Craig Wear explains the widow's trap: when a surviving spouse switches to single-filer status after their partner dies, the same required minimum distributions can push them into a higher tax bracket with few ways to fix it. Older surviving spouses face unfavorable tax consequences.
The widow's trap is something that we talk about in the financial community, but it's a circumstance where one spouse dies, leaves the other spouse with all the money. The RMDs are the same as they were before, but now the remaining spouse is in a single taxpayer bracket, causing them to have the same RMDs but probably pay tax at a higher bracket. And now there's really not much they can do because they're maybe a little bit older and now conversions don't make sense, but you've now just forced them into a much higher tax bracket.
