I currently have pre-tax $$ sitting in a traditional IRA that I contributed years ago. I would like to do backdoor ROTH now that I have hit the income limit

My plan to reduce the tax burden is:

• Rollover the traditional IRA to employer 401k
• Contribute post-tax to traditional IRA
• Convert to ROTH

In theory, this should eliminate paying taxes on the conversion to ROTH, correct? Or am I still going to have to owe taxes on the pre-tax portion that was in the account previously (despite rolling it over)?


Getting conflicting info from different sources (CPA vs vanguard)

You are correct.
Moving the pre tax dollars to your 401k is the ticket.

Then you can make your after tax IRA contribution and convert.

How much are we talking? And what's your time horizon?

If not 6 figures, and more than 10 years, personally I'm doing the full conversion math and possibly paying the taxes to get tax free growth for my lifetime + 10 years.

Thanks.

And there should be no tax owed on the conversion right?

My CPA is saying there would be. Historically very good CPA so not sure why she'd say this

This is correct. The 5498 for year end value on IRAs for 2022 would show 0 and no tax would be owed on conversion.

You should be good like everyone else says….

BUT - to add something, you will have to check with your company's 401k plan administrator to see if they will accept your IRA funds. Sometimes the 401k plan might only accept rollover funds (old 401k/ira) for a certain period of time from entering the company plan. It's dumb but some have that caveat just a heads up.

I meant to update last week but I did in fact check with my 401(k) provider and they do accept traditional IRA pre-tax rollovers into them

I also talked with my CPA and I'm good with the plan. They were thinking I wanted to convert my 401K after rolling the traditional IRA over to it.

Simple misunderstanding but thanks for the great responses