We wish to thank all the investors and financial planners who recently attended our webinar. The webinar was hosted by the Financial Experts Network on March 1, 2022, and entitled Seeking Tax Alpha in Retirement Income. If you missed the webinar, you are welcome to watch it again with the link below.
This webinar contained several useful additional resources. For example, you can download the presentation and my latest whitepaper. Also, you can access the detailed reports presented for Case Study #1 and Case Study #2.
Survey Results
We also wish to thank the many respondents to our survey at the end of the webinar. We had quite a mix of individual investors and financial services professionals respond, as shown in the pie chart below.
Prioritization of new features and capabilities
In the survey, we also asked about prioritizing new features and capabilities in our optimal retirement income calculator. So, here are the results, in rank order. Then, for any that were “close”, we assigned them with the same rank, to properly account for sampling error.
| Rank | Feature |
| 1 | Roth Conversions |
| 2 | IRMAA (Income-related Medicare Adjustment Amount) |
| 2 | State Taxes (as applicable) |
| 3 | Reverse Mortgage |
| 3 | NIIT (Net Investment Income Tax) |
| 4 | Tabular format for later year income, taxes, and account balances. |
| 4 | Rental Income |
| 4 | Saving additional profile data for multiple retirees and spouses |
| 5 | Saving reports to the cloud |
| 5 | Estate Taxes |
So, based on these survey results, Roth conversions were the clear leader on features sought-after. So, this will be the next feature we shall focus on in our retirement income calculator. To this end, we will be collaborating with Dr. Edward McQuarrie, Emeritus Professor at Santa Clara University. His latest research in this area is entitled “When and for Whom are Roth Conversions Most Beneficial? A New Set of Guidelines, Cautions and Caveats” and is available on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). You can also read his work quoted at MarketWatch.
While the benefits from a Roth conversion are often small and slow to arrive, a Roth conversion will almost always pay off if given enough time, i.e., for life spans that extend past 90 and so long as annual distributions from converted amounts are not taken.
Dr. Edward McQuarrie, Emeritus Professor at Santa Clara Univeristy
New calculators coming soon!
We are also pleased to announce that there will soon be another free calculator to aid in retirement planning. The next calculator will focus on savings values prior to starting retirement and includes the use of a bootstrapping simulation, as mentioned in our post earlier in 2022. Stay tuned for the release of the new tool shortly!
You must be logged in to post a comment.