Short excerpt from a YouTube video by Craig Wear, CFP® (uploaded Feb 1, 2025) arguing that common tax-conversion strategies and financial-planning software make built-in assumptions—like converting only to the top of a tax bracket or spreading conversions over 25 years—that can lead to worse tax outcomes and obscure effects on net worth and total taxes.
The 90% of it has built in assumptions that you only convert to the top of your tax bracket. And so if you've got a lot of money and you have a good income, it's probably going to tell you it's not worth it to do it, or it's going to have you converting over 25 years. And what they won't tell you with that, because they haven't even thought about it, is doing it that way you're going to actually pay more tax than if you just skip the exercise altogether. The other camp on the software can give you you can get to the right answer, but it's not presented in a way where you can actually really evaluate how did this affect my net worth? How did it affect my total taxes?
