Episode Transcript
Daniel Wrenne: It kills the whole strategy. It's like you might as well not do anything because–like you can just invest in a brokerage account and that's plain Jane, simple, basically taxed a little bit as you go and then that far outweighs getting taxed twice. Taxed twice is no good.
Welcome to Finance for Physicians, the show where we help physicians like you use money as a tool to live a great life. I'm your host, Daniel Wrenne, and I've spent the last decade advising physicians on their personal finances with the mission to help them understand that taking control of their finances now means creating a future where they can practice medicine where, when, and how long they want to.
Daniel Wrenne: Hugh, how's it going, buddy?
Hugh Baker: Great. How are you, Daniel?
Daniel Wrenne: I'm good. It is election day and we have committed beforehand we will not be talking politics today. Probably when you hear this, it will be well past, and hopefully that all the political drama has died down by then. But we are here today not to talk about politics. We're here today to talk about tax stuff.
And I think this will be a fun topic because it's a very, so we're going to talk about some of the most common scenarios we see, actually fairly regularly, where clients are basically getting double taxed on their money. And so you're not, I mean, you're not supposed to get double taxed on your money.
Hopefully, well, there's a few exceptions, but in it, when you're in a normal scenario, you shouldn't be double taxed on your money, but we're going to talk through a couple of scenarios or mistakes, I guess, that we often see. They're not isolated either. We were talking about that as well. I wouldn't say the majority of people have them, but it's not that uncommon for us to see one of these mistakes.
And they definitely cost a lot of money and so we're going to be talking through those mistakes we run into today. Hopefully, by knowing these, you can avoid them. That's the goal, right? So yeah. Hugh, does that sound like a good plan?
Hugh Baker: Sounds like a good plan to me.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah. Everybody wants to pay less in taxes.
Hugh Baker: That's right. These tools can be powerful, but they can be powerful in both ways if used incorrectly.
Daniel Wrenne: Right. And that's kind of a theme, I guess, is all the three things we'll talk through. They all kind of originate from trying to accomplish strategic tax savings, I guess they're all vehicles, so they're all coming with the intent of strategically using vehicles to save on taxes. That's all three of the scenarios we'll go through involve tax strategies that basically are misused. And that's actually most tax errors are just mistakes or doing, taking a strategy and missing steps in it. So first one, everybody, well, hopefully, all y'all listening know what the backdoor Roth IRA strategy is.
We have talked about it many times before, so you can check back on prior episodes if you aren't aware of what the backdoor Roth IRA strategy is, or Google backdoor Roth IRA. But anyway, Hugh, take us through the backdoor Roth IRA. There's a bunch of errors that happen with it. We even did a show on all the errors that happen with backdoor Roth, but we're going to talk about a particular one.
Hugh Baker: Yeah, so backdoor Roth. So most people are doing everything they can through their employer accounts and a lot of times, the next best thing if you're saving for retirement is to do what's called a backdoor Roth IRA. So a lot of the clients that we work with make too much money, which is a nice problem to contribute directly to a Roth IRA.
So that limit for 2024 was if you're single, making $161,000, if you're married, if you're making $240,000 or more and you file tax return jointly, if you make more than That's right. That's 2024. So if you're making more than that, you can't contribute directly to a Roth IRA. So that's where the backdoor Roth IRA comes in.
So you can contribute to a traditional IRA. There's no income limit. And there's also no income limit to a Roth conversion, which is essentially just a transfer from the traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. So hence backdoor Roth. So where this gets messed up a lot is come tax time, people get their tax documents and you get a 1099R from wherever you use for your investing.
And it conveniently has this box checked taxable amount, not determined. So most people get that tax document. You fill it out. Maybe you give it to your CPA. The default is that this is taxable, but really what happened is you contributed to a traditional IRA, but again, making over that amount, if you have access to a retirement plan through work, you cannot deduct that amount that you contribute to a traditional IRA.
So you have already paid tax on these dollars. There's no deduction. You get no credit for a tax deduction. So if you, let's say a married couple, you contributed $46,500 each to a traditional IRA and now that's $13,000. You converted that to Roth and let's say you didn't invest the money before you converted it.
So it's just an even $13,000. Well, you've already paid tax on that. So the taxable line on your IRA distributions line of your tax return should have zero in that case. However, often–
Daniel Wrenne: Which line is that?
Hugh Baker: Oh gosh, the number. I don't know what the number is.
Daniel Wrenne: I'll tell you, you keep talking, I'll tell you what, because it's good to know, I think it's good to know what line it is. I'll just, in case you're looking at your 1040. But you keep going and I'll look it up.
