Too much in retirement accounts

[pb4uski]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Scratchy My apologies if the point I raise below has already been mentioned in this thread, I did not see it at a quick glance. For non tax-advantaged accounts, the cost basis gets reset at the time of death of the owner. In a community property state, it gets reset upon the death of either spouse, leaving the surviving spouse with a new cost basis for all community property holdings. So, for those who can foresee that much of their non tax-advantaged holdings would not be spent before they were passed on to their heirs, or surviving spouse, capital gains tax would be largely avoided. There is no corresponding advantage for non Roth retirement accounts. Tax will be paid on those funds, including principal and gains, when they are withdrawn, whether by the original owner or the heirs. The point being, the gains in non tax-advantaged accounts may actually never be taxed, in some cases. I anticipate largely spending money from my retirement accounts, and avoiding selling positions which have significant gains in my non-tax advantaged accounts, as this will be beneficial to my heirs.

This is what we are doing and I've written about it often. What happened was that we were living off of taxable and doing Roth conversions but the taxable equities were 200% of cost so the gains from selling taxable equities to raise cash for spending was getting in the way of Roth conversions. So we changed tacks and are leaving taxable alone to get a stepped up basis and gains become totally tax free and that leaves more room for Roth conversions. We have enough in Roths that are past the 5 years to use a portion of those for spending... so we have Roth conversions going in the back end of the toothpaste tube and Roth withdrawals for spending coming out the front end of the toothpaste tube.

We may also use some of those highly appreciated equities in the taxable account for charitable contributions.

[samcat]

I scanned the posts and don't think this was mentioned but there is such a thing as having too much in pre-tax retirement accounts. Once RMDs hit at 72, you don't want to have to take so much that it puts you in a much higher tax bracket.

We have a four pronged approach.

401k
Roth
After tax savings
social security

We put an amount into our 401ks that we are comfortable with (we have our own S Corp so determine our own match) and then put the rest into a Roth or after tax savings. We are probably averaging $20k total between the two of us into our 401ks.

We are not retired yet but feel that the more we put into after tax savings, the more flexibility we have with life. And a lot of our after tax savings is in cash which I'm sure I'll get nailed for but we like cash!