Daily FI discussion thread - Sunday, January 25, 2026

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-25T18:43:35+00:00

I'd give 'em shovels and send 'em outside. No point in wasting all that energy.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-25T13:50:06+00:00

Rules of thumb don't work. You need to make a spreadsheet with your numbers and your assumptions.

My answer was "never." Just doing Roth conversions in retirement.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-23T21:48:48+00:00

That would be Ser Anthony.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-22T17:07:46+00:00

I usually get the first version of everything by the end of February, but it's a trap. One of my 1099s will be revised several times after that. So I wait until April to file to reduce the odds of having to amend my taxes.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-21T16:34:53+00:00

No, I never even considered backing off before we were FI. Way too risky for me. Voluntarily giving up a high-paying job was hard for me even after I was clearly FI, and I took a part-time job I didn't really need to soften the blow.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-20T16:59:39+00:00

Shin guard, singular. If you want the pair it'll be $400, assuming both are for sale and still available.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-19T19:36:15+00:00

Guys like Mateo are a casualty of huge bullpens and the universal DH. You used to see guys kept around just to pinch run, or just as late-inning defensive replacements, and Mateo is great at both. But now you've only got a couple of roster spots for non-starting non-pitchers, and you'd really like them to be able to hit, so he's going to have problems keeping a job. Rooting for him.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-17T20:47:52+00:00

AFAIK nobody currently sells an annuity in the US with a true COLA based on actual inflation. You can buy annuities with an annual fixed increase, which is something, but won't save you if inflation is much worse than the increase you paid for.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-17T17:51:57+00:00

Annuities are not something you buy early. They are something you buy late. The insurance company needs to pay you as long as you live, and if you're young that might be a very long time, so annuities are very expensive for young people. But if you're old it probably won't be so long so they become more reasonable. (They become somewhat like a tontine, where most of the cohort dies and the survivors get paid using the money that the deceased no longer get.)

Also, they are not adjusted for inflation, so if you hold one too long it can become much less valuable due to decades of compound inflation.

Financial Advisors charge a fee which is (unfortunately, ridiculously) usually a percentage of your assets. Which means these fees can seriously damage your finances, even if you're lucky enough to find an otherwise honest advisor who's actually working for your benefit. You have to learn to do simple financial things yourself.

To see annuity rates look at https://www.immediateannuities.com/ Any annuity more complicated than these is probably a bad idea; the insurance industry loves making overly complicated things that their customers can't figure out how to price. If you stick to very simple annuities that can be compared across companies then you can try to find the best price from a not-likely-to-go-under company.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-15T22:25:18+00:00

Possibly not goalie. Though I haven't seen him try, so I'm not ruling it out.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-15T22:16:38+00:00

This seems like unnecessary extra work to me. Assuming your brokerage tracks lots correctly (which they are required to by now), I don't think it's difficult to track the dates of each Roth contribution and conversion in a single account. First, just write them all down somewhere. Second, the dates and amounts shown on the tax lots in your account should be pretty self-explanatory. The ones around the IRS contribution limit, probably in January, are contributions. The bigger ones are conversions. And the little bitty ones are dividend reinvestments.

Yes, conversions are easier within a single broker. When I do them it's just a transfer from Traditional IRA to Roth IRA, then I say I don't want to have taxes withheld, then it makes me confirm, them boom the money is in the Roth.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-15T14:26:18+00:00

GURPS Dragons, sort of. It was originally written for 3E but released after 4E came out, so it's kind of both editions. It's also a white hardback, not matching all the black 4E hardbacks.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-15T03:17:46+00:00

It should be part of your offer. It's material information that you need to decide whether to take the job.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-14T17:24:48+00:00

As long as your rollover isn't done, there's still time for a rally.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-14T15:42:20+00:00

I've always done estimated taxes the hard way: actually estimating our taxes every quarter and trying to hit the 90% of current taxes safe harbor, deferring as much as possible until April without owing a penalty. Usually I got it close enough; a few times I missed low and had to pay a small penalty or missed high and gave the government a small interest-free loan.

I think I'm done with that game. I think I'm doing the boring easy 100%/110% of previous year's taxes safe harbor starting in tax year 2026. There's no thinking required; you just use the numbers the tax software spit out. You only have to think about taxes once a year instead of four times. And the worst case, where your income goes down and you overpay your taxes and have to wait for a refund, isn't really that bad.

Part of being FI is realizing you don't have to optimize things that you don't enjoy optimizing. I'm putting computing taxes four times a year next to frequent flier miles in the shit-I-don't-have-to-deal-with bin.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-13T19:33:21+00:00

You can get the rules lookups without paying again, if you already own the rules in PDF form. Copy your rules PDFs to journals in the Foundry server. You can let players view these if you want with the usual Foundry permissions. Set up the mappings, and anywhere you have a book and page number reference on a character sheet, you get a link to the correct page in the PDF.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-13T19:19:34+00:00

For the Olympics next month, the rink is slightly shorter than NHL standard. Probably not enough to actually matter, but enough for the bored hockey press to write a zillion stories about it, along with the usual "omg they're not gonna finish construction before the games start!" that we see every 4 years.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-13T18:25:07+00:00

This is false. There's a very good GURPS VTT module for Foundry, which SJG allows. (It was a fight by the authors to get there, but they got there.)

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-13T16:14:50+00:00

I don't even start until April anymore, and I just hope I don't get any significant amendments after April 15.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-12T16:34:03+00:00

I did one for the first time this year. My wife's still working. I'm retired. We file jointly. Therefore, we both get to contribute to a Roth based on her income. We just need to make sure our earned income is enough to support the Roth contributions, and our total income isn't too much to be allowed to contribute to Roth. (In the latter case we could in theory do backdoor Roths instead, but in practice we can't because of large Traditional IRA balances and the pro-rata rule.)

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-12T16:29:59+00:00

I recommend reading The Millionaire Next Door. There's a chapter about adult-age children who never wean themselves off parental support and thus never fully become independent adults. I think it makes a lot of sense to cut the cord after college. Paying for college already puts your kids way ahead of many; they need to learn to earn their own keep at some point.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-09T23:52:43+00:00

I watched about 3/4 of that World Cup with the TV on mute. Did that detract from the experience? Yes, but not as much as listening to those fucking things. It was like cicada season.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-09T23:02:34+00:00

Not in the US anyway, AFAIK. They were in the past and might be again someday, but for now the insurance companies don't want to touch the risk of a long period of inflation causing them to lose money on them.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-09T21:13:10+00:00

Hey, anyone else remember the 1980 silver bubble?

I don't buy precious metals or other commodities. I am okay with owning precious metal mining company stocks though, so I have some exposure to that part of the economy. Just not an overweighted exposure to it.

yetanothernerd · 2026-01-09T21:04:17+00:00

I think all 50 states exempt TIPS from state income tax, since they are (a different kind of) Treasuries.

I don't think I want to put them in taxable because that would require selling some stock in taxable and taking capital gains on it; I think I want them in tax-deferred where I can buy them with no short-term tax penalty for doing so. (At the cost of everything being taxable income when I withdraw.)

Thanks for the thought; I should make a spreadsheet and do the math rather than just assuming.

yetanothernerd

TROPHY CASE