It seems like Pralana is using the wrong IRMAA brackets for my scenario (it's showing brackets for joint filers rather than single filers) and I do not know how to fix it. Here are the relevant details of my scenario.
- There are 2 married individuals, one of whom has passed away
- I need to enter both individuals in the scenario because the living person is currently collecting SS survivor benefits for their spouse -- they will begin collecting their own SS benefits in a couple of years
Pralana appears to be handling taxes and tax brackets correctly. The SS benefit calculation also works fine (taking the greater of their own & the survivor benefit). However, within the Roth Conversion optimization, the drop-down menu for IRMAA brackets shows the brackets for joint filers instead of individual filers. I would very much appreciate if someone could help me get this set up correctly -- I'm probably just doing something wrong. Thank you!
@drwiggle Hi, this is a good question. There are three things to note here:
a) The dropdown always shows the brackets associated with your plan's marital status, not the filing status in the year selected. It could indeed show the brackets based on filing status in the year selected...EXCEPT...
b)...In your screenshot, you have not yet specified a year. So assuming you have a two-person plan, Pralana cannot know until you put in the year whether the filing status is MFJ, HH, or Single.
c) Despite the dropdown values, Pralana internally stores whether you picked the 1st, 2nd, 3rd bracket etc. Pralana will indeed pick the appropriate bracket limit based on your filing status each year when the scenario projections are run.
To see this, pick the first IRMAA Bracket and set the year to be 2 years before the filing status changes from MFJ to S. Pick one of the account priorities. Look at the Results > Details by Year. In the Medicare IRMAA Bracket column, you will see the inflated MFJ limit until the 2nd year before the spouse passes (due to the IRMAA 2-year lookback). After that, the inflated limit will drop down to Single limit. See the attached screenshot.
Thank you for the quick reply -- this makes perfect sense.
