Most material I read is the standard fare. Income too high for Roth, make non-deductible IRA, convert to Roth.
Ok, so I can't do that because I've got well over a million dollars in a rollover IRA. I plan to retire in the next year or 2 and wonder if the following can be done:
Open a new IRA.....move money into it from one of my other IRA's, Pay the tax (from outside of the account) and recharacterize it as a Roth. This would be done up to the limit of the 12% income level, so quite low tax.
I'm thinking pro-rata doesn't screw me here as all my IRA money is pre-tax so I'm not doing any mixing of non-deductible money.
Does this work?