Roth Conversions: Why Waiting Is Costing You Millions

You have to do it sooner than you think in a whole lot greater amount and higher tax bracket than is logical to you in order to win the game. You have to turn the rules to your favor instead of just using the rules the way they give them to you.

If you know what your tax liability is going to be in a given year, you can actually optimize, right? Because you don't want to withdraw enough to bump you up to a higher bracket.

You've hit on probably the biggest fallacy that the financial industry has fed to the public.

Most people with a traditional IRA think that deferring taxes is the smart play, but there's a point, and most people miss it, where that decision quietly flips and starts working against you. Craig Weir, who's a CFP and the author of Roth Conversion Secrets, has seen this cost his clients hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. All right, Craig, welcome back. Excited to have you back on the show. It's been a few years, but we thought it was about time to get you back to share the good news of Roth conversions.

Awesome. Well, thanks, man. I appreciate being here. Had a good time last time, so, um, I'm sure we'll do the same thing too. Hopefully give some people some good info.

Yeah, no, I loved our conversation last, and we've actually got to know each other a little bit, you know, since then, and it's been, been really cool to, to hear what you're doing. And we were just chatting before we hit the record button on some of what's happened since we talked last. So maybe just share a little bit on, you know, what's the big idea, and then what, what you've kind of done up to this point with with your advisory?

So, the big idea is— really came to me from being pushed into a corner by a guy that used to listen to me on talk radio many years ago. We're talking 16 years ago. And he came into the office and said, "You know, I retired when I was 60 years old, 60-something years old. It's been about 10 years. My million dollars I got from this major petrochemical company has now turned into $2 million." and I don't need it. I got my first required minimum distribution, and Craig, it was $80,000. I don't know what to do with $80,000 other than I know I got to pay taxes on it. And my CPA tells me my Medicare premiums are going through the roof next year. So I've done a little bit of math, and I've been listening to you a bunch on the radio, and I think all you financial guys have got it wrong. I think I need to convert this over to a Roth instead of leaving it in my IRA. And I said, Mr. Leonard, it's just time to pay the piper, man, which turned out to be the title of my first book, right? It's just time to pay the piper. He said, yeah, I'll tell you what, I'll pay you to prove that to me. And I said, well, you don't need to pay me because if you're right, I got a lot of people that we can help with this. So, the big idea is if you got $1 million or more sitting in an IRA or any kind of a tax-deferred account, I have yet to see a situation where it wasn't better for you to convert that aggressively from the IRA to a Roth IRA. That's the big idea. And bottom line is you'll save millions of dollars of taxes over your lifetime, and you'll save Medicare premiums, and probably you'll have more money at the end of your life. Wow.

And this was an individual that was, you said, 60 years old. So the the common idea of convert when you're younger, it even applied at a later stage of life for him.

Yeah, he was in his mid-70s. This was back in the day where you had to take your first RMD at age 70 and a half, right?

Oh, okay, '70s.

Yeah, so he had just had it. Yeah, so converting early is great, but converting later still works. You know, if Bob were to take his Mass millions of dollars in IRAs and convert them, your kids and his other grandkids are going to be the biggest benefactor. But Bob still wins.

So, what are the rules on when it makes sense to do that? I mean, and how do you determine that?

I don't know that there's rules. I can give you the general guideline is the best answer is yesterday is the best time to do it. You have to do it sooner than you think. In a whole lot greater amount and higher tax bracket than is logical to you in order to win the game. If you play the game the IRS wants you to pay— play, and you just take the RMD tables thinking, I'm just going to defer it as long as I can, which makes total logical sense. That's what everybody's conditioned their whole life. Get the deferral, get the deferral. But what we discovered is there's a point in time when That strategy needs to change or the IRS wins the game. You have to turn the rules to your favor instead of just using the rules the way they give them to you. And the way to do that is you get to pay the taxes on your timeline at the bracket you choose at the time you choose to get it over to a totally tax-free state, which is what happens, as you guys know, when you get the money to a Roth, you're done paying taxes on it and your heirs are done paying taxes on it.

So, so walk through some of the the conceptual change there. So, why does it make sense to do it sooner than later? How are you turning the tables, you know, back toward yourself and not the IRS's favor? Walk through the logic there.

