62 • RUBY, WILDING & SWANSBURG Sever al year s ago, I was surpr ised to lear n ther e wasn’t an e as y way to ans wer that que stio n. Sure, there were internet calculators for your mortgage payments and monthly budgets, but no easy way to evaluat e future taxes in retirement even existed. As an actuary and a saver, that didn’t sit right with me. “Total Tax Burden” Analysis A few years back, I was sitting around thinking about my IR A (y es, t his is a real t hing actua ries do). I had become more and more interested in tax strategies in retirement, particularly in strat egies arou nd Rot h conversions (a Roth conver sion is whe n yo u conver t your tax- deferred account [like an IRA] int o a tax- free account , lik e a Rot h IRA) . Usually, this means the saver withdraws funds fro m the qualified account, pays the taxes on those funds, and then deposits the remaining fu nds int o a tax- free Rot h account. The idea had always interested me, primarily because— for all t he rea sons Beck y outl ined in th e previous chapter— my wife and I don’t expect to be in a lower tax bracket when we retire (i n fac t, we’re concerned we could be i n a higher bracket in the future, but more on that later). Despite my interest in the concept of Roth conversions, I fou nd it hard to evaluate the information I was reading. After all, most of it was theoretical, and I’ m a numbers guy. So, like any good actuar y, I opened up Excel and star ted calculating. My goal was to determine the total amount of taxes I was going to pay on my IR A fro m now until I died. I knew it would be high. But, I was abs olutely blown away by what I f ound.
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