[villagetinker]

Here is a question/situation that I have not seen discussed. There are a lot of very knowledgeable people, so I am looking for thoughts, insights, concerns on the following:

Person is approaching 70 and will need to make RMDs in the next year or so.
A back of the envelope shows $XXX thousands of dollars in additional taxes if the government suggested RMD is followed to the expected lifespan. On the other hand if the ENTIRE amount of the qualified funds are converted in 1 year, the tax is well below 50% of the total for the 25 or 30 years of yearly RMDs.
So here are may thoughts:
1. Making the conversion all at once results in one very big tax bill (not sure if this can be spread over 2 or 3 years??), but after that NO taxes on the Roth withdrawals.
2. Not sure how long it will take to make up the large tax bill from the remaining investments. I need to do more modeling on this.
3. Still working on yearly cash-flow cases, normal RMD versus baying all at once.

I would love to hear others ideas on doing this (good/bad idea), other possible gotchas with this approach.

I will, of course, be discussing with my financial advisor, my tax advisor, etc. I think this will be an interesting discussions as I am sure that I am missing something. Thanks for your comments in advance.