, Faster TPM Tool, eBook Released, Site Updates

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.

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New Retirement Withdrawal Strategy Diagrams

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… 

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Roth Early Withdrawal Updates and New Withdrawal Strategy Pages

It’s been tough to get stuff done this week here in Austin, as we’ve had a wicked ice storm blast through. Why is it tough to do stuff on a computer during an ice storm? Two words: no school.

But I still managed to get a couple things done: a big upgrade to the Roth withdrawal tax and penalty models, and I finally finished a total overhaul of the Traditional and Tax and Penalty Minimization (TPM) withdrawal strategy write-ups, which I previously had on the FIRE Withdrawal Strategy Algorithms page

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Status Update: Overhauling the FIRE Withdrawal Strategy Algorithms Page

Well I’ll admit this is a bit of a disappointing post for me, because I had really hoped to complete a major overhaul of the FIRE Withdrawal Strategy Algorithms Page I’ve been working on all week, as I mentioned at the bottom of my last post. But that’s how it goes sometimes – I’d rather have a decent product than rush to “ship” a super rough / sloppy product. Especially for THIS product – I expect this page will serve as an important reference for much additional analysis I’m planning.

The graphical diagrams on that algorithms page also need a big overhaul, to reflect the current version of the methods.

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Reducing Standard Income & Increasing Long Term Cap Gains to Generate More Cash – Not Worth It

Last week I implemented an idea I’ve had for quite a while to further enhance the Tax and Penalty Minimization (TPM) withdrawal method. However, I couldn’t seem to get improved results for any scenario I tried. 

This week I dove a bit deeper to better understand why this method is not working out (at least so far).

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Update: Reducing Standard Income & Increasing Long Term Cap Gains to Generate More Cash Without Taxes

This week I’ve been implementing an idea I’ve had to further enhance the Tax and Penalty Minimization (TPM) withdrawal method, which I’ve been mentioning in previous posts for a while now

But so far I’m not seeing very good results… 

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20% Withholding Problem Solved (Mostly) and More Withdrawals Stress Testing

This week I’ve got some (mostly) good news regarding the “20% withholding from retirement accounts” challenge I mentioned in the previous post.

I also have a bit more stress testing analysis results of the Tax and Penalty Minimization (TPM) withdrawal method and the Traditional withdrawal method, this time looking at how each method does if expenses increase each year. 

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