Hugh Baker: Definitely on the first page of your 1040.
Daniel Wrenne: Oh, here it is. I got it. I got it. 2024. Oh, well this is 2023. I think it's the same in 2024. 2023, so the 1040 is like the summary. It's like a two-page intended to be like the summary of all tax stuff, so it's line four A and B. So four B, if you look on four B, that's the number he's talking about. Like most of the time it should be zero or close to zero. Like a few hundred is okay.
Hugh Baker: Right. Let's say you put the money in the traditional IRA, you invested it and it got to like 13,500 before you converted it. Well, then you would have $500 on that taxable line.
But the big picture is the amount you contributed to the traditional IRA, that amount is, should not be taxable. But where I think where this gets missed a lot is number one, often you don't get the tax form that says what you contributed to the IRA until the end of May. Well, why is that? Because you can contribute to these IRAs all the way up until the tax filing time.
So I think that's one reason I think this gets missed a lot. And then the other reason, so people are just going through TurboTax and a lot of people are like, “Oh, I did backdoor Roth. I contributed to a Roth, not a traditional. Then you might get some type of error message that says you made too much. And then you're like, “Go back. I didn't, that doesn't apply here.” So I think those are my theories of why this happens a lot. But I mean, you do the math, you're someone in the 24% bracket, 32% bracket. I think those are the most common of our clients. So you've already paid tax on it once at that rate.
You're going to pay tax at that rate again, if it's on that taxable line and you might have thought, “Hey, I want to retire someday. I want to go part-time someday. So what I need to do is get as much money into these retirement accounts as I can, find all the silver bullets I can online.”
And you might end up paying something like 50%, 70% tax on this if it's done incorrectly. And that's going to be a huge drag, especially if you're talking about doing it multiple times, 10 years.
Daniel Wrenne: It kills the whole strategy. It's You might as well not do anything because–
Hugh Baker: Exactly
Daniel Wrenne: Like you can just invest in a brokerage account and that's plain Jane simple, basically taxed a little bit as you go, and then that far outweighs getting taxed twice. Taxed twice is no good. I can tell you that. But basically, what's happening, you're not supposed to get taxed twice, it's just there's errors that happen, like you were saying, most likely it's that miscommunication or errors just inputting is what caused it, and it gets up–the mistake happens when you input that there is this taxable IRA transaction.
That it has occurred and it's because you don't basically account for the second step of the process or the first step, technically, but you're not accounting for the full. It's basically the two-step process, the backdoor Roth IRA. So you're missing one of the steps in terms of your accounting. You're missing the part of the contributing money that's already been taxed part.
And that there's two, like you were saying, there's two different tax forms that come that messes, that makes it even more confusing. One of them comes later in the year in May, and that's the one that's important. And so an accountant, oftentimes accountants make this mistake too, because you have to verbally tell them or tell them communicated in some way that there was a contribution that was made to the IRA with after-tax dollars, and it was then converted to Roth.
And since it was after-tax dollars, that should be no tax transaction. And I mean, that's how we tell clients or that's how we would communicate it to the accountants is like after-tax dollars contributed to an IRA, it was converted to Roth. Therefore, there should be limited or no tax on it. But there's when you have that first part of the step after-tax dollars contributed missing, the accountant just sees this form or you're just inputting this one form and then the software tax software doesn't account for the first part and therefore it looks at it as if you need to be taxed on this transaction.
Therefore, you're paying the tax on the full amount of the contribution, which is on dollars you've already been taxed on. I mean, I'm sitting here explaining and I'm like, this doesn't make a lot of sense. It's kind of confusing just talking through it, given the nature of how this works.
But the gist of it is, it's not that uncommon for us to see people getting taxed twice on their Roth IRA or backdoor Roth IRA contributions. I've seen it many times. And usually when I see it–usually when I see it, I always ask for the prior year returns ‘cause it's typically happening every year that way.
I've seen many times where I've seen people have done it, you can only correct three-year tax returns. So there's been many times where I've seen all three of those returns be done incorrectly. And 14,000 whatever times three is a lot of money that you've been taxed twice on, when you're in a high tax bracket or low tax bracket.
Hugh Baker: Yeah, that's right. Really adds up.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, like we're talking for sure above $10,000 of tax unnecessarily paid. But the good news is you can, okay, so a takeaway on this one, keep an eye on your–if you're doing this yourself, if you're working with a financial planner and they're not watching this for you, then get rid of them and hire us, hire Hugh.
