Can you have rentals and still collect SS?

Excellent question.......I wonder if I am not over preparing myself only to do myself wrong.

Yes, social security is collected and paid out based on "earned" income. Rentals are considered "passive" income...even though those of us in the biz know there's nothing passive about them if you self-manage.

From the article link below:

"Social Security only counts income from employment towards the retirement earnings test. Other kinds of income — including income from rental properties, lawsuit payments, inheritances, pensions, investment dividends, IRA distributions and interest — will not cause benefits to be reduced."

Ray,

Can the Govt rip you off? Sure they can.

Will they?

Depends. There is precedent for the Govt breaking it's promises. Ask any Native American living on a reservation. For more recent examples, look at how the Govt backed off the gold standard, refusing to pay gold in exchange for paper dollars. The Social Security Trust Fund, already a bunch of digital IOUs, is going to be insolvent in 2034 or sooner. Ditto Medicare about 5-6 years later. They can't keep those promises, even if they want to.

My guess is your success will count against you some day in the form of higher taxes to support those failed programs, reduced benefits, or a combination of both.

I do not plan on getting one penny from Social Security, Medicare, or my Military Pension, in spite of having paid into the first two all of my working career from my W-2 job and having served 23 years in the military. If I get anything, it's icing on the cake.

I had my Medicare premium quadrupled when we converted a Traditional IRA to a Roth. We are both paying over $600 a month for Medicare now.

Indeed -- that is a known issue with doing that conversion. It should go back to normal after a year (or 2, depending on how it was done).

-John...

The trick is you don't want to generate more EARNED income. Doing a Traditional to Roth conversion means you're taking EARNED income that was contributed to your Traditional Roth once-upon-a-time pretax and moving it to a post-tax account.

Voila, you have just "realized" (received) that amount as earned income, thus it impacts your SS benefit.

The one good part of the Traditional IRA is it makes your earned income appear to be less in the year during which you make the contribution. But you still are making a good decision in my book by taking the smaller tax hit now and keeping your earnings in the future tax free. IT should more than offset, though with inflation going nuts, it's anyone's guess what return rates will have to look like to keep up. So far, if you're not pulling down 10% or more, odds are you're behind the curve and losing purchasing power even though your dollar value in your investments are increasing.

I'm normally a huge fan of the stock market, and I'm staying in for the long-haul. But right now, my real estate investments are outperforming our IRAs and 401Ks by leaps and bounds.