Discover the tips and strategies that will help you achieve your retirement goals.

I'm your host, James Canole, and this is the podcast dedicated to helping you retire well.

It all starts right here on Ready for Retirement. for retirement.

Hi, everyone and welcome back to another episode of Ready for Retirement.

I'm your host, James Knoll.

We have an issue today, or a question today, about an issue that I've been thinking a lot about wanting to do a podcast on because this question

comes up over and over again. There's just a lot of details to it. So enough questions have come

through and I think it'll be very helpful. Today we're going to be talking about how do you

prioritize between health insurance subsidies versus Roth conversions. Both of those are planning

points that you should be considering at about the same time or at least

at similar times.

There's a lot of overlapping times where those issues could come into play.

And the question for a lot of people is how do I understand which to prioritize?

This question directly came from a listener, like Ben, and Ben said this.

And I'm editing this for brevity,

but his question is this. He says, I'm single and retired at age 54. I took the full 18

months of COBRA coverage before starting on an ACA health care plan in 2019. I have been

using the assets in my non-retirement brokerage account to fund my living expenses. I've been cautious,

not to realize too high of a capital gain

and therefore hit the insurance subsidy cliff. The ACA income limits were raised in 2020 and 2021 because

of the CARES Act and the additional subsidy amounts have helped to knock down my monthly premiums.

But the cliff still exists in the full price for bronze level zero deductible health care plan

...