He Spent His 60s Quietly Moving His IRA Into a Roth. At 73, When the IRS Showed Up to Dictate His Withdrawals, There Was Nothing Left to Tax

If you have a traditional IRA and you’re somewhere between the day you stopped working and the day the IRS starts dictating your withdrawals, you’re sitting on the single best tax window of your life. It’s called a Roth conversion, and executed during the gap years between retirement and required minimum distributions, it can quietly empty out the account the IRS was planning to tax on its own schedule. Do it right and by 73, there’s nothing left for the government to force out.

The Buried Rule Hiding in Your IRA

A Roth IRA has no required minimum distributions for the original owner. Ever. Every dollar you shift from a traditional IRA into a Roth in your 60s is a dollar that will never appear on an RMD schedule, never stack on top of Social Security, and never get pulled at the worst possible tax rate. You pay ordinary income tax on the converted amount in the year you convert, then the account grows tax-free for the rest of your life. The strategy is to deliberately fill up the lower brackets before RMDs and Social Security push your income higher.

Where the Rule Actually Lives

Roth IRAs are governed by Internal Revenue Code §408A, and the RMD rules are in §401(a)(9). The SECURE 2.0 Act pushed the RMD start age to 73 for anyone born between 1951 and 1959, and all the way to 75 for anyone born in 1960 or later. Those two changes are what create the modern conversion window. The current brackets and deduction amounts come from Revenue Procedure 2025-32, the IRS’s tax year 2026 inflation adjustments.

Worth noting for older retirees doing their planning: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law in 2025, created a new $6,000 above-the-line deduction for taxpayers age 65 and older, available for tax years 2025 through 2028. A married couple where both spouses are 65 or older can deduct $12,000 combined above the line, on top of the regular $32,200 standard deduction. That extra shelter can meaningfully widen the low-bracket space available for conversions each year.

Who Actually Wins Here

This strategy works well if you retired before your RMD age, carry meaningful traditional IRA or 401(k) balances, expect those future RMDs to push you into a higher bracket, and can pay the conversion tax from a taxable brokerage account rather than from the IRA itself. The math gets harder when you’re already in the top bracket and expect a lower one later, when you’d need to tap the converted funds within five years, when the only way to cover the tax bill is to sell IRA assets to pay it, or when you’re a high-income Medicare beneficiary already sitting at the top IRMAA tier.

How to Run the Play in 2026

1. Estimate your taxable income for the year before any conversion. For a married couple filing jointly, the standard deduction is $32,200, so income below that is effectively untaxed.
2. Identify the top of the bracket you’re willing to fill. The 12% bracket runs to $100,800 for joint filers ($50,400 single), and the 22% bracket runs to $211,400 joint ($105,700 single). Many retirees convert up to the top of 12% or 24%.
3. Convert the exact dollar amount that fills that bracket. Not more.
4. Pay the tax from outside funds. Using IRA dollars to cover the bill shrinks the account you’re trying to move.
5. Repeat every year until you hit your RMD age, or until the balance is where you want it.

The Catch Nobody Warns You About

Three traps deserve attention before you act. First, every conversion starts its own five-year clock before earnings can come out tax-free, tracked separately from any earlier Roth contribution or conversion. Second, a conversion inflates your modified adjusted gross income, and Medicare uses a two-year lookback for IRMAA. A big 2026 conversion sets your 2028 Part B and Part D surcharges. The 2026 standard Part B premium is $202.90 per month. IRMAA surcharges on top of that begin biting joint filers above $218,000 in MAGI and reach the top tier at $750,000, adding as much as $487.00 per month to Part B alone. Third, conversion income raises the taxable portion of your Social Security benefit and can push provisional income past the 85% threshold, so if you’re already collecting, model that interaction carefully before you act.

The window closes at your RMD age. With the 2027 Social Security COLA now tracking between 3.5% and 3.6% according to current estimates from TSCL and AARP, benefit checks and RMDs both keep climbing. The 2026 COLA was 2.8%, and 2027 is shaping up to be the largest adjustment in three years. Every gap year you don’t use is a year the IRS gets to write the withdrawal schedule instead of you.

Editor’s note: This article updates the 2027 Social Security COLA estimate from 3.1% to the current projected range of 3.5% to 3.6%, reflecting forecasts from TSCL and AARP based on August 2026 CPI data, with the official announcement expected October 14, 2026. It also adds context on the OBBBA’s new $6,000 above-the-line deduction for taxpayers 65 and older, and notes the expanded RMD age of 75 for those born in 1960 or later.

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