Hi all. I’ve been early retired for quite a while and have done some significant conversions from pre-tax Ira to Roth IRA. At this point I’d like to look into graduating from my Excel spreadsheet model to a proper projection tool. My goal here is to optimize my Roth conversions. What tools can you suggest…or even recommend against?
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Read our Complete Retirement Withdrawal Strategies Guide →Roth Conversions during early retirement - what tools are the best options?
KevinInColorado
277 XP
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5 replies
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Weaselorlando
1 year ago
I have been using Boldin, formerly NewRetierment, for retirement planning. They have a Roth conversion explorer that I have played around with. I have heard some different “experts” from Bogleheads convention videos say good things about this planning tool. It’s not very expensive. Overall, I like it.
JenSpokane
62 XP1 year ago
I would love this tool. We’re in our first full year of early retirement and deciding how much to convert is something I think about a lot.
kindaFI
629 XP1 year ago
I don't have an answer for you. This Traditional to Roth conversion is something I'm planning to do as well once we commit to early retirement. I haven't thought too much about the mechanics yet, as I just figured it was a matter of doing as much as you can as soon as you can - with the limit each year being dictated by your tolerance for paying income taxes (clearly, at some point, the marginal rate doesn't make sense). I've found nothing is ever as simple as I think it will be, so what kinds of things am I missing in terms of this optimization problem?
kindaFI
629 XP1 year ago
I'll attempt to answer my own question after thinking about this more: ACA subsidy impacts (rolled amounts will reduce subsidies) and taxes on RMD later versus taxes today on rolled amounts seem like the two biggest optimization issues.
adnaP
1 year ago
I agree with your assessment that it is an optimization problem between paying tax now (including treating losing ACA subsidies as a higher effective taxes rate) vs controlling future RMDs (and therefore taxes in later retirement). As I approach retirement, I’ve been looking for tools to help solve this optimization problem, but I haven’t found anything that seems particularly useful yet. I did play around with BoldIn (formerly New Retirement) in January, but it lacks consideration of ACA subsidies, and it was not particularly easy to game out different conversion amounts (you must enter each conversion event individually, so if I want to model 20+ years of conversions it takes forever to make a very minor change).
I expect I’ll have to make my own spreadsheet to handle this optimization problem with ACA premium subsidies (or lack thereof acting as higher effective taxes) accounted for, but I’d be very happy to discover someone else has already done that work…
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