Fall of 2023 brought two new things to my
retirement.
First, I kind of wasn’t retired anymore. My friend Jim convinced me to emerge from
retirement to do a little “consulting” on a software project that
involved
attempting to resurrect something we had both worked on back in the 90s. He rightly figured that this work would be
right up my alley, partially because I might somewhat remember this old
code
but mostly since I was used to trying to keep old, antiquated, obsolete
systems
running—as I had done with air traffic control software for most of my
career. Another selling point was that
most of the
work could be done at home where I could set my own pace and decide how
many
hours to actually put in.
Turns out, it was really not beneficial for me to
earn a
whole lot of money, since after about $20,000 or so, my Social Security
deposits—which I had decided to start collecting as soon as I could, at
62
(figuring I should get all I can back out of the system before it
collapsed)—would start to be reduced.
In addition, I had been utilizing a marketplace
health
insurance plan (aka, Obama-care) since I retired. That
is literally the only option for the
tens of millions like me with pre-existing conditions (in my case, a
stroke in
2007 and a hole in my heart). Until
Obama-care, people with pre-existing conditions like myself that were
not
employed or could not get health insurance through an employer could
not get
insurance—at any price. So, thank you
Barak Obama and Joe Biden for allowing me to retire at 60 years old
(and, by
the way, screw all you politicians who want to go back to making health
insurance unavailable for millions and millions of us).
The point of the above divergent rant is that the
cost of
marketplace health plans is dependent on the amount of income you
have—the more
you make, the more you pay. So, every
dollar I earned consulting meant I would have to pay more in income tax
to make
up for the money I had “shorted” the government on my health care
premiums.
The bottom line is that I had many incentives to
really
limit the amount of work I did—as if I need more incentive to not work.
The other major development in the fall of 2023
was my
diagnosis of prostate cancer.
This topic seemed worthy of its own page which
starts here.
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