Tired paying big bucks to cellular provider? Have minutes left on your plan every month? You are not alone. Large providers such as Verizon, AT&T are trying to earn money, no matter what do you think. The cost of voice and data plans in US is extremely high, compared to other countries. Fortunately, there are other smaller companies called Mobile Virtual Network Providers (MVNO). They basically resell cellular service provided by big four (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint) in packages more attractive for someone who does not want to pay outrageous price for tiny usage. But these companies may not stay in business for long, you may not be allowed to use your favorite phone or they can have a customer service virtually non-existent. It is important to know how to navigate this world, quite different from expensive but familiar world of major cellular providers. In this article, I would like to share my personal experience how I end up paying almost nothing for the phone service.

First, it is important to realize what kind of usage you are looking for. Do you spend long time on phone while outside of home or work? How much voice minutes and data traffic do you normally use? Most companies in cellular business want you to talk and browse mobile internet a lot, so they can boost a profit by charging you for unlimited minutes and gigabytes of data. But is this really your habit? I am an active Internet user, but most of the time I spend either at home or work office. And I do not talk much on cell phone either. There is an office or home phone readily available for long talks. By that reason, I decided to look for inexpensive home phone service first. Since the days of land line are almost over, most providers offer VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) phone service in one bundle with cable Internet and TV. I use AT&T UVerse for home Internet connection. Currently, AT&T offer local phone service for $24.95 per month in California. And it does not even include long distance calls. Obviously, I had to look for alternatives. There are plenty of VOIP providers on the market, for example PowerPhone, Lingo. They may offer phone service much less expensive than AT&T, but after a closer look I also discovered disadvantages:

• VOIP companies still charge a regular fee for their service
• it takes some effort to install the hardware, if you want to have a traditional home phone
• smartphone apps are easy to use, but the ability to answer incoming calls may be a challenge for apps with poor smartphone operating system integration
• ability to call traditional land line or cellular phones typically costs more or not present at all
• call quality may vary significantly

There are also companies on the market, which use their own proprietary communication protocols and by that reason does not exactly belong to VOIP family (but may be still referred as VOIP because they still use Internet for voice communication): Nettalk, Ooma and Skype are among the most famous. The first two providers offer an adapter, which can be used with normal phone devices and completely eliminates the problem of incoming calls. While Nettalk is charging around $40 per year for unlimited calls in US and Canada, you can use Ooma for free (some tax is still collected). On the downside, initial cost of Ooma hardware is higher than competitors. Although the prices went down and currently you can buy Ooma Telo for less than $100. As regarding Skype, it is quite popular for free Skype-to-Skype video communication, but hard to use to answer incoming calls and on my opinion can not be considered as a home phone alternative. Also, there is an additional cost to call the land line number using Skype.

Besides alternatives I already mentioned, there is another provider: Google Voice. In fact, after doing some research I found that it is much superior to others, by the following reasons:

• all calls in US and Canada are free, including calls to traditional land line and cellular phones
• Hangouts app, closely integrated into Android OS, accepts incoming calls in the same way as with traditional cellular providers
• relatively cheap international calls, just in case if you need it
• work with one phone number also provided by Google: it can be forwarded to any other phone number
• supported by large company with virtually unlimited resource
• Obi phone adapter is available for easy integration with Google Voice (as well other VOIP service): it can work with any traditional phone replacing the land line

Apparently, I found what I was looking for. And I use the setup (Obi + Google Voice) for more than six years. It is a reliable and high quality service, and it costs nothing except the initial one time cost of Obi adapter (which is less than $50). Also, I am using Hangouts app from my smartphone when I am not at home. There is Obi app available from Android and iOS stores, but its functionality is very limited and it is not stable. But I still use it when calling from iPad.

All above is about the home phone service. But what about cellular service? The home phone setup I use allows me to handle the most part of my calls. But for occasional calls and emergency, I also have Lycamobile service. This virtual network operator uses T-Mobile as a cellular service. By that reason, any phone which can work on T-Mobile is good for Lycamobile. They have a few reasonably priced plans available on their web site, however the best and cheapest plan is the one they offer by default: you just need to add money to your balance and this pay-as-you-go service will work automatically. The rates are available at international plan page: basically it is 5 cents per minute for all calls within US. This plan is ideal for very low usage like I have. Again it is possible because of the free home phone setup I have. In total, I pay less than $1 per month for the phone service. Which I consider as a free service. Of course, there are completely free cellular providers currently available on the marker: FreedomPop, RingPlus. But they all have hidden fees and other tricks to charge you: remember, this is a business for profit. So far, I found that setup I use does not have much competition.

