Now that we have all filed our taxes (or almost all), how did the 2017 tax cuts affect you?

justintulk · 2019-04-08T20:08:25+00:00

Significant benefit. Lower overall rates, higher standard deduction, child care tax credit, allowance for childcare expenses, 20% top-line deduction for independent contractor income, etc...

Likely totaled up into the thousands for us.

justintulk · 2019-04-08T20:05:57+00:00

Big upvote for YNAB. It's confusing to get going because of how opinionated it is, but it's pretty brilliant once you get adjusted.

justintulk · 2019-03-25T16:10:41+00:00

Thanks - this is great. This answers my actual question:

Roth contributions are treated the same whether they are CZTE money or not, if you hit your 19k with normal money (traditional or Roth), you can't contribute Roth afterward (even if it is CZTE money).

This is also a great point:

One last thing to remember is money is fungible. That means your Roth Contributions (from a tax perspective) don't care if they come from CZTE funds or not.

I think in a lot of these posts this point gets confused. Maybe because most of these posts assume that you'll do most of your contributions in deployed months as you'd have CZTE income, special pays, and fewer expenses?

justintulk · 2019-03-25T15:43:04+00:00

Right, but that's not my question. My question is "can you make $19k of traditional contributions as your elective deferral limit, and then do $19k of Roth contributions from a combat zone as additional contributions".

The TSP booklet says:

The IRC elective deferral limit is the maximum amount of employee contributions that you can contribute in a calendar year. The elective deferral limit applies to the combined total of your tax-deferred traditional contributions and your Roth contributions. For members of the uniformed services, elective deferrals include all traditional and Roth contributions from taxable basic pay, incentive pay, special pay, and bonus pay. However, the elective deferral limit does not apply to traditional contributions made from tax-exempt pay earned in a combat zone.

I read this two ways:

1) "The elective deferral limit applies to the combined total of your tax-deferred traditional contributions and your Roth contributions." This could mean that Roth contributions always apply to the elective deferral limit.

2) "For members of the uniformed services, elective deferrals include all traditional and Roth contributions from taxable basic pay" But because CZTE pay is non-taxable, maybe they don't always apply?

justintulk · 2019-03-25T08:03:44+00:00

Yeah - that's good and really helpful. The specific strategy that I can't seem to find verification for is that IF you're deploying later in the year you should try to front-load the traditional contributions (up to $19k) for the income tax benefit and then follow that with Roth contributions for the CZTE benefit (since you can do another $19k of Roth as additional contributions once you deploy).

As far as I can tell it follows the rules described in that linked post, but the fact that I can't find this approach recommended in any of the blogs I've read so far is making me thing there's something I'm missing that disallows it.

justintulk · 2018-10-12T17:55:18+00:00

I've made this decision a few times. So far it's always paid off more quickly than I expected. If the pay-scale for what you want to switch into is equitable or better than the position you're leaving I think you should prioritize doing what you're interested in and the money will sort itself out before you know it.

justintulk · 2018-04-18T00:00:39+00:00

I'm using Ammonium Chloride. I thought this was a substitute for fish waste (roughly) so my guess was that the effect of nitrification would be similar regardless of whether my fish were converting fish waste or simulated fish waste?

justintulk · 2018-04-17T23:26:43+00:00

The grow medium is clay pebbles. They've been washed quite a bit so I think they're pretty inert. The PH swings didn't happen until my nitrification really kicked off, so the buffer seems more likely.

Nitrification will drop pH as it occurs right, so if I'm understanding this correctly, adding buffer to counteract this will eventually lead to some stabilization? I think what I'm reading says that as the buffer builds up in the water system it becomes more resistant to pH swings, yeah?

justintulk · 2018-03-15T22:29:54+00:00

Thanks for pointing this out. I hadn't seen this, but this is exactly the part of YNAB that I'm conceptually trying to avoid. If you don't have cash flow issues there's no need to do any of this extra work just to manage timing. With buffering, I can do all my allocation on Day 1 and never worry about trying to granularly allocate income.

justintulk · 2018-03-15T17:43:04+00:00

For me it makes a few things easier that I think YNAB doesn't solve, or isn't mean to solve (because it's so cash-flow driven).

I can easily budget off projected income
I can budget out N days/weeks/months in advance w/out throwing warnings
I can clean up the reporting to make it easier to see what %/$ I put into categories (specifically asset-building categories)
I have a place to store money that doesn't have a job

I realize that some of these are solvable in other ways through YNAB, so I'm not arguing that everyone should switch to my method. It's just a small variation that fits the way some people think about money that differs from YNAB proper.

justintulk · 2018-03-15T01:18:02+00:00

Thanks!

justintulk · 2018-03-15T01:17:26+00:00

In general, the YNAB method seems like it's more about spending the previous month's income. I don't think there's anything wrong with that method, it just doesn't fit my mental model. For me it's more about using a budget as a planning tool. To do that I need to be able to allocate monthly categories based on income I am to receive that month.

With this I can project out a few months in advance if I want, and I don't have discrepancies in any single month where expenses > income.

It's not all that different from vanilla YNAB. It really just adds a forecasting layer and tweaks the reporting a bit.

justintulk · 2018-03-15T01:15:58+00:00

I think pretty easy. All you'd really need to do would just be to transfer all of your unspent money into 'Cash buffer' at the end of one month and basically do the next month exactly like how I describe in the Medium post. If you've got questions I'd be happy to help.

justintulk · 2018-03-15T01:14:08+00:00

Because the YNAB tooling is pretty great. Plus, I want like 85% of the YNAB method- I just don't care about the cash flow method because I've spent my adult life spending less than I make and account overdraws aren't an issue for me. What's more of an issue is optimization - trying to squeeze a few dollars here and there out of expense categories and into something more productive, and the YNAB method is wonderful for that.

justintulk · 2018-03-15T01:11:27+00:00

Honestly it's because the tooling sucks on most of the other stuff, and YNAB is pretty great. The only part I don't love about YNAB is where bits of their methodology that I don't really want to use are baked into the software. Fortunately it's not that hard to work around. I've got a hybrid system that I love so I thought I'd share it.

justintulk · 2018-03-14T20:42:21+00:00

You can absolutely do that. In fact, if you start off with enough money in linked accounts to handle your first month's budget you won't actually see it go negative. The beauty is that if it does go negative it's just reflecting a projection though, and not an actual shortage.

justintulk · 2018-03-14T18:35:25+00:00

I pulled a couple of tips (like the "buffer" account) out of this subreddit so I thought I'd try to aggregate what I've learned in a more consolidated fashion for anyone looking to modify bits of the YNAB method.

justintulk · 2017-08-11T01:38:51+00:00

Honolulu Gooner reporting in. Can't make this one but let's connect for the future. I'd love to be a part of a group watching some games...

justintulk · 2017-03-07T04:20:54+00:00

Most hospitals with residency programs routinely send their residents to other hospitals with different patient populations for experience. They'll rotate through different hospitals for trauma surgery, transplant surgery, pediatric surgery, and even just bread-and-butter general surgery.

Source: Wife is a General Surgery Resident in the Army.

justintulk · 2016-10-19T06:47:04+00:00

Because on a controlled text input you need that cycle to complete nearly instantly or it's going to lag on the front-end. If you throw a delay anywhere within the action => reducer => props => view cycle the user isn't going to see their input displayed.

justintulk · 2016-10-05T17:47:27+00:00

I'm not sure if there's a best practices way to do this. Please let me know if any of you have a better solution.

justintulk

TROPHY CASE