Craig Wear, CFP® explains why many high-net-worth IRA owners hesitate to do Roth conversions—primarily fear of the upfront tax bill, procrastination, and reliance on short-term or non-specialist advice. He frames Roth conversion as an investment in future tax certainty, notes that annual reviews and ongoing tuning matter, cites his firm’s experience (about 1,500 clients in five years, collectively avoiding nearly $7 billion in taxes) as evidence, and directs viewers to an RMD/Roth-conversion calculator to estimate potential tax avoidance for people in similar situations.
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Why do so many smart people do absolutely nothing about the biggest tax trap in their life? You know, we've worked with literally thousands of IRA millionaires. They're successful, they're disciplined, they're intelligent, and yet when it comes to Roth conversions, a lot of them just freeze. They fear that upfront tax bill, or they second guess the timing, or they fear doing it wrong. But waiving only makes the problem worse. Let's just talk about fear of that upfront tax bill. Consider it really a investment in your future. It's getting the taxes paid and over with so that you don't have to worry about what happens next in taxes. And if somebody can demonstrate to you that you not only avoid tax, but your net worth isn't negatively impacted, then it becomes a good deal, right? The other thing I'll say is a lot of people just simply procrastinate. You know, some really smart people just wait for the perfect plan and they end up with nothing. They want to analyze the rest of their life. And really Roth conversions and that journey you take. Although you can come up with what's the optimal game plan today. Part of the reason that we offer annual reviews when we work with clients is because every year or two there's been enough change that you gotta turn the dials a little bit and fine tune it and tweak it. So it's important to get started and then it's important to stay engaged along the way. And we found that sometimes by just helping people to understand that whatever they come up with right now isn't the final plan. It's just where you start and looks like where you're headed. The other, I think problem that we've seen so many people deal with is they trust advice from very well meaning, but folks that really don't know what they're doing when it comes to Roth conversions and tax strategy, they have a CPA they trust, which is great. Most CPAs would admit that they really aren't the tax strategists for long term. They deal with a few years. The clients we work with have advisors, financial advisors that tend to be mainly investment advisors that really aren't qualified or don't specialize in giving this kind of advice, or sometimes they're even prohibited from doing it, or they use some of the most prevalent financial planning tools. But those tools fall very short in their ability to actually create, give them great guidance. So CPAs and advisors often give very short term guidance that misses the lifetime view, the longer term view. What's really better for clients at the time I'm recording this, we've had close to 1500 clients that we've helped just in the last five years of taking our message to a national audience through books and webinars and all that kind of thing. Collectively, those people have saved or avoided almost $7 billion of taxes. And not every one of them, but many of them had the same concerns. They feared the tax bill, they feared getting it wrong. They maybe not including everything, but after starting to convert aggressively, they've saved their heirs and themselves millions of dollars. The biggest hurdle is not the IRS and what tax codes to use or over how many years to use it. It's really our own hesitations about the fears that we have. So I just would encourage you. Good information leads to clarity of thought, which means. Which leads to great decision making. So break through the fear. Get. Get some good information. The rewards are enormous. If you'd like to kind of figure out how big a deal is this for me, you can click on the link down below. We've developed an RMD calculator that goes way beyond just here's what your RMDs are going to be. We've taken at the time 1200 of our clients and we've segmented them into different stratas and you'll be able to relate to them when you put in your age and the amount of IRA assets that you have. We're going to show you based on what they were able to avoid, what your possibilities are. So if you are similar to them, then we're going to show you what someone in similar circumstances have been able to avoid by getting it right click below in the calculator and hopefully it's of some help to you. Take care. Have a great day. God bless you.
