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Steve Woodward

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    • Kudos on tackling a complex, ever changing topic and communicating it here! We have owned our home 35 years. We’ve remodeled the stuff we remodeled. It’s long been paid off. My wife and I have considered moving to a smaller home with less maintenance. It seems we will take a substantial financial hit to do so. It’s my understanding that we will pay long term capital gains on anything over our basis plus $500,000. We still would still have to buy another home but would have less money to do so. It motivates a person to more frequently so appreciation/inflation does not have a detrimental effect, or to never move at all. So here we remain. I believe it is to our countries detriment that the tax code gets used as it does. It gets changed frequently to guide our behavior. It gets changed on political whims. Ultimately the ever changing laws keep armies of accountants, businesses and their leaders, government employees, and citizens/residents trying to interpret existing and guess future laws. I don’t begrudge paying taxes as the price to live in this great country but I do grumble about the complexity. Does it really need to be this hard?

      Post: Owning My Mistake

      Link to comment from April 3, 2024

    • Thinking this thru a bit further….. If I have $100k of stock with a $50k basis, the $20k withdrawal will result in being taxed on $10k of LTCG. At 20% means $2k in taxes. If I have $100k in bonds paying 5% which is being used to live on, I’m paying taxes of the 5K at what ever my tax rate is. This plus the $15k principle I withdraw equals the $20k. It looks like bonds in taxable would win in my simplistic scenario. What am I missing?

      Post: Munis vs. Taxables (II)

      Link to comment from March 30, 2024

    • We like to keep the math easy. By that, I mean easy to look at and rebalance. Our Roth accounts are 25% S&P500, 25% Extended Market, 25% total international stock, 25% short term bond fund. Rebalancing is a cinch. All the numbers should be close to the same. IRA’s take a similar approach except stock portion is 10% in each of the above and 70% is broken up into very roughly equal rungs of a cd/treasury/tips bond ladder. We are just entering the withdrawal phase so a portion of each ladder rung is used for that. Again, rebalancing can be done without a calculator. It would be much simpler to use a bond fund rather than a ladder but we like the certainty of maturing bonds. Taxable accounts is more of a hodgepodge because of rebalancing tax implications. Oh well, symmetry in this area is more of a journey.

      Post: Nothing Odd

      Link to comment from March 24, 2024

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