🎙️ Episode #509 – Could your rental business survive if you disappeared for 30 days? Wesley Portegies and I break down five systems landlords need… The post Could Your Rentals Survive 30 Days Without You? appeared first on Coach Carson.

Hey everyone! I hope you finished your 2025 taxes because October 15th is right around the corner. This year, I put off finishing our taxes until the very last moment. Everything was mostly done back in April, but I had to wait on a few K1s. I filed an extension and ignored it until I got back from visiting my dad in Thailand. Right after I returned, our tenant moved out, and I’ve been up to my elbows in paint, repairs, and scheduling contractors. Currently, I’m pulling up old carpet and refinishing the stairs. This will save me around $1,500. Home improvement is ridiculously expensive these days. Anyway, I finally wrapped up our taxes last week and sent them off. With that off my plate, it’s time to tackle my next big financial project: figuring out our Roth conversion strategy for 2026. This is Mrs. RB40’s first full year of retirement, which means our household income is significantly lower than in previous years. This is a good opportunity to shift money from our Traditional IRA into a Roth IRA while we’re sitting in a lower tax bracket. The bottom line is this will help lower our taxes in the future. Why Bother with a Roth Conversion? Tax-Free Growth & Withdrawals: Once money is inside a Roth account, investment earnings grow tax-free, and qualified withdrawals down the road are also completely tax-free. No Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs): Roth IRAs do not require original owners to take lifetime RMDs. This will help the account compound longer. Estate planning: If my son inherits our Roth IRA, he won’t have to pay any tax on the account. Our Traditional IRA is substantially larger than our Roth IRA. That’s pretty standard for my generation because we could contribute much more to our 401k than Roth accounts over the last 30 years. The main problem with a large Traditional IRA is RMDs down the road. If our Traditional IRA keeps growing at a healthy rate, it’ll be quite large by the time we turn 75. We’ll be pushed into a higher tax bracket by RMDs. I know, I know… This is a first-world problem. But why not optimize our taxes with a little planning? I’m 53 this year. With our lower earned income, we have a window of opportunity to move some money into our Roth IRA. You don’t have to pay the 10% early withdrawal penalty when you do a Roth conversion, making it a great chance to draw down our Traditional IRA a little bit. How Much Should We Convert in 2026? I tried using the tax software to model our conversion limits, but it was pretty clunky. This kind of task is where our AI overlord can shine. I surrendered to the inevitability and asked Gemini for some assistance. Here is our estimated income for 2026: Mrs. RB40’s pension and back pay: $42,000. She had some vacation payout from the previous year. Blog and side hustle:

I didn’t have a name for it back then — there was no “life hack,” no plan, nothing clever. But looking back, it was the first time I ever got a real taste of time freedom, years before I knew that was even a thing worth going after. I was in my early twenties, freshly … Read more

In this week’s stock market outlook, Joel Wenger examines the current market trend, price performance, and headline risks.

Hello from New Hampshire, where the air is chilly and the leaves are changing color. It’s finally here! The moment a bunch of you have been waiting for – the newest Income and Net Worth survey data for the United States is now live on DQYDJ. You can quickly find the update you want most on one of these pages: Income Posts Net Worth Posts I’ve also updated the Individual and Household Income by Year […]

Poverty among Americans age 65 and older rose for the fifth consecutive year and has jumped roughly 45% since 2019 — the highest rate of any age group, an AARP Foundation analysis found. 

Effort can be quite annoying. Sitting on your ass is much easier. But the effects of effort are amazing, priceless even! And it works in pretty much all circumstances. Effort makes your life better, in almost every measurable way. However, it remains effort, it does not come easy, it doesn’t come quick. It takes…. effort! But at the end of the day effort is priceless. Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay Less Effort I was thinking the other day, which takes effort, about that our lives take a lot of effort. But that we as a society, and thus many of us on a personal level, are moving more and more away from effort. Lives need to be lived without effort, or at least as little as possible. We drive everywhere, we don’t cook but order, we don’t go to the shops but we have stuff delivered. Yards need to not have green, you don’t fix broken stuff but you buy new. You don’t eat healthier and workout, but you get a pill or injection. And so forth, and so on. All of this has a major impacts on society, and not for the better either. For example, because we drive everywhere, and often sit at that location (desk, couch, chair, etc.), we move too little. Which has a plethora of negative health consequences, which raises the overall cost for healthcare in our lovely country (not to even mention all the exhaust gasses and micro-dust). Another simple example is a yard with artificial grass & plants and loads of tiles. It takes a lot effort to put them in once (often by a landscaper, not the owner mind you!), but after that you rarely have to vacuum of mop the yard. Great, less effort. But biodiversity takes a hit, water management in the street takes a massive hit during currently more intense rain storms and home life becomes too hot to handle (heat retention). Which again, costs society a lot of money mitigating the negative consequences. Once you start thinking about this in more detail, it applies to pretty much every single part of one’s life. Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay A good thing? Now, to say that less effort is always a bad thing, is perhaps too negative. Our index funds were a great way to need less effort with regards to investing, but the benefits are a more stable portfolio, more diversification and still a great return. Great! But after a lot of effort thinking, I still came up with far more negative consequences than positives. Heck, beyond the index funds, I struggled to find stuff where less effort is actually a good thing. And mind you, even if there are more good things to be found, it often only provides you with just a bit more time. But if you then use that time to watch your phone or TV, it’s not really helping now, is it?! Obstacles Unfortunately, we often realise that we

This post was inspired by Rhys Martell the founder of Well Built Wealth. Rhys does a wonderful job of educating Canadians on all things retirement. I’ve learned a bunch from Rhys and several other advice-only planners. Rhys offered a video (shown below) offering six ways we can lower our taxes in retirement. While it’s a fantastic video, it’s also a good opportunity to ‘put it in writing’, and at times with a little more context. […]