One of the challenges that you're likely going to have in retirement as you start to implement a tax strategy is you're going to ask yourself the question of what degree should I focus on and prioritize Roth conversions versus to what degree should I focus on and prioritize tax gain harvesting.

This can be a tricky thing to juggle because both have tremendous benefits.

And what we're going to do in today's episode of Ready for Retirement is to help walk through, use no listener's actual situation. We're going to

walk through an example to see how should you prioritize each. So let's jump right in.

This is another episode of Ready for Retirement. I'm your host, James Connell, and I'm here to teach

you how to get the most of the life with your money.

And now, on to the episode. The listener question that we're going to be going over today comes from Drew.

Drew says this. He says, here's the puzzle I'm trying to solve. Do I continue to sell stocks out of my non-retirement brokerage account, paying 15% on the capital gains,

or do I spend more money out of my traditional IRA paying 22% and hope that I can control my

income well enough in the future to take advantage of a 0% tax rate on ordinary capital gains?

For reference, here's my situation.

My annual living expenses are about $110,000. I have $2 million

in a tax deferred retirement account. I have $800,000 in a Roth IRA, $300,000 in a brokerage

account, $11,000 per year in a pension, and Social Security coming someday. From Drew.

So Drew, thank you very much for that question. I think

this is a good example to use as we start to understand how do we prioritize various tax strategies

in retirement. And it looks like Drew is specifically asking about tax gain harvesting because

he asks how does he keep a 0% tax rate on his long-term capital gains? So I'm going to take

that question and also add on to it and talk about to what extent should we also be looking

at things like Roth conversions. So, Drew, we are going to look at your question, but we're going to

add on top of it because this is a very common thing. Here's what I'll say before we jump in.

This typically isn't a tremendous issue for someone that doesn't have a good amount of money in both IRAs and brokerage accounts.

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