Lion ponderings

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPrq-MMd-1k Reviewing british biker's review of the villages, it could be the closest analogue to the current location, in terms of an uninterrupted bike path between destinations.  Having said that, lions are rarely on the bike path except for speed workouts & those are becoming rarer with age. The 3 mane destinations: Brownwood Paddock Square   Lake Sumter Landing Spanish Springs    It's 8 miles from end to end.      It was all farmland when lions left.    The box is 5x7 miles.  Targ & wally are not in the 3 mane destinations but still inside the box.  The cheapest rentals all seem to be outside the box.  Most of the rentals are houses now. The smallest apartments there are currently in the $1200's.  With all the fees, they're going to be $1500.  This compares to the coast which is going to be over $2000 with fees.  Largo is the most walkable.   Titus...

After paying another huge tax bill & pondering more cash in tax advantaged accounts, the problem was the chance of capital gains tax actually being higher than regular income tax.  The 12% tax bracket when counting standard deduction is now up to $63k.  The 1st $12k are only 10%.  If the stonks are in a after tax account, interest rates or the cash balance is 0 by the time the stonks are sold, lions could pay 15% instead of 12% on the capital gains.  Most of the IRA funds are currently in dividend paying stonks, which would be taxed at 24% in Calif*.  The dividend is less than what cash is earning, though, for now.  The amount of cash which could be moved to the IRA's would still be paltry, despite every effort to decrease the tax burden.  A lot of cash is going to be needed for housing & transitioning.  It could cost 15% capital gains instead of 12% income tax to raise it from stonk sales in the after tax account.  On the other paw, ...

The tax code ever multiplies in complexity.  Where 401k catchup contribution was previously defined only by age, it now is defined by age & income.  Over 150k puts you into a roth 401k after $24500.  The lion kingdom, making below average income, will encounter the limit in 2 more pay periods.  Most everyone else in the bay area has already encountered it. Betterment only allows defining fixed percentages to contribute to the roth & traditional in every pay period while the tax code only defines specific dollar amounts to contribute in the entire year.  After the next pay period, the lion kingdom would have to change the setting to 55.56% in the roth 401k & 44.44% in the traditional 401k.  In 2 pay periods, it would have to be changed to 100% roth to keep a 401k rounding error from going over the limit.  Then, presumably betterment would cap the roth so the total of the 2 didn't exceed $32,500.  The settings would have to hit right bet...

 The lion kingdom got dinged yet again.  It seems they now require quarterly withholding from 1099 interest payments, regardless of whether you stayed below the safe harbor. The debate began on whether to withhold, keep paying penalties, or switch to 1 year T bills.  The amount withheld is always a guess & the lost compounding could be far greater than necessary.  Withholding double the necessary amount would be worse than the penalties. The penalty might be less than surrendering that amount during last year's bull market. With interest rates soon to drop back below 2% & itemized deductions returning, it might not matter.  There's always a high likelihood of extended unemployment. It's truly dystopian for the government to borrow twice its GDP, then start requiring quarterly tax payments on the interest for the national debt after 25 years of it not mattering, then charge a penalty for not paying the new quarterly taxes. Suspect the very wealthy pay pen...

 Lost in space was 1 of the 1st downloadable D-1 quality trailers but a terrible movie.  It was a missing piece of late 90's lion experience, a formative piece of the 1st gootube generation's childhood.  William Hurt was peaking, right before Dark City.  Lions believe "no-one ever listens to me" in Dark City referred to captain West ignoring him in Lost in Space.  That line never made sense to lions, otherwise. The bitchy bratty female child star, the preposterous dialog between West & blond hottie, the 90's industrial design, the never ending spoilings from Dr. Smith, definitely made it a house of pain.  It brought back how much young lion hated Dr. Smith & Giligan of 70's TV fame.  What was the purpose of those 2? Also, wasn't Dr. Smith still going to mutate into a spider after the heroic escape?     Remember a time when SGI was going to dominate the PC market, everything was going to have a big curvy plastic enclosure, & all li...

 Finally discovered you can bring up the transcript for any video, disable time stamps, select all the text & copy it to a text editor.  Then you can search it or skim it without scrubbing through the video. Normally the transcript window only shows a few lines at a time.  It allows drag selecting the entire video though. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   It came to pass that for all dividends where at least 50% came from interest on treasuries, the fraction of the dividends comprised of interest on treasuries was exempt from state tax.  This didn't matter for a generation because interest was 0, but all that changed in 2023. Taxpayers are expected to research the percentage of all their dividends which is from treasuries.  It was negligible in times of negative interest.  The percentage is listed in the back of the brokerage statement, in a section called INCOM...

  Open wide, motherfuckers.  This end of the 2 headed economy is going supersonic.  The lion kingdom has more than the value of a house in the stonk market, so in terms of missing out on  the top head of dual headed inflation, lions probably have that covered.  Real estate is a volatile market just like stonks, manely investor funded rather than owner occupied nowadays, & not diversified.  Stonks & real estate are both in the top head, but stonk prices won't self limit because they don't count as inflation. The 2 big risks are the pre rate cut media blitz & the pre election fear of Kamal.  It's been 30 years of nearly continuous democrat rule, but so far no sudden wealth tax.  Obama delivered a new tax on capital gains, a 4% bump for realized gains & only for AGI above $200k. Remember the good old days 10 years ago when $200k wasn't poverty?  Everyone is getting hit by the NIIT nowadays. It's surprising Ego Monger's husband fo...