Transcript:
Easan Arulanantham:
With the new proposed spending bill, there’s been kind of this theme where the Roth conversion is going to be phased out by the end of this year, essentially.
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, this came in as a question on an email, and I’ve been asked a couple times on appointments. So in the new reconciliation bill that’s being considered right now, one of the pieces that supposedly in there is that they will not allow for Roth conversions or, or even what those called backdoor Roth, which is a different concept, Roth conversions right now, no matter what income you have, you can move as much as you want from an IRA, to a Roth IRA. So if you have a 401k, you can roll it to your IRA, and then move pieces over a period of time to, to your Roth IRA, as you get ready for your retirement or into your retirement, you can have more and more tax free growth. And you know, you have to do the analysis to see if that’s going to work. Well, we have an awful lot of people doing it. And they’re talking about eliminating it, which makes me sad, honestly. And they’re going after these big, you know, wealthy people that have massive amounts of money in Roth IRAs that are not having to pay tax on them. But they’re missing the mark, because there’s an awful lot of people that aren’t wealthy that have they’re doing conversions, and they’re very excited about it, it’s a better, you know, they already changed the law on one side, where they’re making the beneficiaries have to pull all the money out within 10 years. So they’ve already hammered the beneficiary.
So if you have a $500,000 IRA, prior to that change, you used to be able to, as a beneficiary spread that out over your whole lifetime, which was really cool. Now you can’t, they have to take out in 10 years, that made the Roth conversion even more advantageous, because now I can move that $500,000 over a number of years into Roth, and then my beneficiaries, my kids maybe can take it out over 10 years, but it’s growing tax free. So I’m not hammering their taxes, fight with this inheritance. And so that combination is pretty nasty. I totally disagree with it. But there will be some strategies on what we do. If they do pass that what I’ve seen so far is the talk about being able to, you know, change it in by the end of the year. So in other words, you’d have between now and the end of the year, to do something, if you wanted to do some more conversions, or get more aggressive with your conversions. You know, that makes me feel a bit better. Because I did something really crazy, I took all of my IRAs, and I took out half of them last year and half of them this year, and did the conversion. And, you know, I’m paying a big tax bill, cuz I’m in high tax bracket. But I make a good rate of return in my IRA, it’s one of the things I work on all the time. And, yeah, you know, I’m glad that I did it.
Now, if they do get rid of the conversion, I think that’s important, they have not so far apparently talked about getting rid of the Roth 401k. So you can still theoretically convert IRA assets, maybe to the end of the year, and then continue to add to a Roth 401k if you have one at work. Now, here’s the big caveat. This is all just talk, it’s important to think about it. But it isn’t part of the it isn’t a bill yet. And things can change, before it becomes a bill, somebody can come up and decide that they don’t want to vote for that. And with a thin majority, with 50 people, you know, in the Senate, just one person has to not like that concept for it to probably go away. So I don’t know if it’s a hot button with people enough to make it go away. But keep in mind that this has not happened yet. It’s just something to watch for.
Easan Arulanantham:
Yeah, and there’s been multiple proposals, like, for example, Roth, IRAs are capped at $10 million of value and everything that goes above that has to be taken out, or that conversions would be limited to people with income less than 400,000. So there’s different proposals that have been tossed out.
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah. And the irony is that the Roth IRA conversion is a moneymaker for the government right now. Now they’re going to lose some potential, you know, income down the road. And, but right now, people are doing conversions and paying taxes, and we have a deficit. It’s a big one. You know, over the last four years, during the previous administration, they ran a $7.8 trillion deficit, which is one of the highest ever so you’re cutting back on a revenue source by eliminating Roth conversions. Now maybe you’re replacing some of that revenue sources with higher taxes on capital gains, or higher taxes and corporations or something along those lines, but I don’t get why they let that stop. But I mean, it’s it we’ll see how it plays out. Again, it hasn’t become law yet. And as Easan mentioned, you know, there’s been lots of other proposals that have been out out there that I haven’t heard much about recently so I’m assuming some of those died off. So yeah, we’ll see this is all part of the process that we go through to to get a new bill in place. If if we do it