Personal blog on early retirement, a little traveling, and analytics projects. I write about what I learn as I am learning it.
Personal finance from an optimization habit: early retirement, Roth conversions, credit cards, and the arithmetic behind decisions people usually make by feel.
Two dollars of income cost a couple I was modeling last week $9,574. Not two thousand — two. That is the Roth conversion vs ACA subsidy problem in one line, and as of January it is live again for anyone retiring before 65.
The enhanced premium tax credits that ran from 2021 through 2025 expired on December 31 and were not extended. What came back with them is the old 400%-of-the-federal-poverty-line cliff: below it you get a subsidy, above it you get nothing at all. Not a taper. Nothing.
The “4% rule” gets repeated like it’s one universal number, but the safe withdrawal rate by age isn’t actually flat — it moves depending on how long your money needs to last, which is another way of saying it depends heavily on your age when you start withdrawing. I built my own withdrawal calculator specifically because a flat percentage didn’t fit an early-retirement timeline, and the more I dug into the math, the more the “4%” felt like a rounding of something that should really be a curve.
Continue reading “Safe Withdrawal Rate by Age: Why 4% Isn’t One Number”
People ask me how to retire early like there’s a secret I’m withholding — some clever investment, a trick with real estate, a system nobody else knows about. There isn’t. I retired early, I still don’t have a boss more than a decade later, and the math behind it is boring enough to explain in two paragraphs. The hard part was never the math. Here’s the version I wish someone had handed me plainly, instead of making me piece it together from forum threads.
Continue reading “How to Retire Early: The Math That Actually Matters”
After I put the Roth conversion tool online, the question I kept getting wasn’t about conversions at all. It was simpler and scarier: “OK, but how much can I actually spend?” Almost every withdrawal rate calculator answers that by multiplying your savings by 4% and calling it a day. So I added a mode to my own optimizer that throws the flat percentage out and solves for the real number — the most you can spend every year while drawing every account down to zero by the end of the plan.
Continue reading “A Withdrawal Rate Calculator That Draws Down to Zero”People email me a version of the same hopeful question: how do I convert my traditional IRA to a Roth without paying taxes? I get why they ask. A Roth conversion lands a tax bill in the same year, and nobody enjoys writing the IRS a check for moving their own money from one pocket to another. So let me give you the honest answer first, and then the part that actually helps — the move that gets you as close to “tax-free” as the law allows.
Continue reading “Convert a Traditional IRA to Roth Without Paying Taxes?”
