Upper-class retirees can’t believe how wealthy they are. And the dumbest thing you can do in America, tax-wise, is to work for wage and salary income.
A few weeks ago I posted my 2023 REHP article on Quora explaining how early retirees earning a max-FICA income from their mid to late 20’s, can quit working around age 45 or so and still get 77% of the maximum SS check while paying only about half the lifetime FICA taxes. Quora banned me for perpetrating a scam. {{ LOL }}
No scam. Just the US Federal income tax system and how it screws middle-class workers.
The S&P 500 grew 20-fold over the past 30 years. You didn’t have to do much more than sit back and watch it grow.
CONGRATULATIONS!!! from this retired (amongst other ‘things’) publisher, for a truly remarkable reporting coup capturing our insane and fundamentally corrupt era.
Yeap, I never intended it, give money away on a level beyond my politically radical childhood dreams, but I am incidentally wealthy…. Never got the algorithms figured out and nailed like you did, I just blundered into it all.
Fun mostly, but with an eye to increasing value. But I was amazed when the neighborhood went from tired old hollywood tech guys and ancient brain addled hippies to very in and sheik rock and roll execs and Persian zillionaires….
And I had invested heavily in Silicon Valley stuff at the right time and chickened out at the right time…. mostly by luck but also by reading METAR,