I'm 65 with $500K: How can I manage RMDs to maximize my Retirement Income?

If you're like most retirees, you have an IRA as you step into retirement, and you wanna better understand how required minimum distributions, or RMDs, are going to impact your taxes in retirement, your social security in retirement, and your Medicare premiums. We're gonna dive into that and more today. Hey, I'm Casey Weade, CEO and founder here at Howard Bailey Financial, also a certified financial planner practitioner, and I'm here to talk about required minimum distributions with you.

So we're gonna talk about RMDs. First, we're gonna talk about those RMDs and understanding how they actually function throughout your retirement years. Then we're gonna be discussing the impact that that's going to make on your social security, your Medicare premiums, and then we're gonna get into a couple different scenarios.

We're gonna talk about scenario A, say an average retiree with about a half a million dollars in their IRA, then scenario B with a wealthy retiree with about a million dollars in their IRA. Then we're gonna talk about a couple of different strategies to help reduce their peak required minimum distribution, the tax ascent on their social security, and reduction in the Medicare premium penalties that they're going to pay throughout retirement. Throughout most of my career until the last few years, required minimum distributions were always at that age of 70 and a half.

In the age you turn 70 and a half, the year that you turn 70 and a half, you had to start taking distributions the year after that. So when you turn 70 and a half, you had to take a distribution starting the following year. But if you waited until the following year, you had to take two distributions.

So that's why we often would recommend take it now, then you'll start taking your next one the following year. But that's really up to your unique situation as you're going to see here. But then we started seeing these rules change with the SECURE Act, where those required minimum distribution ages started getting pushed back as you can see here.

And that was as of the SECURE Act 2.0, those that were born 1950 or earlier, their required minimum distribution age, instead of 70 and a half, that went up to age 72. For those now born between the ages of 1951 and 1959, that age is 73. For those of you here in the future, those of you that are born 1960 or later, that current required minimum distribution age is now age 75.

I want to point something out here that I think is not emphasized as much as it should be by the media. And that is that this is not a good thing for you. It's a really good thing for the IRS.

It's a really good thing for our government's debt, because this ultimately means more taxes are going to be collected. And I know that may be counterintuitive to your thinking going, well, if I don't have to take the money out, they don't collect the taxes. However, they're still going to collect those taxes.

They're just going to be collecting those taxes on a much larger dollar amount with a larger distribution rate down the road. I would even say you could argue it would be better if they eliminated the required minimum distributions for this generation of retirees, the baby boomers, that have the majority of the retirement savings in these tax deferred retirement accounts. Then what happens? Those balances get larger and larger and larger.

Instead of distributing those amounts during their tax rate environment, they leave it behind to their heirs, who now are forced to take those out because of the SECURE Act over a 10-year window. And they're probably inheriting those dollars at the peak they're earning years. And so then the taxes just get larger and larger and larger.

So we want to start mitigating these things as soon as possible. Just because your RMD age is 72, 73, 75, doesn't mean you don't want to start taking those dollars out or even converting some of those dollars to a Roth prior to that required minimum distribution age. Now, how much is that required minimum distribution going to be? Well, it's based on your life expectancy.

So what they do is the IRS gives us these life expectancy tables. I summarized some of those key dates for you here on this sheet. And that is understanding the RMD divisor.

So that's essentially your life expectancy. So at age 72, if that's your RMD age, you're going to take your IRA balance and divide it by that divisor that the IRS gives us on their uniform life table. Unless your spouse is well, significantly younger than yourself, you might have some other numbers to look at.

So we always want to look at all of these different things. We're talking about these things at a high level today. If you have questions and you want to dive deeper into any of these specific topics, you want to see me do a video specifically diving deeper into any one of these topics, or you just have a question, drop your question right there in the comment section, and I'll answer as many of those questions as I possibly can.

So again, drop your questions in there. I'll get you an answer. At age 72, the divisor being 27.4, that means that the percentage that you have to take out is right around three and a half percent.

Now, as you get older, your life expectancy gets shorter. The divisor gets smaller. If the divisor gets smaller, the percentage that you have to take out gets larger.

So then at age 82, it's about five and a half percent. Age 92, it's about nine and a half percent. Then you get into your hundreds, and then it's closer to a 20% number at that stage.

So we can see how this could be very damaging for you if you have a large IRA, or if you're not taking a lot of distributions, or you haven't done a lot of Roth conversions on that IRA. That number can get very, very large. It might get so much larger over the years that it dwarfs the amount you actually need.

