Retirement tax questions

A backdoor Roth IRA is not an account, it is a process.  You make a non-deductible contribution to a traditional IRA, then convert it to a Roth IRA.

 

This process does not work if you have any pre-tax money in any traditional IRA, because all IRA accounts are grouped together for the tax and rollover rules.  

 

If you currently have no pre-tax money in a traditional IRA, and you rollover your pre-tax 401k into a traditional IRA, you will not be able to do any more backdoor Roth IRA conversions unless you convert all your pre-tax IRA to a Roth IRA and pay the required income tax.