Unfortunately, there is still a problem with Lycamobile: it relies on T-Mobile cellular coverage. I found this coverage insufficient in the area where I live. In fact I have very limited T-Mobile coverage at my office. By that reason, in addition to Lycamobile I currently use Verizon prepaid plan. This is a data only plan designed specifically for tablets: you must have a Verizon tablet for the initial setup. Then you can insert Verizon SIM card into any phone working with Verizon and it will cost $20 per month for 2GB of data, which is far from free but still much less than other plans from Verizon or AT&T. And the coverage is excellent. I can turn it off any time I want, and turn it on again.

Thinking about early retirement? There is no way you can afford the cost of living in your area? You are not alone. I live at one of the most expensive areas in the world: San Francisco Bay Area. Although my home is smaller than most homes around and the schools are not that great, I paid enormous amount of money for the mortgage and there is also a property tax attached which I have to pay until I die or move. Property tax is rising, together with home price on the market. Zillow is a great source of data, if you want to see an estimated market price for particular home year after year. Currently, my home price is estimated at $1,169K and in June 2009 it was just $619K. Great news, isn’t it? Yes if I want to sell it. However, if I want to live in this home for a long time, property tax will be growing: I already have to pay around $12K for this year. For comparison, my property tax was $8,380 in year 2009. It is easy to see, that property tax has not grown proportionally to the market home price. Thanks to California’s Proposition 13, assessed value for any home not being sold can not grow more than 2% annually. Therefore, currently market value is $1,169K (according to Zillow, you never know the real market price until you sell it) and county assessed value is $881K. As a result, the property tax is still high enough because I bought this home in year 2007 when selling price was almost $800K.

Can anyone retire in a home with annual property tax $12K which will most likely on a rise in future? It depends on the available liquid assets. The home price can be high, but you can not count on it while living in this home. Using 4 percent rule, it is easy to have a rough estimate how much money you actually need to afford this home based on projected cost of living. Also there is a great calculator available. It is true that most people with ordinary engineering income can not afford it and I am not an exception. What do I do then? Work until the age of 70? Another option is to move to other area with lower cost of living. How to determine which exactly area is the best fit? Well, it depends on your personal preference. For me, these are the most important factors I consider to make an educated choice:

• where you feel comfortable and enjoy a social life, presence of relatives and friends, favorite activities and shopping
• climate (I personally enjoy warm weather but not as hot as for example in Arizona)
• insurance cost (health, home, car)
• cost of living, including home or rent price
• property tax, sales tax, income tax

While feeling comfortable is a personal feeling, we can discuss other factors here. There is an excellent living wage calculator, provided by MIT for major metro areas in United States. I found it useful to compare not just absolute cost of living, but the ratio between maximum salary and minimum income required to live for single or married couple in the particular area. The ratio clearly show the areas where you will have the best bang for the buck, while continue to work. But if you are looking for a place to retire, then minimum income is the most important number to consider. Although not guaranteed, the areas with lower ratio and relatively high minimum income may also indicate the future home price increase. It may be good for investment home, but you do not want property tax to be on a steep rise when you retired.  I combined the data for some areas into the table.

Actually I found this table quite interesting. Metro areas are sorted according to the maximum salary. According to the data, living in San Jose may give you better income stream if you manage to get higher compensation. But places like Houston provide even better standard of living for single person. From the other side, areas with minimum income $20K or less are great candidates for retirement location. But I would not completely rely on these numbers: you may need greater than that to live a quality life. But these numbers provide some guidance where to look.

After carefully comparing different states and metro areas, I included a few places into my short list: California, Nevada, Texas and Florida. Is there anything common between these states? Of course, they enjoy warm climate around the year and there is no state income tax in all of them except California. But they are actually quite different in many other aspects. For tax purpose, I found this article quite useful. You can sort the table for property, sales or income tax, as well as for the total tax burden. Obviously, California is #11 in total tax burden, followed by Nevada #34, Texas #41, and Florida #44. However, not all taxes are equal in a retirement. If you are like me, income tax will not be a big deal during the retirement because of low tax bracket. Sales tax is definitely more important, but you always can live a frugal life by limiting the number of items you purchase. We all have to pay property tax, no matter what we do. Even those who rent are paying a property tax indirectly, through the rent. According to the table, the highest property tax burden is in Texas, followed by Florida, California and Nevada.

