Non-Roth Withdrawals

Hi, zmolekms!

The answer to how much you can withdraw from your Traditional IRA and still have $0 income taxes depends on several factors, such as your filing status, whether you itemize your deductions or take the standard deduction, how much social security you receive, if you have any other deductions, and so on.

Generally speaking, as long as your income is less than your standard or itemized deductions, you should have $0 income taxes.  However, the trick in your case is the fact that social security can be 0% to 85% taxable - it depends on all your other income. As an example, assume your filing status was single, your social security was $15,000 each year, and you were taking $100,000 as a distribution from the IRA accounts.   If you wee taking the $100,000 distribution from a Roth IRA, then none of the social security would be taxable to you. If, however, you withdrew the $100,000 from your Traditional IRA, then 85% of your social security would be taxable. The more Traditional IRA distributions you take, more social security will be considered taxable income.  

For your specific case, I recommend using one of the TurboTax Tax Calculators to analyze the situation. You can find our tax calculators at TurboTax Tax Calculator   Given that there are a lot of other variables such as filing status or other deductions, you would have to plug different amounts into a tax calculator to optimize how much you can take from the Traditional IRA and still be at $0 income taxes.