So, if you don't do anything, if you don't do anything with it, that IRA is just going to continue to grow and compound to be a bigger and bigger balance. And by the time you get to the point where you're 73-ish, now you're forced to live by the rules of how much you have to distribute every year. And the first year you do it, it's roughly 4%. I mean, they have these funky tables that are not difficult for math whizzes, but if you're not a math whiz, just know this: the first year you got to take about 4% out. And then every year you get older, the idea is the IRS says the older you get, the more you got to take, because theoretically the day you die you emptied out IRA and you paid all the taxes on it. Theoretically doesn't work because what happens most of the time is not only does the amount you have to take out get bigger just in the multiplication factor, but your balance gets bigger typically unless you're spending it down, right?

Well, the thought, right, that is that you're in a lower tax bracket by that age and so you're going to pay less taxes, right? So, so even though, yeah, you're dealing with a bigger balance that has grown, you're, you're you're paying a smaller percentage.

I have not found that to be true.

So mostly people's tax brackets don't really go down as they retire.

Most people don't, but even if they do go down for a few years, let's say they had a nice, a really nice paying job or business that they owned and they had a lot of money coming in, that income may lull for a few years. And I'm giving you a general— generality. Everybody has their own situation, right? But even if it does lull, Then what happens is by the time RMDs kick in, you take, you got a $2,000,000 account when you're 65 years old and you retire. By the time you're 73 years old, it's not hard to imagine that that's $3,500,000 or $4,000,000. Well, now you take that 4% number for the very first year, now you got $150,000 that you have to distribute the very first year you do RMDs. You take that $150,000 and you add it back on top of Social Security for a couple people, maybe a little pension, some investment income, And you're right back to wherever you probably started the whole game at. And so part of the logistics is to front-load the taxes you pay on the smaller balances. I've yet to see a case where we could model waiting till a potential lower tax bracket will offset the higher amount of tax on the added balance that accrued over those years. Does that make sense? And we, I mean, I use commercially available financial planning software, and then we have to take that data out into our own environment. And we've written our own programs to be able to see this in realistic light so that clients can really see what's better for me. And so the whole game is how do I engineer this in a way where I get the taxes paid, and especially we can say now at low, the lowest tax brackets we've had in a long time. I get the, but the tax rate is almost irrelevant. Not totally, but it's almost irrelevant. But I get the taxes paid now. I let the compounding happen tax-free in the Roth. And let's say that you only had the same balance 10 years from now. On a tax-adjusted basis, let's say you had the same balance. Wouldn't that still have been a good financial decision? Because now the tax risk is totally out of your life and you don't have the RMDs. And I mean, I could go and get way ahead of ourselves here, but there are another reason to do it is something— have you guys ever had reference to something called the widow's trap or the widower's trap? Do you know what that is? A tax trap. So, when the first spouse, let's say both spouses, you got a traditional family, you got a husband, wife, they got $2 million, it grows to $4 million. They're living life, everything's great, and then devastation happens. One of the spouses dies. The day that spouse dies, everything in the remaining spouse's life just changed in a lot of ways, but even in the tax way, because they have that year they can file a married filing joint return, but every year after that they now go to a single taxpayer return. And so instead of $350,000, I don't know the number, but just to use an example of taxable income to get to a certain bracket, now it's $170,000. So they still have the $4 million bucks and they still have the big RMD coming. The RMD's still coming. But now they have to pay at single payer brackets. So that's another reason, especially people that are getting kind of like me, you know, I'm almost 67 years old and I kind of count that I'm a little long in the tooth. Bob looks like he's, you know, 55. He'll get there one of these days, right? He'll get a little older. But when we start thinking about what are we going to leave for our spouse, what kind of mess, what kind of tax thing, now there's another reason to accelerate those so that we don't find our spouse in that trap of now being in single taxpayer brackets.

Yeah, that's really interesting because you could theoretically, if you're married filing jointly, you're going to be, you can have more income and still stay in the lower tax brackets. But as soon as one spouse passes, then those rules change and you can't, it's much harder to get out of it, right?

Unless you're going to assume all your income is going to go in half. But if you have whatever the value of your IRA is, the RMDs don't go in half. The RMDs stay what the RMDs are going to be.

