Backdoor Roth

[Car Jack]

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?

[dandarc]

No it doesn't work.

Pro-rata will factor in all of your IRA accounts.  And SIMPLE and SEP-IRA accounts as well.  So just opening another IRA account at a different provider doesn't solve anything.

What you can do is roll your existing IRA balances into a 401K/403B/457B as these are not included in the pro-rata computation that would apply to the Backdoor Roth technique.

[dandarc]

Addressing what you've specifically mentioned - that's just regular old Roth conversions.  Which of course you can do whenever in whatever amount you please.  My prior comment was specific to the backdoor Roth technique. 

So what you're saying is "I'm going to stop putting new money in to IRAs and start converting traditional balance to Roth."

[Car Jack]

Yah, so my terminology isn't correct but I can probably do it.  The goal would be to reduce RMDs mainly in the future.  But of course, I don't want to pay a boatload percentage in taxes so would do it little bite by little bite.