Browsing: Roth IRA

Q. I retired after 43 years under CSRS last year. Because of my sick leave balance (3,800), my CSRS annuity is 83 percent of my working salary. My wife will be retiring at the end of this year with 20 years under FERS. Her net pay will drop from just under $2,600 a month to under $900 with her basic FERS annuity. Besides our TSP (Traditional & Roth), we also have two small traditional IRAs and two good size Roth IRA accounts. I have reached the minimum 40 credits for Social Security; however, because of the WEP, it would be under…

Q. I’m a CSRS employee with an active Voluntary Contributions Program account. My year-end contributions statement of 12/31/2019 shows a total earned interest of $32,076 since I opened the account. If I convert the entire balance of my VCP account to a Roth IRA, will I be responsible for paying taxes on the $32,076 earned interest at the time of conversion? A. The conversion will be reported as taxable ordinary income for the year in which it is constructively received. Interest refunded to you is subject to a mandatory 20 percent tax withholding. However, if the interest on the voluntary contributions account is…

Q. I am currently working, have both a Traditional and Roth TSP but will be subject to required minimum distribution upon retirement. The five-year Roth requirement will not be satisfied by the time I retire. I would like to transfer the entire Roth account, both qualified and nonqualified, to an outside Roth IRA before I retire to avoid paying RMD on the Roth portion. Can I do this without penalty, or am I limited to transferring the qualified portion only?  A. Rolling money over from the TSP to an IRA should be free from any penalty, if you do it…

Q. In your May 7, 2018, “Money Matters” blog you provided information concerning the rollover of CSRS Voluntary Contribution Program (VCP) funds into a Roth IRA. Can the contribution portion of such funds (non-interest, after tax portion) be rolled over into the Roth TSP? Form RI 38-124, referenced in your earlier column, suggests not, but the most current version of that form predates the creation of the Roth TSP. Such a rollover would be particularly attractive in light of the ability to designate TSP withdrawals as traditional, Roth or a proportional amount of each, with the new withdrawal flexibilities coming to…

Q. Some employees are in disagreement over the minimum required distributions of TSP accounts. We are discussing retirements beginning five years or more from now, so the new TSP rules would apply. Would moving the Roth TSP funds to an outside Roth IRA account avoid the need for minimum required distributions on this Roth portion of a TSP account or would those particular funds still be a part of the funds subjected to MRD?

Q. I am a federal employee with a TSP (Traditional). In addition, I currently own a Traditional IRA and a Roth IRA, while my wife owns a Roth IRA. This year, it looks like our combined income (MAGI) will likely exceed the threshold for the standard approach to contribute to our Roth IRAs. I have seen strategies to use the backdoor approach, but it will require smartly transferring my traditional IRA to TSP to avoid a large conversion taxes. My traditional IRA has a nondeductible basis of $12,000 and $78,000 of earnings. As I understand from research, I could transfer the $78,000…

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