> Some states allow you to break a lease without a penalty ... or if you join the military active duty

Just some added info, this specific reason is actually a federal law known as SCRA, and lessors don't have a choice in it. There's specific rules but they must let you break the lease early. Some states have more strict SCRA laws (for lessors), but they can't be less strict than the federal version.

> the government knows how much I make already

Taxes aren't based only on what you earn. They're also based on your filing status for that year, how many dependents you have, account interest earned that didn't generate a form (IIRC most banks don't send this unless it's over $10), money you gifted over the annual exclusion limit (not taxed until you use up your lifetime limit, but the IRS doesn't know about this until it happens), how much you contributed to IRAs (any forms generated for this happens after taxes close out), how much you contributed to HSAs (other than through your employer), etc., etc.

Point is they may know how much you make, but until they know everything above and more they don't know how much you owe.

Could they send everyone an estimated tax return? Yes. Would that eliminate the need for people to scrutinize their work and correct any errors? No.

There's no harm in re-characterizing "just in case"...the only downside is you might do so without needing to. There's also no harm in waiting, as long as you do it early enough to complete the re-characterization before Dec 31st 2023 (the conversion back to Roth can happen any time, as long as you don't have pre-tax traditional IRA dollars in the same year - but you do pay taxes on earnings when this happens so it's best to do it ASAP after re-characterization).

Don't forget it's your MAGI, not just your gross. So if your gross is say, $230k, and you're putting $20k into a Traditional 401k, your MAGI is going to be $210k or lower, which means no Roth IRA limit (assuming MFJ).

Otherwise yeah, re-characterization will allow you to fix it - just a bit more paperwork/process than normal.

> but what do I do with money that were invested for the past three months

Is this increase putting you above the max limit, or just reducing your direct contributions?

If it's just reducing your contribution limit you might not have to do anything with your prior contributions (depends on how much you've contributed and how much your limit is reduced).

If the increase brings your limit down to $0, you'll have to recharacterize your Roth into Traditional, at which point you can just convert them to Roth again (like the backdoor Roth process).

Oddly enough, I forgot about the 6mo I was in MA years ago - bringing me up to 4 complexes in 3 states over the last 6 years where they never asked for last months rent up front.

I rented in Boston many years ago (actually forgot that in my above post....so 4 complexes in 3 different states) and didn't pay last months rent upfront....

I've only ever seen deposit + pro-rated first month + application/admin fee....but I've only lived in a few places so yeah if asking for more is normal, that very well could've been what OP paid extra for.

> and last month rent

Is that normal? I've lived at 3 different complexes in 2 different states over the last 6 years and none of them ever asked for last month rent upfront.

However, they were all managed by businesses, not private rentals or something.

Buying a home to live in isn't a great investment plan. If you can't sell it free and clear, and not have to spend money from that sale as a result (such as for rent or a new place to live), it's not really an investment...or at least not a great one. That ~$100k you have could be put into the market and earning a larger return on average than average home appreciation is. There's so many factors though...would the condo be cheaper (mortgage + HOA + maintenance, etc) in the near term than your rent would be? If not you have lost opportunity cost of what investing the money while renting could build up in that near term too.

If, on the other hand, the cost of housing is cheaper than renting in the near term, buying would probably be better. Additionally, consider that condo's appreciate slower than single family homes, so the average appreciation mentioned above will be even lower - which favors renting.

For my situation, buying has never the best financial choice for me...but if you're trying to start a family or need the extra yard and such to be happy, sometimes making the best financial choice isn't the most important thing.

You don't need to convert the entire account, however, you can't convert only after-tax dollars. When you convert Traditional IRA to Roth IRA, it's pro-rata - which means conversions are proportional to the pre vs post tax dollars. If 10% of your tIRA is post-tax and 90% is pre-tax, any conversion you do will be taxable on 90% of the conversion.

Unless you're calculating hourly rate of pay as a federal employee - they use 2087 working hours in a year. This is done because it represents the average hours worked per year (with 40hr work weeks) over the 28-year repeating calendar cycle due to leap years.

The shift to an item-based focus is what I didn't like about D3. Obviously gear can make or break builds in D2, but in D3 almost the entirety of character progression was based around gear.

Sure you unlock skills as you level in D3, but once you got to the appropriate level changing your build was as easy as clicking a couple buttons. All the skills were gear-based, and sure certain items worked better for certain skills but once your character was leveled there was little reason to level that class again because you could easily swap skills around and just have gear swaps in your stash.

