The following is only as far as federal taxes go, as I live in a tax free state so I have no idea about state taxes.
Have you seen Go Curry Cracker's blog about never paying taxes again in retirement? Cause it is completely true and so far, even with the changes that may come into play, it's likely to stay that way as far as I can tell.
https://gocurrycracker.com/never-pay-taxes-again/I don't generate enough investment income to pay any taxes so I just file them like regular folk do before April 15th or whenever the 1099s show up.
I'm well below the 15% taxable bracket limit for married filing jointly, so even though all dividends, cap gains and RMDs I make are reported on my tax return as simple (but not earned) income, they are not enough to push me into the 25% taxable bracket and thus trigger any taxes owed. So zero taxes.
I'll probably explain this weird, but take a look at the brackets for 2017 here:
https://www.taxact.com/tools/tax-bracket-calculator Tax rate | Single | MFJ | MFS | HOH |
10% | Up to $9,525 | Up to $19,050 | Up to $9,525 | Up to $13,600 |
15% | $9,526 - $38,700 | $19,051 - $77,400 | $9,526 - $38,700 | U$13,601 - $51,850 |
So based off of that, if you are single, you can generate up to $38,700 in investment cap gains/dividends... but as long as you're under that amount on your taxes, you pay zero for the federal portion because dividends and capital gains do not require taxes paid on them if you are in the 15% or below bracket.
Now I do have a required minimum distribution (RMD) due to an inherited IRA, and that is also taxed differently. But because my income is so low, it is cancelled out by the standard deduction. There may come a point where the RMD is insanely large and I might have to pay taxes on it, but that would be a 1st world problem and I'm doing my best to use the iIRA as my main account to try to deplete it before it gets too large or runs into my own IRA distributions in a few decades.
If you're married filing jointly (MFJ) then you get a ridiculous by MMM forum standards of $77,400 to work up to. I seriously don't think I could even come up with ways to spend that amount of money, so I control the amount of income (investment selloffs/withdrawals) to make sure I stay within the amount that nicely covers the year's expenses. I withdraw about once every quarter to cover the coming quarter's expenses, but 3rd quarter I tend to skip any investment and track the amount of projected dividends/cap gains for the big year end distribution so I have some wiggle room.
NOTE: I keep our income generated low enough to hit the ACA sweet spot. If the subsidies go away, I'll no longer worry about keeping the investment income lowish/monitoring the expenses/income generated as closely, but there's no way I'd every spend up to the top of the MFJ taxable bracket.
Now if you expect to spend way more than $77K in retirement, there will be taxes, so you likely should try playing with the different scenarios since things like kids and other stuff may drop your taxable income down due to EIC and such, but I have no idea about all that. Here is the TurboTax TaxCaster that might help to see how this stuff might shake out:
https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/calculators/taxcaster/If you're on the MMM forum, I'd like to think you'd be able to live a pretty lavish lifestyle at or below the 15% taxable bracket ranges tho.