FIRE Archives - Page 2 of 11

Roth Conversion Calculator With IRMAA and State Taxes

Somebody ran twelve impossible scenarios through my Roth conversion optimizer in seven minutes and then left with nothing. That’s the most useful thing I learned from finally sitting down and reading the tool’s usage log, and it’s why it’s now a Roth conversion calculator with IRMAA priced in, real state brackets for all fifty states, and the ability to tell you in plain English what your plan is actually doing.

The log covers roughly 190 solves across about 31 visitor sessions, which makes this the most-used of the optimization tools I’ve put online. Almost everyone got a plan out of it. Two people got nothing at all, and the way they failed turned out to be the most interesting thing in the whole file — they weren’t defeated by a bug, they were defeated by an answer that was technically correct and completely useless.

Plain-English notes under a Roth conversion plan, including one reading “Your income is pinned at $109,000 for 13 years” — The optimizer explaining its own plan — fixed rules, not generated text.

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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