Recent content by cc3159

Would it be possible for someone to give a brief summary of how this would affect people considering early retirement?

Health care does have me concerned. For the cost part of it, I have planned increases at roughly 10% above my guess of what we'll pay ($15K/yr). 15% or higher just blows my mind -- I wonder if that growth is really sustainable in the long run? If you compound that 15%, in about 15 years, you...

I'd say yes to all of the above. I used a spreadsheet that tracks expenses and forecasts the future. My future forecast has some cushion built in for the unexpected -- inflation higher than expected, etc. It even may be too conservative in some cases.

I posted to this forum about my early retirement situation about a year and a half ago, and received some great suggestions. At that time I was using FireCalc to investigate how soon I could stop working. After careful consideration, I decided that we needed more $s, given the down market, the...

I challenged my assessment last year. They had a two-step process. They sent out a preliminary assessment and give you the option to have an informal meeting with the assessor -- then they finalize the assesments and if you are still not happy, you can discuss with the town assessment board...

My wife recently left her job and has a 401K and a lump sum pension that we will need to roll over to an IRA in the next few months. I had planned to roll them to IRAs with T. Rowe Price -- using their mutual funds -- since we already have some there. But lately I've been looking at the Vanguard...

Actually the $70k does include taxes. Good point. I'm thinking that if I could get the portfolio up to about $1.7M in the next 2-3 years, I'd be much more comfortable stopping work. I used the SS website to do the forecast -- and assumed no income from 2011 onward.

Yes -- the $70K covers all those things. In fact it may be a little high.

My wife recently took a package from her job at a large company. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how great it would be if I could also stop working full time at megacorp in the next few years or do something more enjoyable part-time. We’ve always been aggressive savers - I’ve played around...

Say I have $ 500K in my (pre-taxed) 401K and $ 500K in my (post-taxed) mutual fund. Would I put $ 1 million into the portfolio field in FIRECalc or do I need to first reduce the 401K amount by the taxes that will be eventually be due?

Lowes versus HD I can only speak about my particular town -- but I just went to but a ton of stuff and I compared prices at both HD and Lowe's -- and HD was cheaper for every item. Guess where I'm doing business in the future.