In this presentation, Craig Wear, CFP®, argues that postponing a Roth IRA conversion has a tangible, substantial financial cost. He outlines a baseline scenario where a well‑planned conversion begun immediately yields about $1.8 million in lifetime tax savings. He then quantifies the loss from delaying: waiting one tax year reduces savings to roughly $1.7 million (a $66,000 loss), while waiting five years cuts savings to about $1.4 million (a $357,000 loss). Wear emphasizes that these lost amounts go directly to the IRS, reducing the wealth that families, spouses, and heirs could retain. The talk is framed as a call to action, urging viewers to stop deferring the conversion and to recognize the real‑world dollar impact of waiting.
Chapters
You already know Roth conversions make sense. You've probably been thinking about it for a while. Maybe you even started, but if you're like most people I talk to, there's a part of you that's been telling yourself, eh, I'll get serious about this either at the end of the year or next year after the market settles or after I talk to my CPA or after things feel a little more certain. I get it. I mean, it feels like a decision you can make later. What I want to show you today is what later actually costs you. Not in theory, not as a principle, in real dollars from real conversion plans that we've done. In this plan, A well-executed Roth conversion strategy started now with a full planning year, properly coordinated, produces lifetime tax savings of roughly $1.8 million. Okay, so we're going to call that the baseline. That's what acting looks like. Now, let's look at what waiting looks like. If this person waited 1 year, 1 tax year, for whatever good logical reason they have, their lifetime tax savings drops to $1.7 million and some change. So what's the cost of that 1 year? $66,000. I want you to Sit with that for just a second. $66,000 of tax benefit that they could have had that they will never have an opportunity to get before. Not because the plan got worse, not because anything went wrong, simply because the window was now one year narrower. Let's look at maybe this person waited 5 years and often we have people say to us, well, I'm going to be retiring in several years. And so I'm going to be in a whole lot lower tax bracket then I'll just wait until then or whatever their reason is for waiting. Right. But we hear a lot of it. We hear a lot of excuses. Lifetime tax savings in that case dropped to $1.4 million. So the cost of waiting over 5 years then, $357,000 just because they waited. And here's what makes that number so significant. That money doesn't disappear into thin air. It just stays in the pockets of the IRS. Comes directly out of what your family would have kept. Now it's exposed and it's no longer protected. This also comes out of what your spouse has if something happens to you, out of what your kids inherit. It's not an abstract number. That's real money that either stays in your family or it doesn't.
