What's up, James?

How are you doing? I'm doing well. Have you ever been happy to get a surgery? No. I don't think most people are happy. But I have a weird situation where I was really happy about the thought of getting surgery because I thought it would fix all of my problems. I went to physical therapy. I got an MRI that set of this diagnosis. I went to so many doctors. No one

told me what to do. So at one point, I was like, look, just open me up and just fixed me. I'm in that much agony because of my hip because I play soccer too much and I love it. And that's another episode. But I'll see people come to me, and I'm sure you've seen it as well, where they go, James, just tell me what Roth conversion do I do?

Is it the 22% bracket?

Well, it's going to become 25, so I don't know. What bracket do I do? They're conversion happy, and they just want to do a conversion because they think it's going to fix all of their problems. In the same way, I thought surgery would fix all of my problems. But before you do surgery, there are things we should look at.

And so I want to talk to you today about when it does and does not make sense to do these Roth

conversions. I like that analogy because it is like surgery because people don't realize this.

Roth conversions are painful up front and the same way surgery can be painful up front.

And I mean that because what you're doing with the Roth conversion is you're saying, I'm going to pay more taxes today so that I don't have to pay as much in the future. I'm going to pay taxes today at a lower rate so they don't have to pay them in the future at a higher rate. Kind of like surgery. I'm going to go through the pain today so I can continue playing soccer and have

this quality of life in the future. But perfect analogy, where should we start with this?

Because to your point, people just say, open me up, do surgery, do the conversions, not always

the right approach. Let's start with the two people that deserve to get credit. And as I bring this up

on my screen,

can you share with everyone who have not seen the last few episodes, who the heck we are,

we're doing this together, we have separate shows, and I'll pull this up. Yes, I'm James. This is Ari.

We work together with a lot of people did not know. Ari has a podcast channel and a YouTube

channel. I have a podcast channel and a YouTube channel. If you're on YouTube, you're watching this on my channel. If you're listening, you might be listening on Ari's early retirement podcast or you might be listening at my Ready for Retirement podcast because we're going to take the audio content and push it to both those places. But we said, hey, we've been doing this for several years together now, separate channels. People are surprised sometimes. And they say, oh, you're actually working together. We say, yes. So let's actually do a podcast episode where we get to banter back and forth about different things, not just about things that we want to banter about, but about comments we're getting on our YouTube videos, a feedback we're getting from people listening so that we can answer a lot of the questions that many of you have. Awesome. I'm going to steal one line that I believe

it was your dad told you, and you said, your job as an advisor is not just to advise, but teach people

how to think, how to organize their brain. And so my hope is for some of you is you take away from

this episode today, wow, I should never do a Roth conversion. And anytime I see someone bring it up online or a neighbor, a coworker use this fancy conversion word, I'll get to go. I don't have to worry about it. And others of you are going to be like, wow, this is going to really change how much I can spend in retirement and legacy goals and yada yada. So here are the two people that get credit for today's episode.

Once again, if you have a comment that you want to leave, you want a question for us to

address, please drop it in the comments and we will look to answer that in the future

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