Another important factor is insurance, in particular health insurance. There is another great article on this subject. Apparently, California has the lowest health insurance rates in my list, followed by Texas, Nevada and Florida. In fact, health insurance cost in Nevada and Florida is quite high, compared to California and Texas. Home insurance is another important criteria for comparison. In Florida, home insurance can be as high as $5K annually in some counties (see the data) due to the potential hurricane damage, and it does not even include flooding insurance cost. In Texas the average cost is running about $1K per year, but can be higher at places like Galveston. I pay $512 annually for home insurance in California, which is apparently the lowest across all states of my choice. The home prices and income tax are terribly high in California, however home prices are quite different across metro areas. In this table, I summarized all findings.

Carefully considering all factors, I vote for metro areas in California with reasonable home prices. In addition to all these factors, I personally like climate in California more than anywhere else in United States. But I know other people may have different opinions. Home prices are sky high in San Francisco Bay Area and surrounding cities only. Around Los Angeles for example, you can find a descent home for half the price in Bay Area. Sacramento enjoy even lower prices. This is not just my opinion: prices in lower cost areas across California are rising, which means more people from high cost areas are moving there. Still, at this time I do see California as the most viable option for retirement.

Retirement saving plans such as 401K or IRA are increasingly popular, because they allow contributing money before tax. Especially for those who are in high tax bracket. Also, some employers are matching a part of 401K contribution, which makes it even more attractive while we are at work. However, disappointment comes later at the age of 59.5 when it is a time to withdraw money. At that time, we have to pay tax. The greater amount we save, the greater tax will be. For those like me who live in a state with income tax, the state tax will be added. Is there a way to collect money completely tax free?

There is a great article written by MadFientist, who give some idea how to do that. The idea is to contribute into 401K or traditional IRA during the working years, but after retirement convert small portions of savings from 401K or traditional IRA into Roth IRA each year. The converted amount needs to be carefully calculated, to offset personal exemptions and deductions. In this way, conversion will be tax free. This is in assumption that you retire before the age of 59.5 and you can not withdraw money from 401K or traditional IRA directly without penalty. Money are available tax free from Roth IRA at the age of 59.5.

In a reality, this excellent idea works for married couples rather than singles. I combined all 2016 exemptions and deductions any person can always claim in a typical situation in the table. I assume the person lives in California: other states may have different numbers and some states does not have income tax at all. Also, I added Health Savings Account, which become more and more popular these days and can add up into deductions. It works pretty much in the same way as 401K or traditional IRA, but permits withdrawals for medical expenses.

Also, let us take a look at tax brackets, both federal and California. I intentionally included three lowest brackets only, because I assume most people with limited lifetime savings will most likely fall into 10% or 15% federal brackets after the retirement.

How to collect money from 401K tax free? The idea discussed by MadFientist is to deduct certain amount of money from the total income before tax, and take the same amount of money out of 401K or traditional IRA into Roth IRA. For example, combined personal exemption $4,050 and standard deduction for married couple $12,600 deducted from the income can be replaced with $16,650 collected from 401K plan. As a result, the taxable income and tax will not change because of 401K money transfer. In other words, $16,650 comes with no tax. Obviously, there may be other income which can not be deducted and the tax must be paid for that income. But the good news is that no federal tax will be withheld from long term capital gain in federal tax bracket 10% or 15%. By replacing ordinary income with long term capital gain, it is possible to avoid federal taxes completely. Some states do not have income tax, but others like California does. However, California tax rates are much lower than federal rates. There are other types of investment such as California issued municipal bonds, which are exempt from both federal and state tax.

