Sean Mullaney
speaker
1,197 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 23 Apr
Sean Mullaney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And of course, the surprise is they pay zero federal income tax.
Well, how can that be?
Well, the Roth conversion is essentially wiped out by the standard deduction and the senior deduction.
You structure your affairs so that you have low yield equities in the taxable account, maybe a small bank account, generating some interest income, but essentially the ordinary income, the Roth conversion, the non-qualified dividends, the interest income, can be kept at the senior deduction plus the standard deduction, so that wipes away the tax on that.
And then you can have significant capital gains that you're essentially, you're in your brokerage account.
You sell those brokerage account mutual funds or ETFs and trigger capital gains.
But recall, we have the 0% long-term capital gains tax bracket.
I believe for a married couple in the year 2026, that thing goes up to 98,900 of taxable income.
So that's after we put in the senior deduction, if we're 65 or older, we're married, that's $12,000.
If we're both 65 or older this year, that's fantastic, plus the high standard deduction.
So that goes back to my point that retirement is a time that if we structure our drawdown and our Roth conversion strategy, in the first part of our retirement, we might be paying very low taxes.
And then, yes, maybe later on in retirement, as we spend down those brokerage accounts, we then get into our traditional IRA.
We eventually get to RMDs.
Although, by the way, if you're born in 1960 or later, that RMD doesn't start till 875 later in life anyway.
So yeah, Robert, there are so many good little planning opportunities out there.
And I think we have to step back and say, fear of taxation and retirement is not justified in today's environment based on the rules, based on the incentives of the politicians, based on what the recent history.
In the book, we have a little table.
And it goes through a decade's worth of tax cut after tax cut after tax cut for retirees, even though many commentators are saying, you know, they're going to be increasing taxes on retirees.
The problem with those predictions is the future keeps happening and those tax increases don't materialize.
And what has materialized are tax cuts after tax cuts for retirees.
Showing 1121–1140 of 1,197 · page 57 of 60
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