So it would be a simple matter to kind of run your own spreadsheet here, right? I mean, I guess you would have to kind of project what your tax bracket is going to be at what time, project your returns and roll those forward, right? And then you could actually play out two balances and I guess project an end date. So these are all, I mean, three pretty big assumptions. And you're saying that this pretty much has one conclusion for most people.

Let me address your first point first. Yeah, I mean, when Mr. Leonard finished his conversation with me, I started on spreadsheets. And I developed a very elaborate spreadsheet that took it all in. And all of a sudden, I started learning, well, okay, I also need to factor in what the IRMAA thresholds are for Medicare taxes. I need to figure out what the inflation rate for the tax rates are going to be for different incomes over time. Then I need to also take into account my spending and inflation there. I need to build a variable around rates of return. We got— I mean, I did it. The problem for me was if I got one cell wrong, it changes everything, and it also I mean, I spent months at this and ultimately I threw up my hands and I'm pretty good with spreadsheets, but I threw up my hands and said, I gotta, especially if I'm going to offer this to other people, we've got to do a better job at it. But man, Bob, to your point, I think it's totally possible. We have a lot of engineers that come to us to help them with this and they've already got 12 spreadsheets they put 6 months into. Occasionally we say, "You got it right," but there are so many variables and they move if you make a change. If you assume you're going to convert $385,000 instead of $240,000, you've got to make sure that you've taken into consideration all the variables. It can be done, and if somebody is very astute with understanding elements that I just laid out, No problem. I think the engineers come to us, and this is not a commercial for Craig's business, but they come to us because they want an insurance policy. They want to know they got it right the first time.

So, you run an advisory business, I presume, to help people do this. I presume your output is kind of an optimization, right, of, hey, here's how much you can withdraw on an annual basis based on your income. For that year and to basically minimize your tax outlay and maximize your end game.

That's exactly it. All we're doing is covering, we're trying to protect the risks for the client of getting it wrong. And at the stage, at the status of IRA millionaire and above, getting a good Plan B as opposed to the best Plan A is hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetime.

Gotcha.

And sometimes millions.

Well, and if you do it, if you know what your tax liability is going to be in a given year, you can actually optimize, right? Because you don't want to withdraw enough to bump you up to a higher bracket, right? You want to kind of stay under the brackets. So there's an optimization there.

You know, actually, Bob, that is probably— you've hit on probably the biggest fallacy that the financial industry has fed to the public. What you just said is absolutely correct if you have less than $1,000,000 in your IRA.

Gotcha.

When you get to that $1,000,000 and above, we discovered 16 years ago, all the rules change. All of that that you read in the normal financial media is right for the average guy. But you get to $1,000,000 in your IRA, and you're in the top 10% of American savers. And the problems become different, and the solutions. Now, I could show you many of our analyses that somebody with $1,000,000, $1,500,000, $2,000,000 converted at the top of their tax bracket, and they ended up paying more tax over their lifetime than if they did not convert it at all.

So, is the conclusion if you have $1 million in your IRA almost entirely, let's do a conversion as soon as possible to the largest amount, the full amount?

No. The only way I would say to do a conversion, I mean, what I just took from what you just said, my brain said, is Bob really asking me, do I just do a one-and-done conversion? Because I've got $2 million in my IRA. No, not normally. Most of the conversions we've found, there's a sweet spot between 4 and 7 years for most people, and the difference can be huge. I will tell you this, if you have a large IRA and you have massive income and you're always going to be in the highest tax bracket, I'll say 99% probability, that's when you pull the Band-Aid off and you just do it. You bite the bullet.

What are those conditions again?

You're always— the biggest condition is you're always going to be in the highest tax bracket. You've got enough going on in your financial life that you're never going to drop below the highest tax bracket.

Then it's just rip the Band-Aid off and do the full conversion.

I did this with a guy that had $26 million in his home.

Yeah.

Yeah. He even used IRA money to pay the taxes. And we did the math and he still was better off. And it didn't take 27 years to do that.

