In Nov 2024 I made a 2024 contribution of $7000 to Vanguard Roth within my $7000 limit (46 yrs old), then realized in Dec 2024 that I was over the income limit, so I recharacterized it ($7000 grew to $7016 by then) with Vanguard as a Traditional contribution with the intent of following that with a backdoor conversion from Traditional back to Roth. I'm within the income limits that allow for that. In Feb 2025, I went ahead with the backdoor conversion ($7016 grew to $7062 by then) as a 2024 operation. Messy, I know. Better to do all steps right away, in the year it's intended for. Questions below:
- In TurboTax Deluxe (desktop/downloaded software version), is my contribution $7000 to Roth ("even if you recharacterized it later")?
- How do I treat the growth that it experienced by the time the next 2 steps of recharacterization to Traditional, then more by the time of the backdoor conversion back to Roth?
I tried just following prompts in TT thinking the questions would be intuitive (Intuit!), but for me, they weren't, and during the final check in the software, it flagged a few issues and showed me the errors at their locations on the tax return form, at which point purple dust shot out of my ears and I realized I don't understand what it thinks I was trying to do!
Thanks in advance for your advice on this (and I promise to do clean conversions in the future!)