The deductions for married couple are twice as large as for single and tax brackets are also doubled. As pointed out in another great article by Curry Cracker, married couple can deduct up to $19,500 from income (which comes to $23,400 for those who file tax return for year 2016 and contribute into HSA). What does it mean? It means that anyone who is married can offset $23,400 income by annual withdrawal of the same amount from 401K or traditional IRA into Roth IRA. For example if someone has $250K in 401K plan, then it would require 10 and half years to collect all money from 401K without paying tax. Which is probably a reasonable time, even for those retired after 50. However, if we take a closer look at deductions for single person, then we have $13,700 only to deduct. For the same amount of savings, it would require almost 20 years to withdraw all money. It is a long time. Moreover, we need to reduce $13,700 by annual taxable income (I assume it still exists in some form), which raises withdrawal time to 25-30 years. Not every person live that long after retirement.

There is actually a way to attack this problem for single people. But single person must be a homeowner. Because property tax is the important deduction, which may have substantial impact to overall numbers. The property taxes in US for single family homes vary from $3K to $20K in most cases. It depends on home size and area. In areas with high cost of real estate, property tax can be higher than federal or state standard deduction. For example, I pay around $12K property tax annually and obviously use itemized deductions to reduce taxable income. It helps to offset taxable income when you have high wages, but may have opposite effect once you retire. Suddenly you realize that your income is so small that this deduction does not make sense anymore. But actually it does, when you want to withdraw money from 401K tax free. Property tax must be paid anyway, because we need a place to live. Let us use it for our own favor.

This approach works better when property tax is high, and its effectiveness degrade with amount of tax approaching standard deduction which is $6,300 for single. For California, you will end up paying more than that because of the high home prices (property tax is relatively low), but in Texas it is also achievable because of the high property tax up to 5% in some counties. But the real question is: can you afford this house during retirement? People tend to move to lower cost areas and live in cheap apartment, when amount of savings is limited. Can you afford the house with property tax high enough to offset income tax? It is easy to estimate, using 4% rule. The rule definition can be found for example here. The rule say that in a retirement, we can safely withdraw 4% of the total assets to make sure some money will be still available until the end of life.

The maximum home price and associated property tax depends on two factors: total amount of assets available and projected cost of living. I am single and I can not see myself spending more than $3K per month, unless some emergency happens. I can probably live on $2.5K, by taking special care about daily expenses. It would be a challenge to survive with $2K per month at expensive place such as San Francisco Bay Area, but someone else living in Texas for example most likely can live on $2K. Therefore, I prepared a chart about the impact of property tax and cost of living on the maximum home price retired person can afford. I use the ratio of annual property tax to cost of living from 10% to 50%, as I do not believe it is reasonable to spend more than 50% on property tax. I used Santa Clara county property tax rate 1.36% to calculate the home price. 401K conversion tax can be offset by property tax within a green area: homes priced above $463K are well within the range for many metro areas now. At least 20% to 30%  of annual expenses are required to spend on property tax in order to collect tax free money from 401K plan, which seems reasonable to me.

You can determine where you are in this chart with the help of 4% rule, using the total amount of assets you have as follows: [home price] = [total asset] – [cost of living] x 12 / 0.04. Then you can see if you are within the green area or not, and determine the optimal property tax to cost of living ratio to eliminate tax. For example, with $1M in assets and cost of living $2500 per month the home price would be: $1M – $2500 x 12 / 0.04 = $250K and the goal can not be achieved. However, with $1.5M in assets and cost of living $3000 per month the maximum home price would be $750K. It means that you can buy a home within $463K to $750K price range and achieve the goal by spending 20% to 30% of annual expenses on property tax. But most likely property tax is higher than 1.36% in a county where you live. In this case, the lower bound for home price to achieve tax free 401K goal will come down to $252K for property tax 2.5% and it can be as low as $126K for property tax 5%.

Finally, a few words about Health Savings Account (HSA). It definitely can help to offset 401K tax, when included into deductions. It is not required to have earned income to contribute into HSA, therefore it can be done even during retirement. After the age of 55 the contribution limit increases by $1000, which makes it even more attractive for tax purpose. But the advantages of each individual plan compared with ordinary health care plans must be carefully reviewed for an educated choice. The advantage of HSA can be combined with the advantage of some 401K plans, which allow withdrawing money without penalty if employee left job at the age of 55 or later. Then the most effective strategy can be, assuming enough financial assets are available at the time of termination:

• quit your job at the age of 55
• contribute into HSA and withdraw money tax free and penalty free from 401K directly to personal account between the age of 55 and 65
• withdraw money whatever left on HSA tax free and penalty free between the age of 65 and 70
• apply for social security benefits at the age of 70