That makes total sense. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And you take, when you have, especially in the space you guys are in, when you have alternative investments that have an opportunity to outperform kind of a traditional 60/40 game plan that somebody's Fidelity advisor is going to give them, in my view, there's even more reason to get the conversion done sooner rather than later. And make sure that those assets are the ones that are in the Roth before anything else. Just do it. Just put them over there.

Any high-growth assets.

High growth or high volatility assets, they go first. You leave the money market and the government bonds and the mundane stuff to the very end. And so that I say this before time gets away from us, Most people, it's not in their best interest to convert 100% of the IRA, because you want to end up down the road at a point where you've got just enough required minimum distributions coming in that you stay below standard deductions, that you maybe can use for your charitable donations through something called a qualified charitable donation. So that's a calculated number that says, okay, I got $3 million, but I'm going to leave X because X takes care of our charitable stuff. And of course, if you wanted to talk about charitable stuff, there's even a way for people who are charitably minded to do something called a donor advised fund in the first year and really knock a lot of the taxes out of the way.

So you're saying it makes sense to keep in a traditional IRA a certain amount?

Yes, sir.

And why? I don't understand that.

Well, let's say you have $200,000 in a traditional IRA and you've converted $2 million.

Okay.

On your tax return, there's a freebie amount that you get that you don't pay any tax on. That's your standard deduction, right?

Right.

So, if you don't have other deductions going on, why would you want to waste that standard deduction?

I see.

I would rather have the RMDs come in and just get within a dollar of that amount.

Assuming a very, very simple tax return. I itemize. I have a lot of deductions, so it wouldn't apply to me. But assuming you don't. So, I see the— it's very interesting. I see the opportunity here. You know, one of the things I did, you know, I had a few really low-income years a few years back, and I converted everything at that time. You know, just, you know, and I paid almost no tax. I don't think I paid anything because my income was so bad. I mean, it's not great, but I had that benefit and had that kind of presence of mind, I guess, to think, let me turn some— "Make some lemonade here with the lemons of the bad year I had." And if you get some net operating losses or other kinds of things that you can take advantage. And so, there's a timing aspect that's kind of irrespective of the planning you're doing. It's really based on your income and having a low income year. So, personally, it's a positive, right?

That was smart for you to jump on it too, though. There's another little trick that we use that I think your listeners probably would enjoy. Not everybody that's going to listen to your podcast is already retired. There's someone that's still working. They're probably maxing out their 401, or they are, let's say they're self-employed and they're putting a ton of money into their solo 401. And they're, you know, they're putting between the two of them, let's say they're putting $50,000, $70,000 in there, but they've got $2 million sitting over in the qualified plans. So in that case, as long as they're at least old enough where their plan allows them to do a conversion without counting it as toward the 10% penalty type of money, then we actually— let's say you got somebody who's 59 years old, they got $2 million in a 401, they're not going to retire for a while, they've drank the Kool-Aid, they put all their money into their 401, which is very typical, and they're thinking, well, I'd love to convert, but I don't have any money. Okay, so follow me on this, 'cause this is, when we saw this lay out in black and white, it was like an epiphany. So the guy, so the couple can go put, this year they can go put another $70,000 into their 401. And at the end of the year, what are they going to have? Another $70,000 in their 401 that is going to be taxable at some point down the road. Or what if they just reduce their contributions to the 401 to only what the company matched? And so now they put in $10,000 instead of $70,000. That's $60,000 minus some taxes is cash flow that they can use to go start converting some of that IRA money. So let's say they end up with $45,000 that was going to go into the 401, and instead they use that $45,000 to convert some of the other IRA. Which is totally like, why would I ever do that? But at the end of the year, what are they going to have? They're going to have converted enough to use up $45,000 of taxes in conversion. So depending on their tax rate, they're going to have $150,000 to $200,000 now sitting over in the Roth instead of an additional $45,000 sitting in the IRA. And the way that math works out after just 5 or 6 years is incredible of what you allow them to do differently. And then it also gives them another pot to go manage if they don't have— most of the corporate plans now have what's called an in-plan conversion feature, so they can actually do it within the same plan. If they're, you know, one of the things that we kind of discussed by email ahead of time was this solo 401 thing. So if a guy's self-employed and he's putting a bunch of money into his solo and he's investing in alternative investments or whatever he's investing in, it's just a matter of amending his plan to allow for the Roth 401 and make sure that an in-plan transfer is available. And boom, he's in the money. He can do these same things. And he's so much better off down the road.

