In Retirement

BOB MADE A very expensive tax mistake. Doctors told Bob that he only has a year to live… What did Bob do?
He decided to gift a house to his only son before passing away. The house is worth $2,000,000 that he bought back in 1970 for $50,000 in an expensive suburb of California.
The son decided to sell the house and paid about $430,000 in federal taxes.
$430,000 that could have been $0 instead…
How?

Adam Grossman wrote this in an e-mail today. I didn’t know this did you?
“The spousal benefit is terrific, but a commonly misunderstood limitation is that—unlike a worker’s own benefit—it doesn’t continue to increase each year until age 70. It hits a maximum at the spouse’s FRA. For that reason, it’s important for a spouse to not delay beyond that point.”
On the other hand if the worker delayed beyond FRA those extra benefits pass on to survivors benefits.

Social media is full of seniors complaining about inflation, the inadequacy of Social Security and its COLAs to keep up.
I was curious. Is that true and what has happened to my purchasing power since retiring in January 2010?
To match the purchasing power of $100 in 2010, you would need approximately $153.15 in 2026.
Meanwhile, $100 in Social Security benefits in 2010 has grown through compounded Cost-of-Living Adjustments (COLAs) to $147.36 in 2026. Not equal,

THE WIDOW TAX is sold to the wrong households. It gets pitched to affluent couples as the reason to convert to a Roth or buy life insurance. The pitch says that when one spouse dies, the survivor files single, lands in a higher bracket, and gets clobbered. I ran the numbers for three couples at three incomes, and at the comfortable end the widow tax often costs nothing, or even less than nothing.
The real cost lands lower down,

I used AI as an editorial assistant to help organize and refine my thoughts; the underlying ideas and personal experiences remain my own.
For years, I maintained what I thought was a pretty good retirement spreadsheet. Like many retirees, it tracked my investments, estimated Social Security, projected taxes and summarized spending. Every year I’d update the numbers, glance through a handful of reports and file it away until the next review.
The spreadsheet faithfully answered every question I asked.

No doubt you have heard or read the posts and comments, perhaps by friends about the Social Security COLA.
It’s not accurate, not fair, not enough, doesn’t keep up with our actual spending, use the CPI-E and all the rest.
One thing it does for sure is add to the Trusts growing shortfall.
Some people really need that annual boost, if for nothing else to help offset growing Medicare premiums. But others, including many in the HD community,

IF YOU’RE IN YOUR early 60s and retired, you probably have a lot of financial questions on your mind. The next few years may be among your lowest-income and lowest-tax-paying years. Your salary and bonus years are behind you. Social Security and required minimum distributions from your IRAs and 401(k)s have not started yet. You are hearing advice about doing Roth conversions during this low-tax window, and the arguments are compelling. You may also be thinking about consulting or part-time work to stay active and bring in some income.

There is a slowing growing movement to offer annuities within 401k plans, mostly through target date funds. They purchase the annuity gradual starting around age 50 or so or in a lump sum.  401k Plan provisions determine other options. I think it’s a good and much needed option for the great majority of workers.
But my question is, how important to you is a regular income stream, at least to cover all basic living expenses. I know many HD folks like the flexibility of DIY withdrawals,

I DON’T HAVE MANY regrets in life. But there is one conversation with my mother that I wish I had never had. It was about moving her into an assisted living facility. She was in her 90s, and I thought it would be best for both of us.
My mother would receive better care, and I could take much-needed breaks. She could even keep her house and spend time there when I was with her.
It seemed like a middle-of-the-road approach to providing care.

Possibly a misuse of the term, in its strict financial sense. Anyhow…
For decades I’ve heard about the value or use of leverage. It’s most easily recognized in our homes, often bought with a small down payment and a big loan, so that even minor increases in home value in early years create impression of a big return on our actual expenditure.
Yet last year, when I took on several major home “repairs” (a loose term for work that included demolishing and rebuilding a decrepit garage),

Your 35 years of earnings is what determines you social security benefit, not the taxes paid. Here is why.
✔️ Your benefits are paid for life and perhaps to a survivor. Your benefits don’t stop when you have received all you paid in FICA taxes – roughly after collecting benefits for 6 years.
✔️ The SSA averages your highest 35-years of earnings and then adjusts them to reflect the growth in wages using the AWI – average wage index.

Credit to John Mauldin and Ed Yardeni:

The three-week war in Iran is now 3.5 months, and there is zero consensus among people that I pay attention to as to when it will end. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for weeks. As noted last week, Treasuries now come with an asterisk. China is building production capacity designed to permanently close the door on Western industry in thirty critical sectors. And the S&P 500 is up 17% in four weeks.

I’m planning my first course correction 2.5 years into retirement. I thought I was going to write about Roth conversions, bucket strategies, asset location, and so on. And I am. But it turns out that that’s not the point.
I came late to the HumbleDollar/Bogleheads way of thinking. I’ve been absorbing it all for about 4 years. Thanks to Jonathan, Adam Grossman and all here. I’ve learned a lot, put the advice together into what I think is a coherent plan,

I used AI as an editorial assistant to help organize and refine my thoughts; the underlying ideas and personal experiences remain my own.
Like a lot of engineers, I spent my career solving problems the same way: build a model, gather the data, run the simulations, optimize the result. So when retirement came into view, I did what came naturally. I built spreadsheets—and got back a mountain of output and almost no peace of mind.

Jonathan’s thought of the day is, If the stock market’s performance over the next five years was miserable, would you be? I thought it might be fun to kick this one around a bit. 
Though I am positioned just fine to survive five or even ten years of misery from the market, I still wouldn’t like it. I guess I’m just too used to seeing things go up. So while the nuts and bolts of our life would be fine,