Pro Rata tax accounting when converting to Roth
I have more than one IRA account. One is a rollover in which before tax money has been growing and is worth about $70,000. The other is a traditional non deductable IRA worth about $30,000 (and one is a Roth IRA of about $10,000 that was opened with after tax money (not a roll over)). My goal is to rollover the traditional IRA (30,000) into a Roth IRA so that I will have a total of $40,000 in Roth IRA account.
I can easily see and report the amount of growth in the standard non deductable IRA. This account is fairly new and even lost money in 2008 so growth is only about $2000 let’s say.
However, I am told that the IRS will look at my total IRAs and use a pro rata approach to taxes. Example
$70,000 Deductible Rollover IRA account number 1111
$30,000 Non Deductable IRA account number 2222
$100,000 Total IRA
$30,000 Convert to Roth
Pro rata share of non deductible contributions is $9000 so taxes will need to be paid on $21,000. (Even though I have paid taxes on the original $28,000)
Can this be so? Please show me how wrong I am because not only have I already converted the little IRA into a Roth, I want to roll over my 401K into an standard non deductible IRA because my company is starting to charge me a fee to have the 401K. If the assumptions here are correct I will convert the Roth back. Thanks for your attention
Permalink Submitted by Alan Spross on Fri, 2010-03-26 02:39
Yes, the pro rate rules do apply when converting any portion of your traditional IRA accounts to a Roth IRA. It does not matter which TIRA account you use to fund the conversion. It appears that you made 28,000 in non deductible contributions to your IRA over the years, and this MUST be reported on Form 8606 each year you made a non deductible contribution. Your most recent 8606 should then show a cumulative total of 28,000 in non deductible contributions. Note that if you did not file the 8606s when you should, you can file them retroactively starting with the oldest year. Until the IRS has an 8606, all of your conversion will be taxable.
Moving on now and assuming that the 8606 forms are correct and 28,000 is your basis, and your total IRA values are 100,000 before the conversion, your conversion would be 28% tax free and 72% taxable. For a 30,000 conversion you would owe taxes on 21,600 of income.
Having 28% of a conversion tax free is pretty good. It means that the tax free money will be in a Roth to grow tax free in the future. The rest of it will be taxed, but that is the whole basis of a Roth – you pay taxes now and get tax free income and tax free growth from here. If you want to reverse (recharacterize) your conversion you can do so in whole or in part. For example, if you recharacterize half, then your remaining conversion will be 15k and your taxable amount 10,800.
You should also consider gains or losses on your conversion before deciding to recharacterize. For example if your 30,000 conversion is now worth 40,000 you already have earned 10,000 tax free. You could look at this as paying tax on 72% times 75% or only 54% of the current value. Do you really want to send all that back to the TIRA where it will be 72% taxable instead of 54% in the future. Granted, your account could lose money in the future, but all you know for sure is the value today.
So perhaps you should recharacterize only a part of the conversion or none of it. That is the good part of this – you get a chance to re visit your decision after you have already found out the tax cost and can reverse all or part of it if you wish. Again, it is a choice of paying the taxes now at a known rate vrs in the future at an unknown rate. Almost any economist will tell you that tax rates will be higher down the road.