And we see that in many cases that now you're taking more out of that IRA than you even need. And then what you're doing is you're spending money on money you're not spending. And that's one of my favorite quotes that I heard Warren Buffett once say, and that is never spend money on money you're not spending.

So that's one of the things we're gonna be mitigating in some of these different scenarios. And then you have social security taxes. Then we're also gonna get into Medicare, because most often when we think about these required minimum distributions, we're just thinking about, well, what tax bracket does that push me into? What effective tax rate am I going to be paying? And we forget about some of the other things that can happen as you get a larger RMD.

You could be paying more in social security taxes. You could also be paying more in Medicare premiums. We're gonna start with understanding social security taxation though.

So social security taxes, we have these numbers here, and these have been around a long time, and they're not adjusted for inflation. So every year, these thresholds are going to stay the same. Even though we have inflation, we're seeing more and more retirees spending more and more of their dollars in retirement on taxes, because more are going to fall into this category of paying taxes on their social security.

The inflation on social security continues to rise. Those social security benefits continue to rise, but these taxation levels aren't changing. And we can see for a married couple, it's about $32,000.

So if you have less than $32,000 in what's known as provisional income in retirement, you're not paying any taxes on your social security. Between 32 and $44,000, up to 50% of your benefit could be taxable. Over $44,000, up to 85% of your benefit could be taxable.

The thresholds don't change a whole lot if you're an individual filer, but those thresholds are a bit lower. Now I said provisional income, and you have that question. What's provisional income? A lot of folks believe these numbers are tied to specifically your AGI or your taxable income, but that's not the case.

It's actually a more complex calculation than that. Fairly simple, but it is more complex than that. That calculation is half of your social security benefits.

So take all of your social security income, cut it in half, then add that to your non-taxable interest. This is often overlooked. A lot of retirees will step into retirement, go, well, I'm just gonna put everything in municipal bonds.

I'll be tax-free for the rest of my life. Well, that's not the case because that tax-free municipal bond interest counts towards this provisional income. There are other sources of tax-free income that wouldn't necessarily factor into this, but your municipal bonds, non-taxable interest, that would factor into this equation.

And then you have your adjusted gross income, your AGI. All of this adds up to that provisional income, also known as your combined income. Now let's talk a little bit about Medicare.

So now we have a Medicare program that is penalizing high-income earners. You could be paying for the same level of coverage as your neighbor twice the premium that they're paying. And we can see that on this chart.

And a lot of retirees don't think they're gonna fall into this category, but if you look forward, even a retiree with a half a million dollar IRA may be in a situation where they're paying fairly significant Medicare premium penalties. If you are married filing jointly, you have less than $200,000 in your gross income, you're gonna find that your penalties are not coming into play. If you get over this threshold, 206,000 to 258,000, now what's that penalty? Yeah, the penalty is the difference between that 175 and 245.

So your penalty ends up being what? About $75. But your Medicare Part D premiums also increase. So let's call it $100 a month.

You know, $100 a month may not seem like much, but now we have a couple, $100 plus $100, that's $200 a month, that's $2,400 a year. These are going to increase over the years for you. And so 10 years, that's $24,000.

20 years, that's $48,000. These can end up being pretty significant dollar amounts over your lifetime, even if you're in some of these lower categories. You get up here though, in that $350,000 category, now your Medicare premiums have increased by about $400 between your Part D penalties and your Part B penalties.

So these are some things that we wanna mitigate. And I wanna share with you now a couple of different strategies you may wanna evaluate to mitigate some of the taxes on your social security, mitigate some of your lifetime income taxes, and also mitigate some of those Medicare premiums. So the general scenario here is a couple, they're 60 years old, and they wanna retire in five years at age 65.

Now I put together some different benchmarks here. We're using some of Morningstar's conservative, moderate, and aggressive benchmark allocation returns. So as we talk about returns, we're not talking about any specific returns that we're gonna provide to you.

We provide our clients. We're not talking about any specific investment products or tools here or ETFs. These are just benchmark returns that Morningstar gives us that you might be using to benchmark your own returns that you're getting every year, whether you're conservative, moderate, aggressive, or somewhere in between.

