A short advisory segment by Craig Wear, CFP® recommending gradual Roth conversions of traditional IRAs to lower future required minimum distributions (RMDs) and avoid large future taxes; he argues the common advice to convert only if future tax rates rise is often misleading—especially for high-balance IRA holders, who may otherwise leave substantial taxes to heirs or the government.
So the strategy tip here is by gradually converting portions of your traditional IRA to a Roth, you can reduce the balance of your traditional IRA and that lowers your future RMDs. One really strong and prevalent misleading belief is that you should only convert if you think that tax rates are going to increase in the future. Our experience of over 15 years of doing this and literally thousands of iterations and calculations proves that if you're an IRA millionaire, you generally are going to make a huge mistake by following that traditional advice and you'll leave millions of dollars of unnecessary taxes at the doorstep of Uncle Sam.
