I'm Earning $275k This Year. Can I Use a Backdoor Roth Strategy to Reduce Taxes?
SmartAsset and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue through links in the content below.
If you’re making $275,000 a year, you can’t contribute to a Roth IRA due to income limits. However, a backdoor conversion can allow a high earner to sock away unlimited sums in a Roth account, enabling tax-free requirement withdrawals and a way past pesky required minimum distribution rules (RMDs) that many pretax retirement account require. But this will likely require sufficient after-tax funds – such as from a non-retirement bank account or brokerage account – to pay the upfront tax bill that a backdoor conversion strategy generates.
Conversions are most advisable for savers who will be in a higher tax bracket after retirement. Assuming these conditions are met, a backdoor conversion can be a useful method of avoiding Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) and enjoying tax-free withdrawals in retirement. Consider discussing a Roth backdoor conversion with a financial advisor to make sure you understand the ins and outs of this strategy.
Roth retirement accounts allow savers to use after-tax money to fund accounts where investments accumulate earnings tax-free and, in most circumstances, withdrawals are also tax-free. Another appealing feature of Roth accounts is that they are exempt from RMD rules requiring savers to begin withdrawing from pre-tax savings accounts such as IRAs and 401(k)s after age 73, which can expose retirees to unwelcome tax bills.
Roth IRAs also have income limits that make them inaccessible to some high earners. For 2024, individuals earning $161,000, married couples filing jointly earning $240,000 and married couples filing separately earning $10,000 are all prohibited from contributing to Roth retirement accounts at all.
However, since 2010 it’s been possible for a saver to convert unlimited funds from a pre-tax retirement account to a Roth account. This backdoor conversion, as it’s known, has become a popular way for people who earn and lot and have saved a lot to get the advantages of Roth accounts.
To perform a backdoor conversion, a saver can transfer funds from a pre-tax retirement account such as a 401(k). 401(k)s and other qualified accounts may not limit an investor based on his or her income, and its annual contribution limits are also much higher than Roth IRA contribution caps. Next, they transfer funds from their other retirement account to a new Roth IRA account. Because the funds from the 401(k) are pre-tax, the saver will have to pay income taxes on the converted amounts in that tax year, as if they were withdrawals treated as ordinary income. A large transfer can generate a large tax bill if the entire amount is converted at once. Sometimes conversions of large IRAs are done gradually over several years to manage the tax bill and keep the person in lower tax brackets.
Leave a Reply