Welcome to the Jill on Money Podcast. It's Wednesday, January 13th and we are here to try to take the

mystery out of your financial life. We are here to try to help you make

better financial decisions. Send us an email ask Jill at Jill onmoney.com that's

what AJ did. He writes my wife and I have been retired for many years. During our work time,

we both invested in traditional IRAs. When the Roth IRA came along, it was too late for us.

However, this past year, there was no late for us. However, this past year there was no required

minimum distribution for our IRAs and I considered that if we converted our

traditional IRAs to Roth, the tax impact could be equivalent to the impact of the required minimum

distribution. If the same situation arises this year your assistance is

requested as how I can calculate this impact. They've got 660 grand in both IRAs. My understanding

that you can't withdraw from a Roth without penalty until five years after the

account is established. Okay, hold on a second.

All right, so we are conflating a few things here.

Number one is the way to calculate, just for everyone listening,

here's how you calculate what a conversion is.

Whatever amount you convert just gets added to your income. So

AJ, if you are both collecting Social Security, whatever amount you actually convert just gets

popped into as if another stream of income

into your total adjusted gross income. So for example if for you know we said that you wanted to convert both of these IRAs at once, you would pop yourselves

into the 37% tax bracket.

We wouldn't want to do that.

So I need to know a little bit more information before I can counsel you but I think you might be making an assumption about the conversion versus the actual putting money into a brand new Roth IRA. I don't know if this makes

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