dmertz
Level 15

Retirement tax questions

With accurate records you can do the same attributable earnings calculation yourself.  Assuming no intervening contributions or distributions, you just need to know the account balance immediately after making the contribution and the balance immediately prior to the distribution to be able to calculate the percentage gain.  With only about a $5 increase in modified AGI you'll only need to take out a few dollars more than the $120 of excess originally calculated.  Say, if you obtain a return of contribution of $125 and the attributable earning end up being $5.20, that will round down to $5, increasing your MAGI to $193,205, resulting in an excess contribution of $123 which the return of $125 covers.  A $125 return of contribution would even accommodate close to $9 of attributable earnings at a rate of around 4%.

 

A more detailed description of the attributable-earnings calculation is in the tax code:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.408-11

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