Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Being smart with $$ - Stock Crash Consolation Prize #2


Stock Crash Consolation Prize #2:  Cheaper Roth Conversions.

Converting a Traditional IRA to a Roth IRA means paying taxes now on your retirement account assets instead of paying taxes when you take the money out in retirement.  But once the money is in the Roth IRA account, it will grow tax free moving forward with all the money available to you in your golden years.  While a Roth conversion may or may not be right for you, it is cheaper to convert when the market is down.  Let’s say you have 100 shares of Apple in your Traditional IRA and were thinking about converting those shares in September.  If you did so, you would have to pay taxes based on the value of Apple at the time which was around $22,000.  But if you procrastinated and still want to convert the shares, now you can do so with the value of your Apple stock around $15,000 and only pay taxes on this much lower value.  Same shares converted, less taxes paid.  Stock crash: bad.  Cheaper Roth conversions: good.  There’s rules and nuances you should know before converting but at least you have another consolation prize from this stock market chaos.

Larry Pike, CFA
Client Priority Financial Advisors LLC
www.clientpriority.com 

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