Craig Wear, CFP®Craig Wear, CFP® | Expert in Roth Conversions & Tax-Efficient Retirement Strategies for IRA Millionaires

Waiting to Convert to Roth Costs You THOUSANDS

27 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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In this video, Craig Wear, CFP®, explains why postponing a Roth IRA conversion can lead to substantial, avoidable tax costs. He quantifies the impact of waiting, showing that a one‑year delay reduces projected lifetime savings from about $1.8 million to $1.7 million—a $66,000 loss in tax savings—while a five‑year delay can cost roughly $350,000. Wear also addresses common reasons people give for waiting (retirement timing, anticipated lower tax brackets, end‑of‑year timing, or other life events) and demonstrates that, regardless of these rationales, the tax penalty of delay is significant. The overall message is that acting sooner on a Roth conversion captures tax savings that would otherwise be permanently forfeited.

Chapters

So a lot of people also say, well, you know what? I'm going to retire in a couple of years. I think I'll wait till then. Or they say, I'm just going to wait and get this done at the end of the year. Other people are thinking, well, I'm going to be in a lower tax bracket in a couple of years. I'll wait for that. Or I'm going to retire in four or five years, I'll wait for that, or some other life event they think is going to happen differently. So part of what we wanted to do is to be able to quantify, well, is that better or worse with the same money? If they were going to wait just one year, their projected lifetime savings would be 1.7 million instead of the 1.8. If you do the math on it, it's a $66,000 tax savings that they will never be able to gain if they wait. It's money just wasted on taxes that you could have captured yourself had you acted sooner. If they would have waited five years, you see, the total cost to wait is about $350,000.