This is only wise if the tax rate you pay on the conversion is not more than your average marginal rate in retirement, which you will have to guess at based on your personal fortunes as well as tax law changes. Also, your first Roth conversions as a portion of your total IRA balance will help you more than later ones. The first one provides you with tax diversification, ie you will have a Roth which you will be able to tap tax free if you need income but are in a high bracket in a future year. Once you have a high portion of your IRA assets in Roths, additional conversions usually have less value. Each conversion you do will reduce your RMD from traditional IRAs and thus your taxable income and eventually your tax bracket. But once you have lowered that bracket, your retirement tax rate is less relative to what you will pay on more conversions. There are other variables as well.

Normally, you would not convert ALL of your TIRAs to a Roth unless you had a sizable amount of other income generating assets such as rental or taxable investments that will continue to keep your tax bracket from dropping in retirement. If your tax bracket will drop in retirement, you should be more careful in converting. And even if you elect to convert a certain amount, it usually pays to spread out those conversions over a few years so that you do not inflate the tax bracket that will apply to the conversion.

All these factors should be considered before making the decision.

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