PRC asks about proportional conversions, which spouse has priority, or if the conversion is for one spouse alone. Anyone know of a good resource that explains the "why" behind choosing one over another in any given years?
A lawyer might tell you to consider future divorce in your decision, but I am not a lawyer.
I set my conversions to come entirely from my greater IRA instead of my spouse's because I want to preserve the maximum utility of future QCDs
One other possible consideration: if we are talking about 401k conversions, one plan may be better than the other.
And last thought -- there may be less administrative hassle pulling from only one account.
Have you tried asking Google ? My gut feeling is that it is not an important question for the lion's share of people, and the default is using one account per year.
@abq-goldgmail-com But does anyone know of a good resource for determining?
Here you go:
Just found this link and it is not what I follow. My wife and I each have a regular IRA and a Roth IRA. My thinking is that the younger spouse should convert to Roth to give it more time to grow. I am 4 years older then my wife. We are living off a mix of my regular IRA and my Roth IRA (to lower our taxable income to order to get the enhanced ACA tax break). My regular IRA will be depleted long before my RMD would start (at age 75 for me). Then we will live off of her regular IRA and take out of my Roth as needed.
Nice find! Non-intuitive answer. We didn't follow that advice as the wife's account was relatively small and we wanted one less thing to worry about. Also, for the past few years, my income has been lower than at peak earning years, but still above the threshold for making a Roth Contribution. So our first conversions were to empty her IRA and that allowed her to do a backdoor Roth contribution each year without running into the pro-rata rule.
