Financial Essays and Tools

Under the SilGro home page for Alan Silverstein and Cathie Grow
Email me at ajs@frii.com
Last update: March 29, 2025

Some essays and tools from me, kind of a spacewise rather than timewise blog:

Philosophy

• Thoughts on the Philosophy of Money, Taxes, Saving, and Investing
• Thoughts on Cognitive Biases and Mental Accounting
• Brief Explanation of Mutual Funds
• Saving Money and Paying Taxes -- PDF of 14 PowerPoint slides I created for Junior Achievement Personal Finance high school training
• Financial Age Milestones -- list of interesting "milestone" ages for older and retired people
• Tradeoff Curve -- small PDF drawing I did trying to illustrate how many decisions in life involve trading between two competing alternatives
• Denying To The Grave -- summarized ideas from last chapter of a book

Social Security

• Thoughts on Starting a Pension (or SS) Early
• Summary List of Reasons to Start or Defer Social Security

• SS (Social Security) EMTR (Effective Marginal Tax Rate)
• Social Security Discounts and Break Even Ages -- output from, and link to, SS_BE.pl Perl script
• Social Security break-even calculator -- a spreadsheet created by a colleague and hosted here, on a similar theme as previous but quite different method and results

Other Retirement Issues

• Thoughts on Retirement Cash Flow -- simple models for how to decide if you're ready yet, and doing OK
• Thoughts on Retirement Tax Efficiency Planning -- tax optimization is important, and the rules change in retirement
• Thoughts on Retirement Income Tax Withholding -- you probably don't have to make quarterly estimated payments

Other Income Tax Issues

• Minimize Income Tax on Home Sale -- or other co-owned capital asset sold by the survivor
• Optimizing the ACA PTC (Premium Tax Credit)
• Optimizing Use of HSAs (Health Savings Accounts)

• Compute US federal income tax -- a UNIX shell (bash) script that knows the US federal income tax rates for every year beginning in 1987; does not know about reduced rates for preferential income (long term capital gains, qualified dividends, or capital gain distributions); but is handy just to view summary tables even if you don't run it

Miscellaneous

• HP Share Ownership Plan -- (old) info on buying/selling and tax handling, ancient but perhaps useful for original cost bases, and reminders of the rules