Kevin Rees

Comments:

• I was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension at age 60 (while undergoing heart valve repair). Since then my cardiologist has me taking 1/2 a 20 mg sildenafil every morning and every night. This is now the second unintended side effect of his prescription 😇

  Post: Avoiding Alzheimer’s

  Link to comment from September 14, 2024

• They are withdrawing much less 4% if they have half their assets in TIPs (50%), and are drawing that down evenly across 20 years, that means they are only spending 2.5% per year. They are “rebalancing” every year as they cash in bonds without replacement. Only they are actually rebalancing in a more aggressive direction. in short, their strategy has nothing to do with “4% rule”.

  Post: Laying Down a Floor

  Link to comment from September 14, 2024

• True. IRMAA surcharges, while annoying, only last one year per conversion, and are minor compared to a 5-10% higher tax bracket (post 2025).

  Post: Paying to Avoid Pain

  Link to comment from May 11, 2024

• Correct. However, if you time conversions to coincide with a qualifying event in the same year (like retiring or reduced work hours) “bingo” you can get the IRMAA premiums waived. i speak from personal experience. It works, just need to navigate the paperwork.

  Post: Paying to Avoid Pain

  Link to comment from May 11, 2024

• Yes, this is an example where “market timing” might actually make sense. i am a couple of years older than Jonathan, so i may have to suck it up with IRMAA premium impacts but i am trying to make some very significant conversions this year and next (taking advantage of the 22-24% brackets that may go away). I converted about $100k worth of stocks 2 weeks ago during the late April downturn. My recently converted Qualcomm position surged more than 10% after that move. You never know how those things will turn out, but I see every downturn as a conversion opportunity. I had multiple opportunities in 2022 😩

  Post: Paying to Avoid Pain

  Link to comment from May 11, 2024

• I believe that in most cases it is an unintentional mistake. A lot of people do not understand “stepped up basis”. There is probably a significant overlap in this group with the people who also ask how they can just withdraw all of their traditional IRA funds with zero tax (it’s my money). Financial illiteracy is a real problem. Thanks Jonathan for helping to address this issue with Humble dollar.

  Post: Fact Finding

  Link to comment from May 8, 2024

• My grandparents had a family farm, back when the inheritance tax exclusion was MUCH lower. They set up a trust and had their most “business-minded” son identified as the trustee. When Grandma was gone and it was time to distribute the trust, many sibling rivalries and issues surfaced in a very disturbing way. Some of the siblings still no longer talk to one another. I am sure that is not what Grandpa and Grandma intended. The choice of a trustee really is critical.

  Post: What’s Your Plan?

  Link to comment from May 8, 2024

• I think the tip about “bunching” deductions is under appreciated, from my discussions with friends and family. my wife and I are charitably inclined and we make 2+ years of charitable gifts every other year. Last year in addition to “normal” giving we put appreciated stock and cash into our Fidelity donor advised fund. we itemized last year and had about 160% of the standard deduction. Now this year our DAF will send checks to most of the charities that we support, and we’ll take the standard deduction this year. next year (2025) we will make big donations to our daf again (thx Citigroup stock) and then rinse and repeat. we are in our mid-60s so I think we have at least 3 more iterations of this process before we switch to qcds from our traditional IRA.

  Post: Avoiding or Evading?

  Link to comment from April 10, 2024

• I would only offer that the fix is “simple”, but not “easy”. Simple in the fact that the steps are all fairly straightforward, and most have actually been done before. not easy in that nothing the federal government does is easy these days with a hyper-partisan and closely divided congress.

  Post: Making Claims

  Link to comment from April 6, 2024

• My wife and I agreed we wanted no mortgage when I retired. So I used a mortgage loan calculator to figure out how much I would have to pay to make our 20 year loan an 11 year loan. we just paid that amount every month and retired the loan just before I retired. i only experienced one problem with this approach. Some online credit/identity protocols ask you how much your mortgage payment is in order to verify your identity. I had a hard time remembering our payment amount since I always paid about $500 more 😂

  Post: Matters of Principal

  Link to comment from March 28, 2024