A Few Useful Finds for Life After Work — Issue #10

Hi from Stefan,

Welcome to the tenth issue of this biweekly newsletter.

Nothing here is sponsored or written for compensation.

Tax-efficient bequests

Wade Pfau, author of the Retirement Planning Guidebook, also hosts the Retire With Style podcast. The recent episodes have each focused on a section of the guidebook.

This week’s episode is How to Leave More Wealth to Your Children After Taxes.

The latest helpful Wall Street Journal quiz

Five Questions to Help You Make Better Financial Decisions

A great museum

We were recently in Michigan to see family, and visited the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn.

It has a huge and fascinating collection of historical American automobiles, both passenger and racing — including the Ford GT40 that Gurney and Foyt drove to victory at Le Mans in 1967. We spent a few hours there and only had time for the automobiles. I want to go back for at least a full day to see the other collections, including aviation, furniture, agriculture, textiles, and more.

Product update

Many of you asked for the ability to reserve part of your portfolio for a legacy goal or future long-term care needs. That capability is now live. The updated Methodology Paper explains how the model incorporates the legacy constraint. The spreadsheet report now shows the reserved portion of the portfolio over time, and the web results page includes a new graph of projected portfolio balance.

If you haven’t run your plan recently, this is a good time to revisit it. Try it with and without a legacy goal to see how your after-tax spending capacity changes.

Up next in product enhancements: the site will import the list of any existing TIPS that you own. If you already own TIPS, the model will take those into account as part of covered base income, and recommend only any new TIPS that would be needed to meet your base income target.

Warmly,
Stefan Sharkansky, PhD
Founder of The Best Third