A few years ago, I paid $2,000 I didn’t really have to spare to sit in a room with Ed Slott — the CPA widely regarded as America’s leading IRA expert — because a client handed me his book and said, “Here, read this.” I went in thinking I already knew this material. I came out realizing I’d spent my entire career quietly congratulating myself on tax deferral without asking the obvious next question: what happens when it’s time to actually use this money?
That’s the shift Ed Slott’s training forces on you. Tax-deferred growth feels like a gift while you’re accumulating it. It becomes a very different story once required minimum distributions (RMDs) show up and start pulling large, mandatory chunks of your IRA or 401(k) onto your tax return whether you need the cash or not — what Slott calls a “tax bomb.”
At our firm, my colleagues Tom Griffith and I are both Ed Slott Master Elite Advisors, and every year we come back from his training with new ways to think about this. Below are eight questions from Slott’s own retirement tax checklist. Whether you’re decades from retirement or already drawing down accounts, these are worth sitting with — even if some of the answers are uncomfortable.
1. Are You Exposed to Higher Future Tax Rates?
For most people, the honest answer is probably yes. Today’s tax brackets are, historically speaking, low. A married couple can convert IRA money up to the top of the 24% bracket — currently just over $400,000 of income — and still be paying a rate that’s cheap by historical standards. Given the size of the federal deficit and the difficulty of cutting spending enough to close it, it’s reasonable to expect rates to move higher, not lower, over the next decade.
There’s no single “right” percentage of your savings that should sit in tax-deferred accounts versus Roth. It depends on your total balance, your other income, and your goals. But two things are worth remembering: unused space in a lower tax bracket in any given year is gone forever, and if most of your retirement savings are concentrated in tax-deferred accounts, you are, by definition, exposed to whatever tax rates exist when you’re forced to withdraw.
2. Are You Using the Years Before RMDs Are Required?
There’s a window — typically between when you retire and when RMDs begin (currently age 73, moving to 75 for some) — where your income often drops. You’re no longer earning a paycheck, you may not have started Social Security yet, and your RMDs haven’t kicked in. That’s frequently the best stretch of your life to do Roth conversions, because you can fill up lower tax brackets deliberately instead of having a large RMD force you into a higher one later.
One detail that surprises people: once RMDs start, you cannot convert the RMD itself — it has to come out and be taxed as ordinary income first. But that doesn’t mean conversions stop. If your RMD is $20,000 and your target for the year is to fill up a bracket at $100,000 of IRA withdrawals, you take the $20,000 RMD first, then convert the remaining $80,000. The RMD has to come out first; everything else can still be planned around it.
3. Will Your Retirement Accounts Create a Tax Problem for Your Heirs?
For most families, yes — unless the money has already been converted to Roth. Under current law, most non-spouse beneficiaries (adult children, for example) fall under the 10-year rule: the inherited account must be fully emptied by the end of the tenth year after your death. This applies to both traditional and Roth inherited IRAs.
The difference is what “emptied” costs your heirs. A Roth IRA comes out tax-free no matter how they time the withdrawals. A traditional IRA does not. Picture two children each inheriting $500,000 in a traditional IRA. One withdraws it all in year one and adds half a million dollars to that year’s taxable income — a painful tax hit. The other spreads it out over the ten years, managing their own bracket along the way. Same inheritance, very different outcomes, and neither child will think to plan for this unless someone explains the 10-year rule to them in advance.
4. Are Roth Conversions Being Considered at the Right Time?
If conversions make sense for your situation at all, the next question is always when and how much. The goal is simple to state and hard to execute: get money out of tax-deferred accounts at the lowest realistic tax rate, whether that rate applies now or in some future year.
The complicating factor is that tax rates are set by Congress and can change relatively easily — tax law is one of the few things that can be altered through budget reconciliation, without needing 60 votes in the Senate. Nobody can predict future rates with certainty, but today’s rates are historically low, and the years after you retire but before RMDs begin are usually your best opportunity to convert meaningfully within your current, known bracket rather than gamble on what a future bracket might look like.
