Finding Your Optimal Roth IRA Conversion Strategy

Hey there, this is Craig Weir. Thanks for clicking through. I hope to give you some good information here in just a few minutes about more about Roth conversions. And I've got a little bit of an example that's on the page that you're looking at that I'd like to run through with you so that you can understand and know what's in there and what it may mean for you. You know, a few years ago when I wrote my first book, Paying the Piper, my big challenge was just to convince people that there really was a lot of money to be saved in a lot of different ways by doing Roth conversions. And now we find that a of people are doing Roth conversions, so they call us to talk about what they're doing. And what we find, unfortunately, is that most people are not doing all that they could do. And the result of that is they're leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not well over a million dollars in many cases, on the doorstep of the irs because they're just doing what's comfortable or what they saw on the Internet that they should do. So our goal is to try to help people get the optimal strategy. And let me show you what I mean by that. Here's a real live couple that are on this table that's presented to you. They had about a million and a half dollars of IRA money. They're in their mid-60s. We used very conservative assumptions about rates of return and how long they're going to live and all those kinds of things. But you'll notice here that we laid out three different scenarios for you to look at today. This is not by any stretch of the imagination all that they saw, but I'm just going to show you the three most reasonable ones that they looked at. So they didn't do any conversion at all. Then the middle column is if they just converted to the top of their current tax bracket each year, what would happen? And then the last one was the optimal strategy, the one that we found for them that helped them the most, that gave them the highest net worth and the highest amount of tax savings. Well, you notice there's something really big and stark difference between them, and that's the amount of total projected required minimum distributions. So if they do nothing, they've got about three and a half million dollars of required minimum distributions. And those RMDs are the catalyst for all kinds of pain. Higher Medicare premiums, potentially higher Social Security tax on your Social Security, and a variety of other things. And you'll see that if you follow that column down that meant that they were going to have about a million and a half in total taxes during their life. And that's because that's with all their sources, their Social Security and a little bit of investment income and everything. And you can see that that also meant that were going to leave enough money in their IRAs that their heirs were going to have another 900,000 or so in taxes to pay upon their death as they began to inherit the IRAs. And for those of you that are questioning that, that's the income tax on the IRAs, not an estate tax. Okay? So they're in. Their total projected Medicare premiums were going to be about 367,000. Okay? So that's if they didn't do anything at all. They're going to retire just fine. Their life was going to be wonderful. They're going to be able to afford everything they wanted to do, but they were going to pay a lot of money in income tax. So the most comfortable scenario, the one that most people use, the one that the financial press is really great at puffing up and making good, is that you just convert to the top of your current tax bracket. Well, that's that second column over there now, right. You notice that it does help. They take their projected RMDs from three and a half million down to 1.3 million. They save a couple hundred thousand dollars of taxes over their life, which is a good thing. Their heirs save a couple hundred thousand dollars of taxes. Their Medicare premiums drop $80,000 by just converting to the top of their current tax bracket. And a lot of people have a hard time understanding how that happens. And I have other videos and material that can explain that to you. But their total tax avoidance by just going to the top of their current tax bracket was just under a half a million dollars. Not bad, but not the best, not optimal. They're still leaving a ton of money on the table for the IRS that they're not going to get to enjoy. You notice the optimal strategy gets rid of their requirement of distributions almost entirely. You notice that their lifetime taxes drop down to about a half a million dollars instead of a million and a half dollars. And you notice that they've put their heirs in a position of having hardly any taxes owed on what's left. And their Medicare premiums dropped an additional 50,000 compared to just the current tax bracket. So in total, the optimal strategy for them save them $1.8 million or help them avoid taxes of about $1.8 million. You need to know that these results on optimal strategies are also done at a place where their net worth is at least where it was or higher. Very seldom do we see a decrease in net worth if you get Roth conversion accelerated. Roth conversions done appropriately. So they ended up with an additional $1.3 million in their pocket just because they got it right. So good, better, and best. Best wins. Good is really not a place that you want to be right? So what's at stake when you're an IRA millionaire is rather significant. Doing something is really not the best. It doesn't get you a buy. You can't. It doesn't get you a pat on the back that you can live with and feel great. It's still leaving a lot of money on the table. So just to continue through retirement in blissful ignorance doesn't give your family the most, doesn't give you the most, and it just leaves a lot of money on the doorstep of the irs. So, you know, a simple online calculator is not going to be able to give you an optimal strategy. I have yet to see a single spreadsheet that is interactive enough by the engineers that we've worked with to give the optimal strategy the entire picture. Calculating everything that's needed and certainly a free service offered by an investment advisor who wants to win your business, to manage your money or to sell you a financial product is not the best strategy either. It's not the way to figure out what's the best outcome for you. We'd really like to help you. I've got a specially trained group of certified financial planners that understand this stuff. They. They talk to people all day long. That's all they do is financial plans and customized Roth conversions that give people their optimal strategies. And we've developed proprietary analytical tools that allow us to do the job with a tremendous amount of efficiency to make sure that you win. At the end of the day, doesn't it make sense to at least have a phone call to figure out if we can help you, whether you're a good candidate for this kind of service and for Roth conversions in total? So if you're already doing Roth conversions, good for you. But if you don't know, absolutely positive because you've done the numbers and calculated a variety of scenarios that you're optimizing it, then I'd say there's still some money on the table for you. As you can see, the difference between good and best is pretty enormous. If you're that IRA millionaire and you've got the money. If you have less than a million bucks in your IRAs, the principles still apply, and there's probably still a lot of money that you can save, so don't just totally discount it. But our service is designed to help people that we can get the greatest amount of savings, get the biggest bang for our buck, and we back everything we do with a 100% refund offer. So we have to know that we can reach certain benchmarks to save you a whole lot of money. So if it makes sense to you to have a preliminary call, then click on the button to schedule a call. And we'd love to just kind of see if there's a fit and if we can answer some of your questions about Roth conversions that lead you to determining that you're on the right path, or maybe you're like most everybody else that we talk to, and there's really more that can be done, and we'll be able to quantify that for you. So schedule a call today. You know, our average client saves about $2.1 million in income taxes. They'll save between 80 and $150,000 of Medicare premiums. And we do all this in a way where we prove to you that based on your assumptions that you believe are reasonable, not ours to embellish anything, but we want to make sure that we're able to do all those things and make sure that your net worth stays about where it is or higher over time, and that's how you get to the optimal Roth conversion strategy. So I hope this meant something to you. I hope it gave you a little bit more information on your journey to try to figure out what's best for you. So, Craig Weir again, God bless. Have a great day.