Tag: Taxes

Ten Lessons From Ten Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Studies

Last week, we published the Tenth Safe Withdrawal Rate Study! Amazing how time flies! I did about one case study every three weeks for the last 6 months! And I could even include another one if I were to count the one I did for the ChooseFI podcast back in 2017. In fact, the ChooseFI appearance (Episode 23R and Episode 26R) started the idea because our first volunteer reached out to me after he heard me on the podcast. Since then I’ve published 10 posts, worth almost 30,000 words that generated tons of clicks, feedback and encouragement:

  • “John Smith”: Seven-figure net worth, but not quite ready for FIRE yet. Big ERN would recommend a few more years in the workforce!
  • “Captain Ron”: Early retirement on a sailboat. How much can they withdraw from their $3m portfolio to stay afloat (pun intended) in retirement?
  • “Rene”: No need to worry about the recent layoff: You are more than ready for early retirement!
  • “Mrs. Greece”: More than ready to retire due to large portfolio size and moderate living expenses, especially if the husband keeps working!
  • “Mrs. Wish I Could Surf”: Alternative investments (real estate hard money loans). Keep the mortgage or pay it off? Either way, more than ready to retire!
  • “Mr. Corporate”: Geographic Arbitrage by moving to a low-cost European country. Roth Conversions and zero tax liability!
  • “Ms. Almost FI”: Your name is a misnomer. You are ready to retire now even when self-funding substantial long-term care expenses in the future!
  • “Mr. Corporate Refugee”: How to deal with a large portion of the net worth tied up in a house in a high-cost-of-living area?
  • “Mrs. Wanderlust”: Substantial supplemental cash flows due to buying an RV and then selling it later.
  • “Mr. and Mrs. Shirts”: Ready to retire this year, but should Mr. Shirts work for another nine months for some additional big payday?

But, alas, all good things have to come to an end! I have decided to take a break from the case studies, at least for now. I might revive the series again later but for next few weeks and months, I will pursue other topics! Thanks to all volunteers who submitted their data. And thanks to all other folks who didn’t get their case studies published. I’m not even sure I properly responded to everyone whose request was denied. I think I may have some inquiries from October last year that I haven’t responded to. If you submitted a request for a case study and haven’t heard from me back, sorry, I’m just a bit disorganized!

Sooooo, ten case studies: what have I learned from them? Plenty, because that’s the topic for today’s post…

Continue reading “Ten Lessons From Ten Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Studies” →

Ask Big Ern: A Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Study for Mrs. “Wish I Could Surf”

Welcome to a new Case Study! This time, Mrs. “Wish I Could Surf” (not her real name) volunteered to open the doors to her finances. And every case study brings up something new to learn for yours truly. Today’s challenge: How would “alternative” investments factor into the Safe Withdrawal Rate exercise? Peer Street, Hard Money Lenders, Lendingclub, Prosper, etc. have gained a lot of popularity, especially in the FIRE crowd. When calculating safe withdrawal rates, I have only worked with stock/bond/cash portfolios because they are the asset classes with returns going back 100+ years. Doing the SWR exercise for a portfolio of Peer Street loans will require some “hacking” in my Safe Withdrawal Rate Google Sheet!

Further challenges come from the fact that Mrs. and Mr. Surf keep their finances separate (similar situation as in the Case Study for Rene) and Mr. Surf will still be working for a number of years, so we have to make some assumptions on how to assign the tax burden between Mr. and Mrs. Surf. Lots of work to do! So let’s get started and look at Mrs. Surf’s finances…

Continue reading “Ask Big Ern: A Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Study for Mrs. “Wish I Could Surf”” →

Ask Big Ern: A Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Study for “Mrs. Greece”

Welcome back to our case study series! To see the previous installments, please check out the first three parts:

Mrs. Greece, not her real name, not even her country of origin, contacted me a while back and wanted me to take a look at her financial situation. Here’s Mrs. Greece’s background… Continue reading “Ask Big Ern: A Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Study for “Mrs. Greece”” →

Ask Big Ern: A Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Study for “Rene”

Welcome! Today is the third installment of our Case Study Series. Please check out the other two posts here if you haven’t done so already:

Today’s volunteer “Rene” (not her real name) was laid off earlier in 2017 and is now living off her severance package. She wonders if she has enough of a nest egg to simply call it quits and retire in her late 40s. And many other questions: if/how/when to annuitize any of her assets and what accounts to draw down first? So many questions! As I pointed out in Part 17 of the Safe Withdrawal Series, a safe withdrawal rate calculation has to be a highly customized affair and that’s what we’ll do today again. Let’s see what the numbers say!
Continue reading “Ask Big Ern: A Safe Withdrawal Rate Case Study for “Rene”” →

Good and Bad Reasons to Love the Mortgage Interest Deduction

Welcome back to the Early Retirement Now blog! I hope everybody had a safe and relaxing Fourth of July holiday. And if you don’t live in the U.S. and had to go to work yesterday we hope you had a nice Fourth of July, too! We are currently on vacation in Paris and I am sure even here I smelled some barbecue in the air yesterday, so folks seem to celebrate worldwide!

