I've been living by the Fido RIP (well it used to be called the Retirement Income Planner) tool. It got me to retirement and in the 11 years since seems pretty darn conservative; I know times can change. I track expense w Quicken and just check that, yeah, I'm way under what I could spend. Anyway....
A lot of this thread is on taxes. We can easily live on SS and my pension, in fact we definitely do since Covid stopped any expensive travel. We have almost no assets in our brokerage account, but almost 7 figures in our Roth's and still well over 7 in my IRA. For last 5-6 years I've been maxing the Roth Conversions to stay below IRMAA. At 71, this is my last year to do that. The conversions were close to what my MRD's will be, so not a big change in flows.
It doesn't often get talked about, but a real motivator to me for the Roth conversions is that with both of us, we're paying MFJ rates. Paying attention to the mortality thread, it's highly likely that one of us will be paying what I've projected to be about 30-40% more tax on those MRD's when it's done as a single filer. Has anyone with a substantial tIRA upped their withdrawals beyond minimum (once past 72) in order to pay the lesser tax rate? I know you have to account for missed opportunity for tax free growth on the additional, but the single payer premium is substantial.
I had an accountant about 30 years ago warn me about doing too much tax deferred (was before Roth's). I'm not regretting what we did, but I never expected to have a pension as healthy as this is nor was I counting on SS still being solvent. For now. As they say, First World Problem.
