Yes agreed - fortunately Roth conversions are a method which can be utilzed when warranted.Easy also to forget that, in our case, our marginal tax rate in our prime earnings’ years was about 40%.
Something to keep in mind is that when you are retired your money will still be invested and hopefully growing.
The RMDs only start out at about 4% so if your investments are growing at 7% then your portfolio will still be growing until the RMD percentage is higher than the growth rate.
If your portfolio is growing at 7% then you will not actually need to start drawing down you IRA until you are in your late 80s. At that point some people will be in long term care which may be tax deductible.
I did not look up the statistics but I don't think that most people will live long enough that RMDs will actually force them to be drawing down their portfolio.
Some people who are retired and have large RMDs which cause a tax problem may look back and which they had chosen a Roth but forget that the reason that their IRA is so large is that with a few dips the stock market has been in a historic bull market since the lows after the 2008 financial crisis. Their IRA might be several times larger than could have been predicted with more average returns.
It would have been a tough sell to convince us back then that Roth’s were the way to go.
Right now we are in the low 30%’s. There’s a chance that the surviving spouse will hit 40%, depending on how the market performs. But then it’s a wash.
Statistics: Posted by smitcat — Mon Jan 26, 2026 11:53 am — Replies 61 — Views 1839