You know, would this make sense to— does it ever make sense to put money in a traditional IRA? I mean, it sounds like if the conversion is always positive, why even bother? Why don't just go straight into a Roth and forget the traditional?

My two sons, their advice from their father, after seeing the huge amount of taxes that my clients are faced with, my sons do nothing but put money into a Roth 401.

Right.

100% of it goes into the Roth. And the only reason that they would fund the traditional is to get it in and then get— and then diversify at the end of the year.

So, is there any— I mean, you're kind of saying generally, it's just good to do sooner than you think, more than you think, et cetera, et cetera. But is there any optimization strategies you can apply by spreading it out? Like Bob said, you know, maybe wait until you maybe have a lower income year for a lower tax bracket, maybe can you use other losses from other types of investments to offset any liability? I mean, are there any other kind of tricks, or do you find that it's usually not worth the effort and then you don't do anything?

No, I think it's definitely worth all those. The challenge we have is finding our clients Finding CPAs of our clients who can think lifetime instead of this year. And so typically, the CPAs need to go through an education process that we don't pay them to look at our lifetime. We pay them to save us taxes this year. And so all of a sudden, you come along and say, hey, I listened to this podcast and I'm going to convert $300,000 this year, and they kind of blow a wig. But yes, although you can use certain kinds of losses to offset, if it's a kind of loss that offsets ordinary income, then you can use that. You can use charitables like we talked about. I have yet, if we were sitting in November and you knew that next year you were, your income was going to go down by $200,000, then I probably would give you the, okay, let's wait till January. But if you got $2 million sitting in your IRA and we're sitting here at the beginning of the year and you have a typical year, that $2 million is going to grow by another $120,000 to $170,000. So why would I wait and know I got to pay tax on an additional $170,000? The waiting just is not a game that you really win. There is optimization, And I can't really, I don't know how to verbalize that. We had to write software to come to the answer of what that is because it's different for everybody. It has to do with your income, it has to do with what you believe your mortality is, what your spouse's mortality is, has to do with all the other taxable things coming into your life. But I gave you kind of a little bit of a rule of thumb in that where convert to the top of your tax bracket for most people is going to take 20, 15, 20, 25 years. Most of our conversions for that we've found that work best for our clients is between 4 and 7 years typically. So it tells you we're stepping up to higher tax brackets. You, if you're an IRA millionaire, you cannot wait. I mean, you can, but the amount of tax that you are— the tax advantages that you're giving up on $1 million, the amount of tax advantages you give up every year you wait is $66,000 under today's tax laws that you can never get back again.

Explain the $66,000. How you come up with that number?

Well, if I took $1 million and I looked out over my lifetime of what kind of tax am I going to pay, and then I said, well, let's do this at the most optimal rate, and now what taxes am I going to pay? But now let's wait a year to start doing the optimal, the cost is $66,000 of tax avoidance that you can't get anymore. So people say, well, I'm going to be retiring in 2 years. I'm not going to be making $350,000 a year. I'm going to be making $120,000. So I think I'm just going to wait till then. Okay. So now what you just did under that same analysis I just gave you is you just said, okay, I'm willing for there to be another $250,000 or $300,000 I have to convert in 2 years. And then I'll start converting when it's worth that much more. You can't. You never can make it up.

What about some of the other hidden costs you kind of alluded to? Obviously, the widow's tax, RMDs, you mentioned Medicare, and even estate taxes. Maybe hit on some of those things down the road. People bring about that.

Yeah. So, Medicare, one of the things that keeps a lot of people from doing conversions is they learn about something called IRMAA, and it's just an acronym for Medicare surcharges that happen. Medicare Parts B and D— and Ben, you're a little ways away from needing to know all this stuff— but Medicare Part B and D are income-based premiums. So the more money you have, the more income you have on your tax return, by a delay of 2 years creates higher Medicare premiums, and those can be $15,000 a person. Higher. So a lot of people that we talk to, their premise is, well, I'm going to convert just enough up to where I don't pay that IRMAA charge.

