Advanced level - Backdoor ROTH IRA conversion timing

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
May 9, 2023
1 reply
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Hi all, I had a very specific situation on handling Backdoor IRA transition to Roth. I've found this option last minute and contributed 6k to my traditional IRA on April 17, one day before the 2022 tax submission deadline. The money was posted on my Fidelity account but not settled, so I could not convert to Roth IRA before the tax day. Am I still good to convert now, considering the funding happened on April 17 or it should have been funded and converted by April 18? Or shall I just leave it where it is in Traditional IRA to be safe?

I have also received a form 5498 about the 6k traditional IRA contribution from Fidelity. Will they change it to Roth if I am even able to convert?

My 2022 tax filing deadline was automatically extended to October, so I had a bit of time to figure this out.

Thanks in advance.

Opus 17

Level 15

The conversion will happen in 2023 and will be reported on your 2023 tax return. There is no retroactive option for conversions and rollovers, they happen when they happen.

The tax consequences of the IRA to Roth conversion depends on whether you have any pretax traditional IRA money in any account, even if it is a different account with a different broker. If you have pretax money, then your conversion is prorated and is not a true “back door“ Roth conversion. If you don’t have pretax money in an IRA, then you can do the back door conversion at any time. There is no time limit relative to the contribution.

TiboroneAuthor

Level 2

Thanks so much! I'll have this 6k Traditional IRA then for tax year 2022 and if I understand your advise correctly that can impact my conversion from traditional to Roth for 2023 (if I choose to do that). So that make me "stuck" with the traditional IRA option, unless I found someone who can guide me through the prorated process (I suppose it's quite complex). Do you have any options e.g to withdraw since I have not done anything with the traditional IRA money at Fidelity?

Opus 17

Level 15

@Tiborone

I don’t understand your follow up question. It seems you might be slightly confused by the concept of a backdoor Roth IRA, and so I’m going to go over some background—apologies if you already know this.

The concept of a “back door” Roth IRA is the following: suppose that your income is too high to allow you to make a deductible pretax IRA contribution and also too high to allow you to make a Roth IRA contribution. You can make a nondeductible contribution to a traditional IRA—which means you don’t take a tax deduction — and then you convert it to a Roth IRA. That way, you can get money into the Roth IRA even though you are ineligible to make a direct contribution.

If you want to make a back door Roth IRA conversion, the first thing you have to do is to put nondeductible money into a traditional IRA. Presumably, that is what you did on April 17. If you don’t take a tax deduction for the IRA contribution, then you have to report it as a nondeductible contribution and your 2022 tax return will include a copy of form 8606, which keeps track of your nondeductible IRA basis.

Then, at any convenient time, you convert the traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. If the traditional IRA was non-deductible, then the conversion won’t be taxable.

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Now this is in contrast to a regular Roth conversion. Any time that you have pretax money in a traditional IRA, you can convert some or all of it to a Roth IRA and pay the income tax. Because a traditional IRA is taxed when you withdraw it, and a Roth IRA is taxed when you contribute, but not when you withdraw, doing a Roth conversion is a way of paying tax now instead of later. There are many advantages to this, but it also depends on your individual financial situation.
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Hopefully this was a rehash of background information that you already know.

Where the backdoor Roth conversion runs into problems, is when you have tax deductible money and nondeductible money mixed in a traditional IRA.

I don’t understand your conclusion that you are “stuck“ in a traditional IRA. If all your money in a traditional IRA is tax deductible, then any Roth conversion is a regular taxable conversion and it is not a “back door” conversion. You can do a Roth conversion any time as long as you are prepared to pay the taxes.

If all of your money in a traditional IRA is nondeductible, then you can convert it to a Roth IRA at any time. Since the money was not deductible in the first place, it is not taxable when you convert it. That is what is meant by a back door conversion.

If your traditional IRA contains a mixture of pretax tax (deductible) and after tax (nondeductible) contributions, then the backdoor IRA become slightly more complicated.

If you have more than one IRA account at the same or different brokers, they are all considered a single IRA by the IRS. If you want a bit more details for your situation, you will need to tell us what is your current total balance in traditional, IRA accounts, and how much of that money is nondeductible versus tax deductible.