5. Are You Giving to Charity in the Most Tax-Efficient Way?
If you’re charitably inclined and over 70½, probably not — unless you’re already using a qualified charitable distribution (QCD). A QCD lets you send money directly from a traditional IRA to a qualified charity without ever recognizing it as taxable income, and if you’re subject to RMDs, it counts toward satisfying that year’s requirement.
Two mechanical details matter here. First, a QCD only works from a traditional IRA — never from a Roth, since you’ve already paid tax on that money and there’s no benefit to be gained. Second, ordering matters: if you’re doing a QCD in a year you also owe an RMD, the QCD has to happen first, before any other withdrawal, or you risk it being treated as an ordinary taxable distribution instead. This is not a do-it-yourself project — a small mistake in the sequencing can turn a tax-free gift into a taxable one, so get help executing it correctly.
6. Do the 2026 Tax Rule Changes Affect You?
Almost certainly yes, even if only at the margins. Beyond the routine annual increases to IRA and 401(k) contribution limits, recent legislation added a new deduction of up to $6,000 per person for taxpayers over 65 — but it phases out above certain income levels. The cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction was also raised, from $10,000 to $40,000, again with income-based phase-outs.
None of these changes exist in isolation. A Roth conversion decision now has to account for whether it pushes you past the income threshold where you lose the new senior deduction or a portion of your SALT deduction. This is exactly why retirement tax planning has to be done as a single, integrated plan rather than account by account — and why it should be evaluated over your lifetime tax bill, not the tax bill of any one year. Judged one year at a time, a Roth conversion almost never looks appealing, because you’re voluntarily paying tax you could have deferred. Judged over a lifetime, that same conversion is often the reason a retiree pays meaningfully less tax overall.
7. Are IRMAA Thresholds Limiting Your Roth Conversions?
For most people, yes — and often more than they should. IRMAA (the income-related monthly adjustment amount) is the surcharge added to Medicare Part B and D premiums when your income exceeds certain thresholds, currently $218,000 for a married couple and $109,000 for a single filer, based on income from two years prior. A lot of retirees plan their entire financial life around staying just under that line.
That instinct makes sense in isolation, but it can work against you if you’re sitting on a large IRA balance and staring down big RMDs a few years out. In that situation, absorbing a year or two of IRMAA surcharges in exchange for meaningful Roth conversions is often the better trade. IRMAA is a one-year cost that resets annually based on your income; a Roth conversion creates a permanent, tax-free asset that benefits you, your surviving spouse, and your heirs for years or generations. For someone with a large tax-deferred balance, the long-term value of the conversion frequently outweighs the short-term pain of a higher Medicare premium.
8. Are You Prepared for the Widow’s Penalty?
Most people are not, largely because it requires thinking about a future most of us would rather not picture. When a spouse dies, the survivor typically shifts from filing jointly to filing as a single taxpayer — often within the same or following year — while household income doesn’t drop nearly as much as the tax brackets do. The result: the surviving spouse frequently pays more in tax and more in IRMAA surcharges on a similar or only modestly reduced income.
This is one of the strongest arguments for Roth conversions done well before that point. Roth accounts have no RMDs for the original owner, withdrawals don’t add to taxable income, and they don’t push a surviving spouse’s income higher for IRMAA purposes. Leaving a surviving spouse with more money in Roth accounts, rather than traditional ones, directly cushions the financial shock of losing a spouse — on top of the emotional one.
Why This Matters
Every one of these eight questions touches the others. A Roth conversion decision affects your IRMAA bracket, your heirs’ tax bill, your exposure to future rate changes, and what your surviving spouse inherits. Looked at individually, each question has a reasonable-sounding answer. Looked at together, as part of one coordinated plan, the right strategy usually becomes much clearer — and it’s rarely “convert everything” or “convert nothing.” It’s a schedule, built around your specific numbers, revisited every year as the rules and your circumstances change.
If you want to see where you land on these eight questions, pull your most recent tax return and your account balances and start working through them one at a time. And if the ordering rules, the IRMAA math, or the 10-year rule start to feel like more than you want to manage alone, that’s exactly the kind of planning our team does every day.
Have questions about Roth conversions, RMDs, or how these eight questions apply to your own accounts? Reach out to our team at Cardinal Advisors.