Is that a one-time charge or it's every year?

Every year.

You get set and then—

Well, it's every year based on 2 years ago, your tax return.

Okay, okay.

So what we have found is better for people to do is to just pay the IRMAA charges. Just understand it's the glass you have to crawl through in order to get that $3,000,000 of tax benefits over your lifetime. So what would you rather have? $15,000 of premiums in your pocket that you didn't have to pay because you didn't convert, or $3,000,000 of tax benefit? So waiting on, waiting because of IRMAA is, I like to say, it's like it's stepping over $1,000 bills to pick up dimes. It's just not worth it. That's one of them, right? The other has to do with kind of the next generation. We've already talked about the widow's tax trap. Now when both spouses die, it's a totally different game plan now altogether as well, because now whatever, whatever, and typically us guys go first and we leave our wives and the wives live X amount of more years. Although my wife and I have decided that we're not going to do that game. We're going to, we're going to die together during the middle of the night, holding hands, cuddling. That's how it's going to go. No pain. No meds. Yeah, now the good Lord may decide he wants it differently, and I'll defer to his judgment on that, right? But when both spouses are gone, now the Secure Act that was passed a few years ago, where Bob used to could leave his big IRA to his family and they could stretch it over their lifetime. Ben, if you get his $4 million IRA, and if you were the only sibling, You got to pay tax on that $4 million within 10 years. You got to take it all. Now you're probably at a point in your life when that happens, you've got your tax planning done, you're ready to retire, or you're already retired. And now all of a sudden, I know, first world problem, but now you got $400,000 or $500,000 a year of added income that you got to take every year because Dad left all that money sitting in an IRA. What your dad's already done for you is he's got it now totally taxed.

That's Dad. Yeah.

Yeah. What a bummer.

You got to pay taxes on.

Yeah.

And so, so Roths don't have that. There's no accrued tax liability that you're passing on. And it also goes, it's out of your estate. Am I right?

No, it's still part of your estate.

Still part of the estate.

Yeah.

It's just not taxable. And the heirs still have to take the money out in 10 years, but there's no tax consequence to it.

Right.

It's just free money. So, you know, I'll address one other thing too for the people listening in on this. You know, sometimes we have people say to us, well, you know, I don't— in fact, I had a guy say this to me just last week. He said, you know, I don't feel as bad as you probably want me to feel about leaving my— his case was $10 million to my kids. And them having to pay tax on it. It's a whole lot more than my dad ever left me. And I understood his point, but the point I wanted to make was, you don't understand, sir. You're not making a decision whether you're going to leave it to your kids or not. You're making a decision if you don't take care of this ahead of time, you're choosing to give it to the IRS instead of to your kids and your grandkids. Now, if you're okay with that, then you can still stick your head in the sand and say, well, they got enough money. But understand that when you die, they're writing some big old checks to the IRS that they didn't have to.

So, with the Roth, you don't have to pay taxes on the gains, but do you still have to pay estate taxes? Or, I mean, talk about that.

Well, it still is part of your estate. Okay. But, and then you add up everything you have in your estate, right? And it's either passed or, you know, if you got a big enough— what is the number now? Around $15 million a person or something like that. And that changes every few years. Every time the wind changes direction in Congress, it changes. But it's still part of the estate.

Love it. Well, I don't have an IRA, but if I did, I'd probably convert it right now. But it's actually because I, you know, we had another podcast where Talking about solo 401s and I want to get one set up. But for me, I think it just makes sense to go straight to a Roth and not even worry about traditional or doing a blend. Is that kind of your—?

Yeah. So, what I would do if I was you, Ben, is I would set up, and for anybody out there that's self-employed, set up a solo 401 with a Roth 401 option. And you can fund an incredible amount of money into that 401 option. A whole lot more than if you just went and tried to do it in a regular Roth. I think it's like 26% or 56%, or I'm not a CPA, so I don't have to remember those numbers. But you can put an enormous amount of money into a Roth 401 that you cannot put into a regular standard Roth IRA. Yeah.

