. I did a small Roth conversion last year and it worked out perfectly; I remained just inside the 12% tax bracket at tax time. This year, I hadn't planned on doing a conversion since, if I'm committed to staying within the 12% bracket (upper end is just $50,400 for a single filer), there's not a lot of room to spare between my essential annual expenses and the extra room a conversion would take up. (I'm sure there's a more elegant way of expressing that thought but hopefully you follow.) And I was hoping to spend a bit more on home improvements.
But....now we have the war Rumpie has started. I haven't wanted to check my investment balances, but I'm hearing on the news that the stock market is jumping quite a bit. If you want to find a silver lining in it all, you might consider a Roth conversion when the market is way down, since you'll be paying taxes on a much lower cost per shares.
If you're going to do any Roth conversions and are also delaying collecting Social Security, that creates a narrow window of opportunity, just a few years for most people, when doing a conversion is most cost-effective. It's the time between the start of retirement and the start of Social Security; these could likely be your lowest income years just prior to Social Security and then RMDs.
It helps that pretty soon I'll have the new car paid off; that means that between the monthly payments and the extra I've been throwing at it that I'll have an extra $700/mth to spend. My balance is down to $2,900. so it'll be done by June, when I'll probably throw a lump sum payment at it just to get to payoff.
Regardless of whether I end up doing another conversion this year (I'll likely take a cautious wait and see approach as I feel a conversion later in the year gives me more flexibility) I am thankful that a long time ago I set things up for just this kind of uncertain market environment. I moved a good chunk of money....enough to cover my essential expenses right up til the time I begin Social Security...to a money market settlement fund at my brokerage. It's not earning a ton of money...about 3.58%....but the important thing is it's pretty much like "ballast" and immune to yo-yo stock market prices.
Nothing new to report on the air quality VOC readings. After 2 straight days spending a lot of time with "Claude" AI and not conclusively determining anything, after moving all my chemicals, paints, solvents, glues, etc to the garage, the readings are still a bit high, whether or not the heat is on or off. I kept a detailed summary of our conversations that Claude wrote for me, so when I'm ready I can pick up where we left off, but I kind of wonder if I'm just going down a rabbit hole with Claude that's not going to lead me to the truth.
I'm going to a democracy rally tomorrow. If Minneapolis people can brave cold weather, so can I. Yeah, here in the far Northeast, we haven't really enjoyed much of the heat wave affecting so much of the country. We had one nice day yesterday.
I had hoped that by deleting my account at ActBlue that I would stop getting these super-annoying text messages looking for donations for anyone running for anything anywhere in the country. Unfortortunately, that has not been the case. Each time I delete the text I'm careful to report it as a "scam" so I stop getting texts from that particular address, and now I'm keeping a list of each text I get post-ActBlue acct deletion to make sure I'm not getting repeats from anyone candidate. I deleted my account yesterday, and thus far have received 2 texts and an email. I'm not sure there is a way to donate to political candidates anymore without having your personal info used to hound you incessantly moving forward. It's the same thing with NRDC. I made a one-time donation and now, despite repeated requests, I'm still getting mail from them. Each time, I stuff everything into their postage-paid return envelope with another request to delete my info from their mail list.
March 27th, 2026 at 03:57 pm 1774627072
Good idea to do a Roth conversion with the stock market being down.
Somehow my phone number was put on a Wisconsin political list. I've replied stop, i've done the delete and reported spam, but they keep using different numbers. I don't even live in Wisconsin, nor have I ever lived in Wisconsin. It is frustrating.
March 27th, 2026 at 06:43 pm 1774637034
,
It might be too late for you, but I set up an email address just to use for donations. I direct my ‘personal’ stuff to a second address, and use a third for money related notices and a fourth for things like notifications from this site.
A little scam creeps in to the two I care about but the others I can pretty much wholesale delete.
I’m not sure what you are saying about Roth conversions. The space you have at 12% is that between your income and the $50,400 right? Which unless your income changes is a fixed amount? Are you thinking that if you transfer shares now when the market is low the expected gains on them when the market recovers is better than if you sell when the market is up? If so, by waiting you think the market will continue to drop further?
I am just over the 12% bracket so I.’m not playing the Roth conversion game but it interests me.
March 28th, 2026 at 01:00 am 1774659615
Where I am, it's already starting to get hot (80F and higher), and worse, we've hit pollen season. For better or worse, it's an annual "tradition" here so I'm just waiting for it to pass. Too bad it takes roughly a month though.
Hope you have a nice time at the rally though, and please stay warm.
DK: Yeah, these robocalls really annoy me. We have always had issues with robocalls, but if I didn't know better, the current uh Rump administration just absolutely do not care, and instead of cracking down, they are allowing it to spread just because it suits their political agenda. So, why stop it? I definitely did not get any of these texts during Biden, until the very end there.
March 28th, 2026 at 02:59 pm 1774709960
If you have an iphone you can go into Settings/Apps/Messages and toggle the switch on so messages from unrecognized numbers go into a spam folder that you can review at your leisure (and probably delete). I did this after realizing that simply deleting my ActBlue Account did nothing and I was still receiving unwanted texts.
Lots of Ideas, yes, this is a good idea; i don't know why I didn't think of doing that as I have a "spare" email address I rarely use. It probably is too late but I will use that address moving forward...thanks!
As for the Roth conversions, I probably didn't explain it very well. My gross income last year was about $71,000, but with all the various deductions, my taxable income was just $46,000, just a few thousand under the upper end of the 12% bracket. I did $10K worth of Roth conversions last year and was careful not to exceed the $48,475 limit so I'd stay in that bracket.
I was suggesting here that when the market is way down is a good time to do a conversion because the income I'd be taxed on would be a lower amount, not to mention that money has plenty of time to grow, untaxed, in my Roth, since that would be the last account I touch, if ever. But here's the real benefit:
So for example, if you want to convert 200 shares of a mutual fund that was trading at $60 last fall, converting them last fall would mean you'd add $12,000 of ordinary income to your return. But if you converted them today at $48 a share, the same 200 shares comes to $9,600 of income. You’re moving the same number of shares for $2,400 less in taxable income.
Tabs, if you rebalanced a traditional IRA account(s), simply moving money around inside a tax-deferred account, or reallocating it, is not a taxable event, so that shouldn't affect any conversions you've done. You pay taxes on a Roth conversion because you're moving it from a tax-deferred account to a tax-free account so you need to pay the taxes in the year you do the conversion.
March 28th, 2026 at 08:21 pm 1774729276
When I did it I moved a dollar amount from an account that was invested in a money market - this was my ‘safe, if I have to start all over’ money and the conversion was not just traditional to Roth but from unmanaged to a managed account so I made no decision about what to sell.
You might find it easier to use a ‘new’ email account for things like financial transactions and people you want email from and abandon the old one to the junk. It is a pain to change it but at least you can control it.
I find that my family and friends are way more likely to text now and I guard my mobile number to keep it as clean from spam as possible.