I've made a few money/finance/FI related calculators and visualizations and I made a couple tax related ones recently that I thought I'd share. I think people here might enjoy playing with the calculators as interactivity and visuals can help you understand tax rates even if you already understand them mathematically.
The first is a sankey diagram of federal income tax (it doesn't include payroll taxes or state and local taxes):
Just choose your filing status and enter your income both regular and capital gainsidends and it'll distribute your income into different tax brackets where you can see how much is taxed vs kept. You can hover over the various links to get more information. If you make alot of income, the graph gets really big so watch out.
The 2nd calculator is a more holistic view of taxes across all incomes. It attempts to also show the fraction of income in each of the tax brackets. Basically you can hover (or click on mobile) on the graph to move the vertical dashed line to a specific income level (shown at the bottom). THat line then cuts across a bunch of different tax brackets, i.e. "bands" (regular and capital gains). The amount of the line in each tax band is the amount of your income subject to that tax rate. This one seems maybe a little more confusing to people that I've shared it with.
One of the things to look at is the fraction of income coming from capital gains vs regular income (via the slider on top). If you can shift your income to be mostly from capital gains, you can reduce your tax rate significantly.
I hope you find this interesting and maybe helpful. Feel free to share it to whoever and as always, I appreciate any feedback, suggestions etc. . . for making it clearer, better, more useful.
**sorry for clogging up for forum with duplicate posts**. The forum seemed to be frozen for me so I tried posting several times and eventually they all went through.
@CCCA ,
I looked at this. It's interesting and useful to many, but I'm not sure how useful it is to me.
(Thanks for doing it though!)
We're FIRED and have between $0 and $3,000 in W2 income, depending upon whether we amused ourselves with doing something that paid us. We have 401K/IRA RMDs, occasionally have capital gains, and we have rental houses and farm income.
Are 401K/IRA withdrawals are taxed the same as W2 income when it comes to Social Security and Medicare?
Rentals have depreciation to offset rental income. I really don't know whether anything is different for the sharecropped farmland taxwise or not.