In any case, as we detailed last week, we plan to rent during early retirement, at least in the beginning. But even if and when we buy a house we’d likely pay cash and forego the mortgage deduction. Won’t we miss the deduction? Probably not! We found a few reasons to really appreciate this tax deduction but also two very bad reasons. Let’s start with the bad reasons! Continue reading “Good and Bad Reasons to Love the Mortgage Interest Deduction” →

The ERN Family Early Retirement Capital Preservation Plan

Fritz at The Retirement Manifesto suggested we start a series covering how different FIRE bloggers plan to implement their drawdown strategy. I realize we are a bit late to the party given how many fellow bloggers have already contributed:

So, better late than never: here’s the ERN family contribution. To begin, we are intentionally not calling this a drawdown plan. We will draw from our investments but hopefully never significantly draw them down. So, we are more in the PIE camp, trying to maintain our capital. Even if we were comfortable with leaving nothing to our heirs and charitable causes in 60 years, the drawdown over 60 years would be so small (especially early on, think of this as the initial amortization in a 60-year mortgage!) that we might as well plan for capital preservation rather than drawdown.

Continue reading “The ERN Family Early Retirement Capital Preservation Plan” →

You want to know our savings rate? Which one?

Last week, I read a nice post on Chief Mom Officer on the challenges of calculating savings rates. Right around that time I was also revisiting our 2017 budget and the projections of how much we are going to save this year. This is the last full calendar year before our planned retirement in early 2018 and it’s imperative that we stay on track and keep a high savings rate on the home stretch. But how high is our savings rate? Is there even a generally accepted way of calculating a savings rate? What are some of the pitfalls? We were surprised about how easy it is to mess up a calculation as seemingly trivial as the savings rate.

Continue reading “You want to know our savings rate? Which one?” →

An addition to the ERN family portfolio: Preferred Stocks

Last year in December we noticed that one of our Municipal Bond mutual funds had short-term losses. That’s not a huge surprise after the post-election bond yield surge and hence it was time to harvest those losses. If you’re not familiar with Tax Loss Harvesting, we wrote two earlier posts on the topic, one dealing with the general concept and one dealing with the implementation. In any case, after we sold the underwater tax lots, where do we put the money? For 30 days we can’t invest in the same fund (or different fund with identical benchmark) or we’d run afoul with the IRS wash-sale rule. There was one asset class that we had never owned but had definitely been on our radar screen for a while. Finally, we took the plunge and invested in… drumroll …

Preferred Stocks! Continue reading “An addition to the ERN family portfolio: Preferred Stocks” →

Why would anyone have a mortgage and a bond portfolio?

We are homeowners with a pretty sizeable mortgage but we also accumulated a nice retirement nest egg, which is actually many times larger than our mortgage. Even our taxable investments are several times larger than the mortgage. Still, we don’t pay off the mortgage because we like the benefit of leverage. We have a liability with a low-interest rate and assets with a much higher expected rate of return, so our overall expected rate of return is higher than without a mortgage. Our friend FinanciaLibre (now a defunct site) did some nice number crunching on this topic recently and we agree wholeheartedly.

Moreover, if you follow our blog you’ll also remember that we take a pretty dim view on bonds:

So, personally, we skip the bond allocation altogether. Others have written about this, too, check Physician on Fire’s 2-part guest post here and here. In light of all of this, here’s one question that occurred to us:

Why would anybody have a 30-year mortgage at about 3.50% and a bond portfolio currently paying around 1.8 to maybe 2.5% interest for safe government bonds?

Leverage works only when the asset has a higher expected return than the liability!
Continue reading “Why would anyone have a mortgage and a bond portfolio?” →

Our Interview on the Amber Tree Leaves Blog

Our first interview! Ever! Be sure to check out our…

Interview on the Amber Tree Leaves Blog

We talk about everything related to our options trading strategy! Continue reading “Our Interview on the Amber Tree Leaves Blog” →