Let's do another Q&A episode where this week I'll be talking about Social Security lump sums for retroactive payments, whether to pay every mortgage or not, step up in basis, making gifts without having to file a gift tax return and much more in this, the 193rd episode of the Retirement Planning Education Podcast.

Welcome to the Retirement Planning Education podcast, where you can learn all about IRAs and Roth IRAs, employer retirement plans, taxes, Social Security, Medicare, portfolio withdrawal strategies, annuities, estate planning, and much more.

And now here's your host, Andy Panko.

Hello, all of you fine folks. Let's have another

question and answer episode on the Retirement Planning Education podcast. I always look forward

to these. I received a lot of questions over the last month, so I'm not getting to all of them.

I'm basically just going through, you know, oldest, I have a stack printed out here. I'll see how many I can get through in roughly an hour. I'll try to keep an eye on the clock here. And I'll stop there and the rest will have to carry over to next time. There's also some of you submitted, you know, proposals or recommendations for deep dive episodes. I'm not blowing you off. It just takes a lot more work and energy and effort to put something

proper together. If I think I can address it in just a quick Q&A format, I will, but some of the

stuff is like, man, that's going to take some work. So those things are just kind of sitting in the

stack that I may, you know, hopefully get to at some point. So we'll run through today's questions,

lots of good stuff. Again, thank you to everyone who send questions. If you want to send a question for me to hopefully answer going forward, you can send it to Andy at Andypanco.com. And like I said, I will do my best to get to it and put it in, you know, time order of when I address these. One thing I want to mention about an episode,

what month is it? I think it was this month, February, 2026's deep dive topic where I talked

about backdoor Roth contributions. Thank you to a listener for pointing this out to me after the

fact. I wish I could go back and change it now, just to add to it.

But I said that all of your IRAs, whether it's a traditional IRA, a rollover IRA, a

contributor IRA, whatever you choose to call it, or a CEP IRA or a simple IRA, you have to

aggregate the balances of all of those together.

The balances of those as of December 31st of the year, you do the conversion in the backdoor Roth process to figure out the pro rata process and calculation.

If you have an inherited traditional IRA that you inherited from someone that does not get included because that's not formally yours.

It's still the decedent's IRA.

You're just the recipient of its income after they die.

That's kind of the best way to think about it.

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