So the returns listed here are coming directly from Morningstar at a conservative benchmark. They've shown their long-term returns, 3.86%, moderate benchmark, 7.4%, aggressive, 10%. So we can think of that probably as kind of an 80-20 portfolio, 80% fixed income, maybe 60% fixed income, maybe 10 or 20% fixed income.

So these are the returns that we're gonna be looking at as we look at these scenarios for this couple that's 60 years old, retiring in five years. But we're also going to look at a couple different asset levels. So we're gonna look at your average Joe retiree with a half a million dollars in their IRA, about 2,900 a month in social security benefits, spending $4,000 a month, about $50,000 a year after tax.

Scenario B, we wanna talk about our quote-unquote wealthy retiree. And you may not feel wealthy if you have a million-dollar IRA. However, the IRS is going to tax you much like a wealthy individual.

And you're gonna see that over a lifetime here. That IRA balances a million dollars, social security, a little over $6,000 a month, and expenses of $8,000 a month. We're gonna start by taking a look at some of our software we use here in the office at Howard Bailey Financial, looking at that conservative average retiree.

So what we're gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and jump to the projections using all the inputs that we've discussed thus far. Also wanna emphasize that we are increasing their expenses for inflation at around 3% per year. And what we can see here is if they are going to only make 3.86% per year, that benchmark return, they're gonna run out of money in their early to mid 90s.

Probably not the scenario that they want. They're going to need to generate a rate of return of at least 5% in order to avoid a shortfall. Now, if we look at the other scenario, we have a million dollars in our IRA.

Same facts and figures there. Still running out of money in those early 90s. We need to generate a higher rate of return in order to avoid running out of money over an age 100 scenario.

So we're gonna step away from these two conservative scenarios and focus a little bit more on a more realistic return that you might be achieving or that you might be benchmarking your portfolio against. So let's jump into our moderate benchmark scenario. So we have a couple here.

As we've stated, they're 60 years old, gonna retire in five years at age 65. A little bit less than that, a little over four and a half years roughly. They have social security benefits like we laid out, 38.50 a month, $2,500 a month.

Their projected cost of living adjustment, we use 2.75% per year as a conservative cost of living adjustment for those social security benefits. We have a million dollars in that IRA and they're going to continue contributing to that IRA about 1,500 bucks per month. Their expenses are 8,000 a month as we said, and we're inflating that at 3.27% over their lifetime.

In that scenario, moderate benchmark return scenario, now they have enough. So we're generating a rate of return there in this scenario that's higher than what that required rate of return was that the system spit out for us. And now we wanna do some tax mitigation.

So we click on our tax tab and we jump into our tax tracker to start doing a little analysis. We're just going to do something high level here as we're working with you on an individual basis. We can dive deeper into these numbers, customize it for yourself, which we would do.

Does it make sense to do conversions over the first five years, the second five years, break them up? How do we wanna accomplish that? That's gotta be unique to your own situation. We just wanna talk about this from a high level today. If you wanna schedule a time to do a tax analysis for yourself, all you have to do is call the number on your screen and one of our financial advisors will visit with you no matter where you are in the country over a Zoom meeting, provide you with that analysis.

As we look at this analysis for that quote unquote wealthy retiree over a five-year period of doing Roth conversions, converting $100,000 per year every year for the next five years, now their projected required minimum distributions were over $6 million over their lifetime. That is from age 60 through age 100. Their peak required minimum distribution would hit over $350,000 with projected lifetime taxes of 2.5 million.

Now, over five years, we've only converted about half of the IRA, half a million dollars over five years, but just doing those conversions and even doing it while they're working in this particular scenario, they've reduced their lifetime taxes down to $1 million, about a $1.5 million tax savings. Their peak required minimum distribution went down to about what they need out of these accounts, say $32,000, and you'll see in a second, that's kind of where they start these RMDs. We've levelized a lot of those required minimum distributions.

If we look at that average retiree scenario with a half a million dollars in their IRA, now, are they okay? They're going to be just fine as well. They're earning enough in the way of rate of return. We want to start doing some tax planning.

Now for them, we're going to do conversions. Obviously, those conversions are going to be a smaller dollar amount. Now we're doing conversions of $40,000 a year over five years, again, converting about half of their current IRA over to a Roth IRA and taking their peak required minimum distribution from 180,000 down to 30,000.

Lifetime taxes going from 870,000 down to about a half a million dollars. And so now I want to summarize those different numbers for you. We're also going to summarize some of the more aggressive numbers as well.

