Money Archives - Kind-of-Lost

Safe Withdrawal Rate by Age: Why 4% Isn’t One Number

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.

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How to Retire Early: The Math That Actually Matters

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.

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A Withdrawal Rate Calculator That Draws Down to Zero

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.

Convert a Traditional IRA to Roth Without Paying Taxes?

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.

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When Does a Roth Conversion Make Sense? What the Math Says

I spent the last stretch building a tool that answers one question I get asked constantly in the FIRE world: how much of my traditional IRA should I convert to a Roth each year? Put another way: when does a Roth conversion make sense, and how much should you do? The tool runs a real optimization model, not a rule of thumb, and the interesting part is that once I started feeding it realistic numbers, the math kept repeating the same handful of lessons. Here they are, in plain English.

Quick disclaimer up front: I’m an operations-research guy, not your accountant. This is what the model showed me, not advice for your situation. Talk to a tax professional before you act on any of it.