We have combined taxable wages between me and my wife $119500 for 2017. We expected our income to be below $110000, so we made contribution to our Vanguard Traditional IRA $4300. Now, we realized that due our income we can't take IRA deduction. Can we rollback our IRA contribution and convert it Roth Ira? We both have employee sponsored 401K, I am 55 and my wife is 49
If you are filing jointly, a modified AGI of $119,500 is well below the $186,000 where the eligibility of each of you to make the maximum Roth IRA contribution for 2017 begins to be limited. This means that you can recharacterize your traditional IRA contributions to be Roth IRA contributions instead. Generally this would be better than doing a Roth conversion from the traditional IRA unless, individually, you have no other money in traditional IRAs and your traditional IRA lost value between the time of the 2017 contribution and the time of the recharacterization.
When the traditional IRA contribution is recharacterized to be a Roth IRA contribution instead, the custodian, by trustee-to-trustee transfer, moves to a Roth IRA the amount being recharacterized adjusted for any gain or loss while the contribution was in the traditional IRA. In TurboTax you'll enter the original traditional IRA contribution and indicate in the follow-up that you "switched" the contribution to be a Roth IRA contribution instead. TurboTax will prompt you to prepare an explanation statement for each of the recharacterizations describing the original contribution, the amount of that contribution that was recharacterized, and the adjusted amount that was transferred.
" our Vanguard Traditional IRA "
That's not right. There is no such thing as a joint IRA. whose IRA is it?
We have 2 separate IRA: We put $2300 on mine and $2000 on my wife's
@dmertz aren't you the wizard on this? Or am I confusing you with someone else?
If you are filing jointly, a modified AGI of $119,500 is well below the $186,000 where the eligibility of each of you to make the maximum Roth IRA contribution for 2017 begins to be limited. This means that you can recharacterize your traditional IRA contributions to be Roth IRA contributions instead. Generally this would be better than doing a Roth conversion from the traditional IRA unless, individually, you have no other money in traditional IRAs and your traditional IRA lost value between the time of the 2017 contribution and the time of the recharacterization.
When the traditional IRA contribution is recharacterized to be a Roth IRA contribution instead, the custodian, by trustee-to-trustee transfer, moves to a Roth IRA the amount being recharacterized adjusted for any gain or loss while the contribution was in the traditional IRA. In TurboTax you'll enter the original traditional IRA contribution and indicate in the follow-up that you "switched" the contribution to be a Roth IRA contribution instead. TurboTax will prompt you to prepare an explanation statement for each of the recharacterizations describing the original contribution, the amount of that contribution that was recharacterized, and the adjusted amount that was transferred.