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Originally Posted by UteChief
Thanks Rainman, that makes a lot of sense for your situation. I’d love to hear others. An advisor started doing this for my SIL and I can’t figure out why!
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I think it has a place with variable incomes if incomes are down.
I think there is a case to be made that if you want out of some investments that have a loss in a taxable account you could do Roth conversions for the loss amount. But that sounds…painful.
I think there is a case where you lose an expense and could do Roth conversions for that amount without much impact on your life. For instance, if you pay off your mortgage you could do a Roth conversion for the P&I of your mortgage and not feel it too much. But my (not very confident, but it’s what I’d do) opinion is if you have the time horizon to capitalize on ROTH benefits, you’re probably better off to take whatever tax savings you are trying to utilize and stick the cash amount of the tax savings into a taxable brokerage (or increase contributions to a qualified plan if you have room).
I recently made this ridiculous spreadsheet that evaluated some qualified plan options, the theory of the exercise was to maximize total assets given a set cash flow. My bias was to put everything into a Roth optioned 401K, but in point of fact, sticking it in a traditional 401K and investing the tax savings into a taxable brokerage outperformed the Roth + tax across every variable I looked at. Thats all assuming current tax rates which 493 points out could change soon.
I’m not ready to take the leap on the basis of potential tax changes like 493 is suggesting, but it’s probably the smart play. The 2017 tax cuts were signify d if they go the other way Mr T predicts PAIN. But who the hell knows what will happen. I wouldn’t have predicted Trump of all people would sign off on SALT limitations and as much as democrats rail on capital gains tax they never do anything about it. So I’m not willing to eat tax on the current betting on the future with tax. But I’m almost certainly wrong.