> One reason people were looking for ways to lose money was that, in the U.S., there's a hard income cutoff for a health insurance subsidy at $48,560 for individuals (higher for larger households; $100,400 for a family of four). There are a number of factors that can cause the details to vary (age, location, household size, type of plan), but across all circumstances, it wouldn't have been uncommon for an individual going from one side of the cut-off to the other to have their health insurance cost increase by roughly $7200/yr. That means if an individual buying ACA insurance was going to earn $55k, they'd be better off reducing their income by $6440 and getting under the $48,560 subsidy ceiling than they are earning $55k.

Except that in real life there is no /dev/null that you can immediately pipe in exactly $6440 to hit your target.

You have to spend your time in order to achieve this reduction in AGI.

And discontinuities being discontinuous means that the number of people who have the necessary training/experience to confidently achieve this in, say, three hours, is probably in the same ballpark as people who can successfully set up encrypted email in the same amount of time.

For everyone else, it's going to take at least a week's worth of time to plan, double check, execute, triple check, etc. (And realistically double that, or more.)

At 55K, you've already spent that savings in the value of the time you gave up to get the savings.

People often make fun of free software developers for failing to properly value their own time. But at least that's not their domain of expertise. A financial hobbyist spending $2 of their time to save $1 is professional grade irony.

Edit: clarification