what percent of my investments can I take out annually if I want it to still grow after beating inflation and taxes annually?

That TOTALLY depends on what assets you have and what you make as profits. There is an old rule that if you are in a diversified stock portfolio you can take out yearly 4%, though I heard 3% is more like it, but that WILL eat your assets. If you on the other hand get like 10% return on deposit (and yes, this IS A THING, I actually get 12%) and inflation is 2% - make the math.

The general point is that you need to calculate how much you loose through inflation and tax on that one (yes, your portfolio must grow by inflation POST TAX). Then you can take out the rest and pay tax on that and that is what you can take out.

But it all depends a lot on WHICH CURRENCY and WHICH TAX LEVEL you talk about. See how you are not giving any locale indication or currency indication? And locale is where the tax comes in.

Here is one way to approach this:

• Take money out of your investments by looking backwards. Look back and see what they returned in the last 12 months and factor in inflation, and then take everything above that. You may have to pay taxes on any capital gains, so you will not be able to spend all of that money, unless you plan on paying all your taxes from other sources. Another consideration is that sometimes you can have taxable income from your investments even if you don't sell any shares. This is when you have to pay taxes on dividends.

Unless your money is invested in a way that guarantees a specific level of returns, there is no way to know how your investments will do in the future. And remember even bank accounts may only guarantee their rates for a specific window of time, or in some cases they can even change tomorrow.

You also don't know what inflation will be going forward.

When you look backwards you may find that over the previous 12 months your investments didn't beat inflation, or that they lost value, and you will not be able to sell anything without making things even worse.