I have a hard decision to make soon and that’s how much of my salary I will defer into the future. A key problem that comes with a higher income levels is higher and higher taxes. My employer allows me to defer my compensation into the future (at least 5 years) which has a net…
Category: Tax Strategy
Evaluating Municipal Bonds
I’ve been writing about municipal bonds lately largely because I love the tax free interest these bonds generate and it helps with taxes so I’m writing about munis yet again. This time I am going to write about my decision making process for which bonds to buy. Lately, I am getting a flood of municipal…
Financial Regrets: FSA Account
One of my family’s biggest challenges are taxes. We often keep getting pushed into higher tax brackets and now we hover between 24% and 35% depending many different variables each year. To help drive down some of my W-2 income, I opened an FSA account this year and it has been the worst mistake of…
My 2023 Tax Autopsy
I wrote about my $15,000 tax bill on this post and I’ve been conducting an autopsy on how my money got murdered in the brutal manner that it happened. Preparation Review Documentation: I took a look at all my W-2’s, brokerage accounts, bank accounts,real estate business records, taxation records from various jurisdictions. I confirmed all…
I’m Buying $30,000 in Municipal Bonds (Taxable Bucket)
As a result of my $15,000 tax debacle I had this year for the 2023 tax year, I decided I needed to do something drastic and sensible so I’m buying $30,000 in municipal bonds to generate tax free income. I already bought $10,000 of ETF NEA which is a municipal bond ETF that is currently…
Thailand & Taxes 2024
In my continuing quest to find a potential expat retirement spot, I came across a recent video on YouTube that has some good sources of data on changes to taxes this year in Thailand. The World Wide Income Tax Bandwagon More and more countries are starting to tax income worldwide even though that particular country…
Risk Management: Taxes, Real Estate & Rental Properties
The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on the tax risks of owning multiple residences or real estate in different states and it’s something that my wife and I have had to deal with over the past few years. Here’s a key quote from the article, “States are getting more aggressive to avoid missing…
Investing From A Taxable Bucket
It’s complicated. I wanted to start this post with the phrase ‘it’s complicated’ because if you don’t like complicated things then this post isn’t for you. In my post, “How I’m Investing My Buckets of Money: Taxable” bucket I gave an example of how I’m investing funds from my taxable bucket but I merely scratched…
Spain Taxes Are Worse Than We Thought
In my post, What They Don’t Tell You About About Retiring Overseas, I wrote about how my wife and I are avid travelers. With one of our kids now seemingly living in Europe on a semi-permanent basis it makes a great deal of sense for us to consider buying a home somewhere in Europe to…
I Owe Uncle Sam $15,000
With April upon us the tax deadline is looming and I decided to sit down this past weekend to work on our taxes. My go to tool is TurboTax and I have a love/hate relationship with this software but that’s a story for another day. After going through dozens of documents and forms the software…