No. of Recommendations: 4
For now I've retired as of the end of January. I've been looking more at my investments, breakdowns of Roth/IRA/Tax accounts, income streams and taxes. Some probably think I should have done this earlier but with laws and investing changing over the years, I'm not sure if it would have mattered much.
Recently I created a spreadsheet going from 60 to 100 with columns containing different income streams (pensions, social security, RMDs, Roth conversions, etc.) and doing a crude tax/AGI calculation for each age. I'm not sure how far off my tax calculations will be but I figured a simple std deduction and a tax bracket calculation would help me out. My goal was to see if there are any issues with IRMAA or blips into higher tax brackets down the road.
I'm also doing a rough view at what happens if I get a inheritance from a relation. He has told me I would be getting 50% of his IRA which is decent sized but I'm not one to ask how much but I can roughly estimate when he says he lost/gain $X on a given day based on the market % move. I don't factor this in my spending but I wanted to look at its impact down the road with the RMD required of inherited retirement accounts.
Making a big, and likely very wrong assumption, assumption that the tax laws will stay the same, the only issue I'm seeing right now is if/when one of us passes away and we are filing as a single vs a couple. That greatly changes the tax brackets and lowers the IRMAA levels by about 50%.
This year I will start taking at least 10-20% RMD from my inherited IRA (via my father). The IRS keeps delaying enforcement of it but like many who have retired and are delaying social security my low income years will be pre-social security and pre my own RMDs so I want to get most of that money out and also do some Roth conversions sooner than later.
Having a spreadsheet with all of the numbers (hopefully semi-accurate) makes things easier to see. I also included my investments so I could see that I'm about 65% stocks, 35% treasuries in my largest account. My other account that is being used mostly to bridge the time until social security is collected is mostly treasuries. I have a 3rd account still with TSP that is mostly stocks and I'll move that account in the near future since dealing with the TSP is like going back into time. Trying to add a beneficiary actually requires having a witness to view you doing it on the web site.
Our next headache is moving cross country again (3rd time in the last 5 years and 5th in last 20 years) into a single story house outside Phoenix. I was stumped on where to live in retirement but ended up going with having some friends there and my wife having a ton of friends/family out there. If I was younger or had no health concerns or if it was easier to do, living somewhere overseas like northern Italy or Germany would have been interesting.
I also need to simplify my investments into index funds. Currently I have about 20% of my stocks in Berkshire and Google which has done well. My wife is pretty clueless/don't care about most of that stuff so I'm trying to write up notes about what to do when I'm gone.
Have a nice weekend
Rich