D2 forced you to think about the character you wanted to play and actually build into that character. Once you did it wasn't easy to change your character, so it encouraged replayability by forcing you to remake the same class if you wanted a different build. The only way I spent years playing D2 was due to this, such as leveling up a paladin into a hammerdin, leveling a different one for boss killing (smiter), and even a third as a zealer. In D3 this would've all been accomplished with a single playthrough and some gear/skill swaps depending on what I wanted to play. D2 gave a sense that a character has a specific purpose to me, D3 was just "idk do whatever you want whenever you want" so the characters felt boring and had no real meaning behind them.

That said I still did enjoy D3, I just felt like it was well behind D2 in terms of replayability. I played D2 for 4-5 years when it first came out, I played D3 off and on for maybe a year, and a good chunk of that was to make a little bit of money when the real money auction house existed.

> My only argument here is your statement that IRAs beat a 401k. 401K is often match or beat an IRA in terms of fees.

As someone who has an IRA with public options that are lower fee than even TSP offers, your argument is objectively false.

A 0.04% ER (vs 0% FZROX, for example) costs $25 on $62.5k per year...not 'over a decade'.

Yes, it's a small amount, but yes this is one factor that can make an IRA better than TSP.

ER isn't the only thing either...access to early withdrawals can be situational, not recommended, but still easier and cheaper with an IRA than with a 401k / TSP.

Look at it from the other way around, would you recommend someone roll money from an IRA (with good low ER funds) into TSP or a 401k? Why or why not? My point is entirely that there are more reasons to have money in an IRA than there are to have money in a 401k-style plan. TSP is great as far as 401k's go, but it doesn't beat (or match depending on your needs) an IRA so logically you should prefer to move your money to an IRA unless TSP offers something special (which it really doesn't other than maybe the G-fund).

There's at least a few IRA options that have lower fees than TSP at every major brokerage. And beat doesn't have to be by a significant amount to beat it. Even slightly lower expense ratios with similar returns "beats" the higher ER option (TSP in this case).

TSP is great as far as employer plans go, but most of the big IRA brokerages have lower ER options available.

> The new brokerage link option narrows the issue with broader investment choices.

Not really, the fees are absolutely absurd ($145 in annual fees plus $28.75 per trade - which means monthly if you invest new funds into it once per month - and that's on top of any fund specific fees) and you can only invest 25% of your total TSP balance this way.

If anyone is legitimately looking for broader investment choices, they would be better off rolling from TSP into a bad 401k plan than they would be staying in TSP.

> and its almost always a super bad idea

Depends on how they leave it. While it is tough to beat TSP in a company 401k, it's easy to beat in an IRA, and IRAs have so much more flexibility and accessibility.

It's only a bad idea when they want to move into a worse plan, which definitely doesn't describe an IRA at the big brokerage providers.

The only reason I left my traditional balance in TSP is cause my income is close enough to the Roth IRA income limit that I didn't want those dollars going into a traditional IRA in case I need to backdoor Roth in the future. My Roth balance went into my IRA and has lower fees, similar overall returns with better market exposure, doesn't require leaving my employer to withdraw, and is cheaper to withdraw early (contributions can be withdrawn in full tax/penalty free vs pro-rata like TSP and 401k's are).

I would guess it could cause memory leak issues and such, but in all honesty I'm not much for low-level programming details beyond what I did through school and much prefer sticking around the web dev space these days....so I'm not entirely sure the full implications that GOTO would have on memory.

This is why I prefer typescript :P

Exceptions can open up a whole pandora's box in the flow of a program. I can't speak for every language (because there's lots I don'tknow), but at least with what I'm most familiar with the function does return to the line it was called from depending on how you handle the exception.

In the case of your function catching the exception, you can fail gracefully by logging an error, at which point the program will continue and the function will return to the line that called it then just chug right along (if the result of the function wasn't necessary for the program to continue).

In the case your function doesn't catch the exception, it will bubble up to the place it was called from and repeat this process (if the exception is caught at the higher level, my second paragraph happens, otherwise it bubbles up again, repeat until something catches the exception or the program reaches the main function and crashes).

So yeah, exceptions can be the oddity here, but they also can continue to work the same as no exceptions when it comes to the flow through a program.

> sooooo, function() ?

Not exactly.

Functions return to the point of execution once they finish running, GOTO just continues running the program linearly from where ever in the code the GOTO is pointing to.

For example, if the comment you replied to used a function instead of GOTO XANADU, the 'unrelated stuff' would run, then it would return to the spot it left off on, which would run the 'necessary cleanup'. But GOTO doesn't do that, GOTO would run the 'unrelated stuff' and then just hit the end of the file and never clean up.

GOTO is a one-way operation that sends the program to another line of code and never returns (unless you explicitly program another GOTO that goes back), functions send the program to another line of code but then return back to the line the function is called from once the function is done.

If you're the less than 10% that can consistently outperform the market via market timing, sure.

If you're like a vast majority of investors, investing early and often is better than trying to time it.