Sean Mullaney
speaker
1,197 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 23 Apr
Sean Mullaney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Now I will say Irma starts biting when we become single, either we're single going into retirement or become a widow.
And that's when Irma can bite.
But like you were saying, Robert, it tends to be more of a nuisance.
It tends to be a tax on affluent single retirees.
just the way it functions, that's just how it breaks down.
But even then, IRMA tends to be an indication that things generally speaking worked out well in your financial life and perhaps you had some tax inefficiencies in the later part of your life when they don't impact you as much.
This is one of the lessons of the book is that when we think about taxes, we should think about when are they the most impactful?
I would argue that the most impactful when you're 40 years old, you got two kids at home, you got a spouse at home, and you haven't built up sufficient assets to be financially independent or whatever you want to call it.
Boy, paying taxes then isn't that great because you got two mouths to feed, you have a spouse, you haven't built up all this financial wealth.
And even early retirement, the beginning of retirement isn't the greatest time to pay taxes either because look, you might have 30 or 40 years of retirement you have to fund.
Paying some money to Uncle Sam at that point isn't that great because now that's money that could have been invested for your financial future.
To the extent people worry about sequence of returns risks, not something I worry a whole lot about, but it's not a nothing concern.
Paying taxes up front in the early part of retirement is not a great thing to do.
So if we're going to have, say, Irma in the later years of our retirement because we did traditional retirement accounts a little too much, say, well, you've essentially picked a really good time to pay tax because at that point it can't be as impactful to your financial future.
At that point, these inefficiencies, sometimes I refer to these inefficiencies as garbage time touchdowns, right?
You use these traditional retirement accounts, you won against the IRS when you were working, you then spent down taxable brokerage accounts early in the first part of retirement, you won against the IRS, and then maybe later in life,
you have these inefficiencies that come after decades of defeating the IRS.
Maybe what you've done is you've picked a pretty good time to pay taxes, because at that point, one of two things is true.
If you're paying IRMA, you're financially affluent, you're well above most Americans in terms of financial success.
So you're paying the surcharge or maybe a little incremental tax on the income tax side at a time where you're already wealthier than most of your cohorts in that age group and overall Americans.
Showing 1161–1180 of 1,197 · page 59 of 60
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