No disrespect, but your math doesn't add up.
Please detail how standard deductions get you to 60K in the current system with no 401k and no IRA, and no HSA because I frankly don't see it. (25K maybe. but not 60K)
We're Married Filing Jointly with three kids, so that's 12.4k standard deduction plus the 5 personal exemptions at $3950 each minus 3k in child tax credits is $58,200 in tax free income. Try it yourself at any of the online tax calculators. I like
this one because it's simple.
Tax loss harvesting will reduce your income by up to 3k per year, so now you're at 61.2k. If you itemize your deductions the amount could go up considerably. For example, we had almost 19k in itemized deductions last year instead of the 12,400 standard deduction, that got us over $67,000 without paying any tax at all.
(For the record, we make a lot more than 67k and ended up paying a ton of tax.)Several people here have claimed RootofGood's post isn't accurate for an early retiree because he's using retirement accounts to reduce his AGI to ~$72k. That ignores the fact that he's still paying $150 in tax on $72,000 of unreduced income.
As for retirees not having children, that's certainly a potential problem. I had my last child at age 36, so she'll be a tax deduction until I'm 54 years old. At age 71 I'll have to find an alternative tax avoidance strategy if I want to spend more than about $23k/year in inflation adjusted dollars and still pay zero tax. Like itemizing. Or owning rental property. Or starting a small business, paying myself a small salary, and claiming the EITC. Or paying college tuition. Or, you know, I could skip tax optimization entirely and just swallow the 10% tax on the first tax bracket's $9k or so and pay an effective tax rate of 900/32k = 2.8%. Doesn't sound too terrible, for a couple of empty nesters living an optimized lifestyle.
And remember no pulling 10 K from your Roth as it is not in your plans since you claim to have no need for it and plan to have no funds in it after age 59.5. (Your own original point.)
Quite the contrary, I'm going to have a ton of money in my Roth IRA at age 59.5 precisely because of my original point, which is that you can only withdraw contributions and not earnings penalty free before 59.5. By that age, the majority of my Roth IRA balance is going be earnings. I will have withdrawn all of my contributions (tax and penalty free) before age 59.5 but still intend to have a vast sum of money suddenly available to me for tax-free anytime withdrawal at age 59.5 to supplement my ~20k (inflation adjusted) tax-free income for a MFJ couple with no kid and no tax optimization (standard deduction with 2 exemptions and no kids is about 20k in today's dollars).
The Roth is still a great deal for people who want to spend a boatload in retirement. I don't mean to disparage it as a useful tool for everyone here. But the horse race recharacterization trick, in particular, doesn't help most moderate spenders much because only the contributions can be withdrawn prior to 59.5 so recharacterizing the least-appreciated conversion is useless in terms of accessing more money early. Recharacterizing the losers is useless because the withdrawal rules are based on value at conversion, not subsequent price decreases, and the decreased value would still exist in your trad IRA so it's not like you've undone a loss.