Rates are crashing and fuel to the moon!

We are 31ish all in . Live between Atlanta and Augusta Georgia. We paid 154 for the house and 2 acres in 2007. County says it's worth 410 now. I almost wish they'd just send me a check for it , but don't really know where we'd go. We're within 10 miles of our son and daughters homes and we like being close to the grandkids.

 

Wow, property taxes still low when comparing to Chicago suburbs.

 

Oh yeah, Chicago suburbs are absolutely insane

 

Because most of their their income and sales taxes go to subsidizing down state.

Which, to be clear, I'm perfectly fine with. Just pointing out the reason for the high property taxes.

 

To get 73k after taxes you'd need to make over 100k at a company job. To make 100k at a company job you'd need to work 70+ hours a week 50 weeks a year. I only had to work for 6 months 55 hours a week. If i worked as much as a company driver did I'd be making well over 200k in equivalent after tax wages.

It's not just the fact that I make more than double what company drivers make per hour, but it's also that being self employed I have significantly more tax write offs available.

I live on 30k a year though so at 73k I'm saving 60% of my income. Why work hard all year when I can live on 40% of my income working for 6 months out of the year?

I'd rather take the other 6 months to pursue hobbies and interest or bs on here with you in this case lol.

 

My property taxes are about $3200 and insurance is $3600 a year.

 

You forgot about what you employer pays for..

life, health,dental 401k match insurance.

Single truck O/op needs to gross 195K a year just to keep up with company paid drivers "netting" 55k a year.

 

And…?

 

I thought someone might mention that and I did think about that. My health insurance is under 200 dollars a month on Marketplace.Gov due to getting a $500 a month subsidy. If I get my MAGI (Modified Adjusted Gross Income) over 40k I would lose subsidies and wind up having to pay back as much as 6,000 dollars for the year. Fortunately, as a self employed person I can contribute to my own Solo 401k (33,500) and HSA (4,300) to keep my MAGI down around that 40k level. Most jobs health insurance I see are charging over 200 dollars a month so I figure I'm actually doing better than company guys on that.

Life insurance is of no value to me being a single guy who doesn't plan to get married or have kids, but a policy for a healthy 32 year old would be less than 50 bucks a month so it's pretty much a nothingburger at $600 a year. Call that a wash against my cheaper health insurance costs.

Now 401k match if you max out your employee contribution would be 23,500 * .05 (5% match) = $1,175 or if you calculate it as being a 5% match of total salary instead of contribution would be 55,000 * .05 = $2,750.

However, that's not taking into account things like Vesting and the fact that you're extremely limited in what you can invest your 401k in. The high fee mutual funds you may be locked into over the long term could cost you significantly more than the match you're getting whereas with my Solo 401k I'm free to invest in low expense ratio ETF's.

If you look at the difference in growth of a portfolio with fee's of .1% vs 1%

After 30 years: contributing 2k a month with a 10% Annual ROR

• Portfolio 1 (0.1% expense ratio) grows to $4,520,976
• Portfolio 2 (1% expense ratio) grows to $3,661,487
• Difference between the two portfolios = $859,489

That 0.9% extra expense cost nearly $860K over 30 years! Expense ratios make a huge impact over time.

 

And I don’t know about you, but I don’t go through all the BS, time and extra liability to make the same as a company driver. But Hey! You have at it.