You know, you can put it up to $77,500 because I just did it. And I put it into a combined traditional and Roth and then immediately converted the traditional. And then I did it for my wife as well. And yeah, well, then if you're over 59 and a half, it's like, okay, so I've got this investment that's just going to continue to accrue tax-free. I can pull the money out whenever I want or let it accrue. And there's just no downside to doing a big solo 401.

Yeah, not at all. And I'll give a shameless plug if people want to, if you're kind of wondering now, what's this really mean to me? What you really need to try to get an idea of is what is my first required minimum distribution going to be down the road? And what's that going to do to me financially, right? So there are all kinds of RMD calculators out there on the internet that you can go grab and you can get the answer to that. We have gone a step further and we took 2,500 client experiences We loaded them into a database, and we developed an RMD calculator that gives you the same math of, okay, what's it going to be worth? But then we took it a step further, and we said, okay, what did other people like you avoid in taxes by doing these conversions very aggressively? Which I think is a really nice icing on top of the cupcake. And so, and you can cut this part out if you want to, but rmd.q3adv.com. rmd.q3adv.com. Free calculator. Don't have to put in your email address in order to find out some of the information that's there. And the difference in that calculator is that you're going to get to see what is possible. If I got this right, what's possible? What could I get accomplished by doing these accelerated conversions? And so I think, you know, another point that you asked me about, Ben, is timing on this stuff, right? And so we've hit, if you're in your 50s, there's still a reason and there's a way to get it done. If you're in your 60s, it's really the sweet spot. Right, because you got plenty of time before your RMDs start, and probably you're at your peak earning years. You may be retired, and you got the opportunity, you got time still. But even in your 70s, there's still opportunity. You just have to understand, once you get past about 75 years old, the real benefits to the conversion go to your heirs. You're going to see some during your lifetime, but if we ran a calculation that said, is it worth it to me Is it worth it in my lifetime to do this? We would have to tell you no. But is it worth it on the long run to my family? Yeah, it's— there's still millions of dollars to be saved there. We've even done conversion strategies. We had a lady last month, 86 years old, and the whole reason she did it is she didn't want to leave her kids with this great big tax mess that they had to deal with. And she had hardly any income, but she had a huge IRA. So it really works at about any stage. You just gotta, you gotta match what are you trying to get accomplished with the right strategy to do it. And sadly, most of the people in my industry aren't trained on this, and they don't have software that works. Or if they're with a big firm, most of the big institutional firms won't even let their advisors get into these kinds of tax conversations. So, we just found a really nice little niche and we've helped a lot of people and really proud of that.

Let me ask about 401s. A lot of people have larger 401s than IRAs, but a lot of them, they don't have Roth options. Am I right? I'm thinking about my youngest son who's got a big 401, but—

It's really unusual these days for a corporate plan not to have a Roth option. They exist, but it's very rare for them not to exist. If he calls the HR department or whoever handles it, I'll bet you there's a Roth option available to him.

Okay. And so, then if that's the case, the calculation is the same, isn't it? I mean, when you're saying IRAs, you really mean IRAs or 401s. I mean, is there any way to— should we think about them differently or should we think about them, no, this is the same calculus?

No, and I could even add in for government workers a TSA account. I could add for teachers 403 accounts or 457 accounts. Anything that's a tax-qualified deferred plan is all wrapped up in the conversation we've had. Because it still has, they all still have the same problem. They defer, defer, defer, defer, defer, and then you got to pay the piper. And so doing the conversion, you get to be in control and If you do it the right way, like not just to the top of my tax bracket, if I'm an IRA millionaire, you end up with a whole lot more tax avoidance, maybe some more money in your pocket at the end of the day, but you end up with a lot of protection for your spouse against future tax rates and for your kids.

Craig, thanks for coming back on the show, man. It's really great to have you back, and we'll definitely put a link to that calculator in the show notes. What's another way for people to find you on the internet? Are you couple books and website, all that?

Uh, just q3adv.com gets them to the main website where they can access books and our podcast where I had you on, and, and, uh, a lot of our YouTube channels and all that stuff. Awesome.

Well, thanks so much for coming on, Craig. It's fun. I love it. Thank you.

Enjoy it. Appreciate you guys. Take care.

Want to go deeper? Join our free community, or grab a copy of our book, all at investlikeabillionaire.org. Let's keep the conversation going.