Life Changes & Winding Down the ISA Experiment

Sometimes plans change, especially when we aren’t expecting it! Over the past few months, a few things have come together to cause us to make a decision to move next year. In short, we’ve always wanted to live further west (within England), further away from London. We only moved to our current area because I

Bridging to Retirement – Splitting SIPP & ISA Contributions

Edit 06Dec21: I realized that this is all completely wrong! You can get the same effect, without paying National Insurance, by just putting part of the money to the pension, then taking the 62% hit on the take home cash for an ISA. For example, for £1,000 of pre-tax income, put £475 in your salary

Tax Management in Traditional Retirement (Phase 3)

This is Part 3c of our Retirement Withdrawal Strategies series. Quick summary so far: Part 1: When can you access your retirement savings? Part 2: How to avoid paying US and UK tax again (or at least minimize them) Part 3a: Putting it together in Early Retirement Part 3b: Putting it together in Middle Retirement

Estimating Social Security for Americans in the UK

I’m back after a short break – a week on holiday in Cornwall, and another week just catching up. I’ll continue my withdrawal strategies series in due course, but this is another quick aside, which is related but not central to that series. A lot of people in the FIRE community, especially on the younger

Tax Management in Middle Retirement (Phase 2)

This is Part 3b of our Retirement Withdrawal Strategies series. Quick summary so far: Part 1: When can you access your retirement savings? Part 2: How to avoid paying US and UK tax again (or at least minimize them) Part 3a: Putting it together in Early Retirement Today, we’ll look at “Middle Retirement” or Phase

Putting it Together: Tax Management in Early Retirement (Phase 1)

This is Part 3a of our Retirement Withdrawal Strategies series. In Part 1, we looked at when you can actually access your retirement savings, dividing retirement roughly into three phases: In Part 2, we explored the tax-free buckets that you can use so you never pay US or UK tax again (or at least keep

RMDs vs Lifetime Allowance – Which Alligator Should You Focus On?

Fair warning: this post is for people who have reason to be concerned about both RMDs and the Lifetime Allowance. If you don’t have a Traditional 401k/IRA/etc. balance or you have no concerns about exceeding the LTA, you can skip on past – just focus on the one that affects you. Also – this one

Retirement Withdrawal Strategies – Part 1

I’ve been thinking about this one for a while, trying to find a way to make it simple and straightforward. There’s already some great work out there on withdrawal strategies, including from GoCurryCracker and the Mad Fientist/JL Collins, but they’re specific to Americans in the US. You could work out a similarly simple approach for

US Health Savings Account (HSA) (Account Options)

Here’s another account that you might bring over from the US. Unfortunately, while in the US this is the “ultimate retirement account“, in the UK it loses its shine and basically becomes a taxable brokerage account. That doesn’t make it bad, just not nearly as good. Synopsis You may already have an HSA from the

US Employer Pensions (401(k), etc.) (Account Options)

This is a big one – it might be limited in your ability to contribute moving forward, but for many Americans who move to the UK after starting their career in the US, you’ve got one or more employer pension accounts, possibly with substantial balances. For our purposes, the rules are pretty much the same