I can finally join this thread too. Four tax returns and the estimated taxes. I rue the day I decided to start selling designated shares on schedule D, but my BIL the CPA has been working 100-hour weeks since February so I'm not sniveling.
Cute Fuzzy Bunny said:
Since we're all finishing our taxes, anyone wanna share their tax efficiency?
Turbotax spits it out for you on the cover sheet it prints with the returns.
0.0%. Oh, wait, that's the kid's tax returns. It's not totally zero since she has to turn over two bucks to the state.
7.66%. We took some rebalancing cap gains when Tweedy, Browne was $25/share and couldn't
possibly go any higher (it's ~$28.50/share now but the rest of the portfolio has caught up). Those Roth IRA conversions add a bit, too, but we came in just $100 short of the top of the 15% bracket. I was a little off the dividends & cap gains but I made it up on the tax deductions.
Including state taxes our total percentage of taxable income was 11.74%. That's a little higher than I like (last year was 8% when we weren't taking cap gains) but it beats the heck out of the 18-23% we were paying for almost two decades before I ER'd. It'll probably be back down to 8% in 2006.
No complaints. I built a spreadsheet tracking nearly 30 years of spouse & I working since my first paycheck on Murrysville Golf Course. Our retirement portfolio and our net worth both rose last year, thanks to the small-cap stock & real estate markets. Our retirement portfolio is catching up to our lifetime salary. Our net worth is finally closing in on our lifetime total of our salary, interest, dividends, & cap gains. Over all those years of working, we've paid 13.04% of our total earned & unearned wealth in taxes.
Now it's time to take a look at the college-cost spreadsheet, an exercise I haven't done for a year or two. Can we say "scholarship"? We'd better learn how to...