Hi y'all,
I've been lurking on this board off and on since March and thanks go to all regular posters for the wealth of information discussed here. It's difficult to talk to friends about a lot of the personal stuff that is posted here but when making the decision about when to retire it's crucial to be able to bounce those thoughts off someone else. With this board I hope I've found how to do that anonymously.
We are aged 50 and 45, with three sons (6th, 8th and 10th grades) and we think we have "enough" to be able to retire. In fact, we are in a similar situation to Blake who posted here in the last couple of weeks. We have run Fire-Calc and barring an absolute catastrophe at our current levels of expenditure (6 years of MS Money data) we can easily survive.
Other complications in our situation are that we are British citizens (green card holders). We have only been here for 6 years and therefore have not built up enough credits for either Medicare or Social Security yet. From looking at the government site it appears that the US govt will look at the social security record from another country in which there is a work record and pick up credits from there. Does anyone have experience of this? In any event it may not matter if SS bites the dust within the next 15 years.
Furthermore, we are not completely comfortable with how the tax system works here. We have always had someone else prepare our taxes and are unsure of our understanding of the rules. Using MS Money's retirement calculator it tells us that in retirement our tax rate would be in excess of 20%. I cannot see how it could be so much when all our living expenses will come from dividends, capital gain and a small amount of interest from cash accounts. In addition, we have property taxes of $12,500 (Texas!) and presumably all our medical insurance and expenses will be tax deductible. My view is that we will not be able to generate enough income to offset the allowances we have each year - but am I missing something? (DH thinks I am) Can anyone recommend a good tax program to purchase which will allow us to model our tax situation in retirement and give us some peace of mind on the tax front?
I think there are enough issues here for my first post! I await your replies with curiosity.
jj
I've been lurking on this board off and on since March and thanks go to all regular posters for the wealth of information discussed here. It's difficult to talk to friends about a lot of the personal stuff that is posted here but when making the decision about when to retire it's crucial to be able to bounce those thoughts off someone else. With this board I hope I've found how to do that anonymously.
We are aged 50 and 45, with three sons (6th, 8th and 10th grades) and we think we have "enough" to be able to retire. In fact, we are in a similar situation to Blake who posted here in the last couple of weeks. We have run Fire-Calc and barring an absolute catastrophe at our current levels of expenditure (6 years of MS Money data) we can easily survive.
Other complications in our situation are that we are British citizens (green card holders). We have only been here for 6 years and therefore have not built up enough credits for either Medicare or Social Security yet. From looking at the government site it appears that the US govt will look at the social security record from another country in which there is a work record and pick up credits from there. Does anyone have experience of this? In any event it may not matter if SS bites the dust within the next 15 years.
Furthermore, we are not completely comfortable with how the tax system works here. We have always had someone else prepare our taxes and are unsure of our understanding of the rules. Using MS Money's retirement calculator it tells us that in retirement our tax rate would be in excess of 20%. I cannot see how it could be so much when all our living expenses will come from dividends, capital gain and a small amount of interest from cash accounts. In addition, we have property taxes of $12,500 (Texas!) and presumably all our medical insurance and expenses will be tax deductible. My view is that we will not be able to generate enough income to offset the allowances we have each year - but am I missing something? (DH thinks I am) Can anyone recommend a good tax program to purchase which will allow us to model our tax situation in retirement and give us some peace of mind on the tax front?
I think there are enough issues here for my first post! I await your replies with curiosity.
jj