So as you see here, I've summarized those moderate return scenarios. So there's moderate benchmark return scenarios for the wealthy individual with a million dollar IRA, the average individual with a half a million dollar IRA, and then as a starting required minimum distribution of about $100,000 and $50,000. I think some will find that startling that those required distributions will be that large even on day one of taking those distributions.

But I think more startling is the peak required minimum distribution of about 350,000, almost $200,000. Now, are they going to be able to reduce the taxes on their social security? If they don't do anything in all of these scenarios, they're going to be paying taxes on almost all their social security, 85%, that maximum amount. And their AGI is going to be at age 80, around a quarter of a million dollars and over $120,000.

So this puts them in a scenario where they're at risk of paying more and more Medicare premiums, especially as they get into their upper 80s, even their 90s for that matter. And then let's take a look at the aggressive scenarios. So we talked about those rates of return.

The reason I wanted to use different rates of return for this analysis is for you to see the impact that that makes on those peak RMDs over time. Obviously, the faster that IRA is growing, the larger those required distributions are going to become, and the bigger the impact you're going to have when it comes to doing Roth conversions. The aggressive wealthy retiree has a starting RMD that's $50,000 more than that moderately allocated retiree with peak required minimum distributions over a million dollars.

Remember, they have a million dollar IRA today. This is just the power of compound interest and AGI of over 350,000 at age 80. And that average retiree, still seeing some pretty dramatic increases, $75,000 as a starting required minimum distribution, over a half a million dollars in peak RMDs, and 85% of Social Security still taxable.

In all these scenarios, their AGI at 170,000, almost double what it was in the moderate return scenario. So this is why you want to run multiple different scenarios under different potential returns so you really hone in on the right Roth conversion strategy for yourself to mitigate all of these taxes, mitigate Social Security taxability, mitigate your Medicare premium penalties as well. So now we're going to start implementing some of those Roth conversions.

I want to summarize those things for you on that chart. So now I wanted to simplify it a little bit. We're only going to look at that moderate scenario.

I think it's probably unlikely that you have a retiree that is that aggressive seeking returns that are as high as those Morningstar benchmark aggressive returns. So probably a more realistic scenario here. So for the moderate wealthy retiree, their starting RMD went from about 100 grand down to $30,000.

Their peak RMD went from about 360,000 to about 30,000, and their age 80 taxable amount on their Social Security is about 77%. So we were actually able to mitigate some of the taxation on Social Security. You know, when you get into those upper levels though, if you have over a million dollars, especially 1.5, $2 million or more in IRAs as you step into retirement, you're most likely going to be stuck paying taxes on your Social Security because you're going to have a lot of other income in conjunction with those IRAs, in conjunction with higher Social Security benefits.

And so you may not be able to do much about Social Security taxes. You may be able to do a whole lot though when it comes to your Medicare premiums, maybe saving yourself significant dollar amounts over your lifetime by doing the same tax planning. So I think the moral of the story here is it doesn't matter if you have a half million dollar IRA, a $3 million IRA, there's benefits to doing some tax planning.

If we take a look at that average retiree with a half a million dollars in their IRAs, their starting RMD was about 50,000, now it's 20,000, peak RMD of 180,000, now 30,000, their taxable Social Security at age 80 has now went to just around 50%. So that's pretty significant reduction in the taxability of their Social Security and their AGI has dropped precipitously from 120,000-ish to about 70,000. Their lifetime tax savings in that wealthy scenario, that million dollar IRA, $1.4 million roughly.

With that average retiree, about 420,000, that's almost the value of the IRA that they had when they stepped into retirement. Now I wanna emphasize something here, and that is looking at that age 80 AGI. So those age 80 AGIs in these two scenarios, about 120,000, 240,000, going back to that old chart, if it's 120,000, they're probably not worrying too much about paying those Medicare premium penalties.

But if it's 250,000 and we said that peak RMD could be 350,000, we see some pretty significant penalties coming into play when it comes to Medicare premiums, and that's not being factored in to the lifetime tax savings amount that you see there. So now we can see that this is a really important and very potentially costly decision for you to be making as you're stepping into retirement or if you're already there. So give us a call right now at the number on your screen to schedule a comprehensive review of your tax strategy in retirement.

What are you going to do about those required minimum distributions? Let's help you project those taxes in the future and start mitigating some of these risks for you in your retirement.