What is a Backdoor Roth IRA?

In this episode of the Doctor’s Eyes Only Podcast, brought to you by Vestia Personal Wealth Advisors, Partner and CEO Lauren Oschman talks about the benefits, drawbacks, and qualifications for a Backdoor Roth IRA.

Lauren Oschman - I always go back to a story, so I actually work with a father and a daughter. The father is a retired physician, his daughter is currently a practicing physician who's working on accumulating her wealth and saving for her own retirement. So I started working with her father when he was on the precipice of retirement. He came to me, referred by his daughter, who had been a client of mine for a long time, and he said, Lauren, I've always done my investments myself and I would just love for you to be able to tell me, can I retire? 

I started going through all of his accounts, and he had done a really really great job saving. He had been in a private practice, he had a lot of money put away in pre -taxed vehicles, so money that had never been taxed. And then anything he couldn't get into a pre -tax vehicle that wasn't a part of his spending plan, he was putting into a brokerage account. He never funded anything in the Roth bucket, right? 

So we can kind of think about money in three buckets from a tax perspective, pre -tax, taxable, that would be your brokerage, and then tax -free, which would be your Roth IRA, under all of the current tax laws. He didn't have anything in the Roth bucket. He had saved really really well, so I was able to tell him that based on all of the calculations that I ran, it looked like he was in a good position to be able to retire. The big question mark, the thing that I could not assure him .. was that pre -tax money.. I don't know what's going to happen to tax rates over the next 20 years. Tax rates are not fixed. We could end up with new people making decisions in Congress. We could have new tax laws passed, and tax rates could actually go up. So he had the vast majority, probably 80% of his money, was in accounts that were subject to taxes as he takes his withdrawals. 

A lot of these conversations about IRAs, Roth IRAs, the sequence of transactions to do the Backdoor Roth IRA does involve tax strategy and tax reporting. I am not an Accountant, I am a Financial Advisor, so please, any decision that you're going to make that is going to involve tax reporting, please run these things by your accountant to make sure that you have all of the information before you make decisions based on what makes sense for your situation. 

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