Most people think of Roth conversions from the standpoint of how do we save the most amount of money and taxes over the course of our lifetime.

And this is absolutely correct. This is the first way that you should be thinking about Roth conversions.

But it's also good to take this a step further if you're married.

You can also think of Roth conversions as being a way to protect a surviving spouse.

And the reason for that is when one spouse

passes away, tax brackets change for the surviving spouse. So that's the topic of today's

episode of Ready for Retirement. And it's based upon a question that Steve submitted.

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.

Steve said this. He said, I'm addicted to your podcast and I find them highly instructive.

You've addressed the potential value of performing Roth conversions and numerous episodes.

In these, you have discussed taking into consideration current and future

anticipated tax brackets and the ability to reduce RMDs when deciding on whether to perform

Roth conversions or not. Beyond these factors, there are a couple of additional dimensions that

you haven't addressed. One is that even if a person expects to be in the same tax bracket in the

future, there could still be value in performing a conversion based upon the tax-free withdrawals in the future, which after passing

a break-even point in time will be favorable, even after taking into account the opportunity

cost associated with using money to pay taxes at the time of the conversion if the same

funds were instead invested. It would be interesting for you to go through such an

analysis, though clearly it will depend upon the tax bracket for the investor. Perhaps you could do so

for the 24% bracket. The other consideration is that for married investors finally jointly,

...