Or if you're doing it yourself, look at that line 4B. It's actually pretty simple. Just every year when you go to do your taxes or, your accountant does your taxes, look at the line 4B and make sure it's a low number or zero. And if it's not, you need to understand what's going on. You got to examine it.
Like what's happened here. And there could be legitimate reasons for it being a higher number, but it could be that it's an error. And you can fix it if it's done. If it's happened, like I just said, you can fix up to three years prior. So if you do notice that's, if you realize that's happening and you have an accountant doing it for you, that's, go to them and say, “Hey, I need you to fix this.”
Hugh Baker: Yeah, relatively easy to get it fixed to amend your tax return.
Daniel Wrenne: Okay, what's number two? What's the second most, well, we're not doing this in like frequency, I don't think, although it may be in frequency order.
Hugh Baker: Yeah, I don't know. So the number two, more of a recent example of a newer client. So client comes to us and from another advisor, and they have a SEP IRA. So this is a self-employed person. And I'm sure we'll have another podcast someday on SEP IRAs. But for the purposes of today, we're just going to talk about it in this example. So client came to us and the advisor before was using the same investing platform that we use.
So whenever the accounts moved over, we could see all the transaction history. So with a SEP IRA for somebody self-employed, there is a dollar limit that you can contribute. And then there is a percentage of compensation or net compensation that you can contribute to. So there's two different limits and the one that applies is the lesser of.
So the dollar limit of, and this would be for 2023, dollar limit contribution was $66,000. So this person contributed $66,000 to their SEP IRA. Call me cynical, but probably working with an advisor that is paid based on assets under management and says, “Hey, you can put this much into this account.” Clearly is not–
Daniel Wrenne: Is that true?
Hugh Baker: It is.
Daniel Wrenne: Okay.
Hugh Baker: So I could see the transaction history. Okay. And just as part of new client onboarding, I viewed tax return and I see, okay, you contributed $66,000, but your tax deduction was something in the $30,000. So there was about $30,000 in this account that she got no tax deduction for, and it's in an account where when you withdraw the money later in retirement, you have to pay tax on the whole thing.
So she put $66,000 in, only got credit for $35,000. So here's another $30,000. Example of 30, 000 that at some point in the future, the IRS is waiting to collect tax on a second time.
Daniel Wrenne: That's a bummer. That's another. Yeah, that's for sure taxed twice on unnecessarily–
Hugh Baker: Yeah. So in this case, she contributed the dollar limit, but based on the limit on–
Daniel Wrenne: Is that why they canned their advisor?
Hugh Baker: No. So they had no idea. This is something I found out after becoming a new client. So yeah, she was in the 35% tax bracket. So you do the math, 35% on about 30 grand. That's maybe a nice little short trip to Europe or something like that.
[Midroll] Let's take a quick break to talk about our firm, Wrenne Financial Planning. The goal of our podcast is to empower you to make better financial decisions. But sometimes the best financial decision you can make is to work with someone who understands your financial goals and has the expertise to keep you on track to reach them.
That's where Wrenne Financial Planning comes in. We are a full-service financial planning firm that works with over 400 physicians and their families across the country. We charge a transparent monthly flat fee for our services and offer virtual meetings you can take from anywhere. Best of all, you'll get to work with a team that specializes in working with physician families.
So whether you're starting out and wondering how you'll balance your student loan payments and saving for a home, or you're an established physician trying to figure out how to pay for your kid's college and how much you need to save to reach financial freedom, we can help. I'll put a link in the show notes to schedule a no-obligation meeting with one of our certified financial planners.
Wrenne Financial Planning LLC is a registered investment advisor. For more information about our firm, please visit wrennefinancial.com. That's wrennefinancial.com.
Daniel Wrenne: Another one that's 10,000 plus per year. And I wouldn't be surprised like I was saying, the first example we gave these kinds of things a lot of times repeat themselves. S yeah, how do you avoid that? If you're working with an advisor now, and you're worried that, maybe an AUM advisor. If I was wearing the AUM advisor, this would be this or even a commission-based advisor, like any advisor that's like getting paid on transactions or more money, to me, this would be a pretty big conflict of interest. And they have less incentive or no incentive to worry about this kind of thing. And they can easily put it on the accountant. It's like, “Well, the accountant should have told me,” or whatever. Like maybe that would be their excuse. So how do you, if you're working with someone like that, how do you keep an eye on this or maybe if you don't, ‘cause you probably don't even know that it's happened yet, maybe for starters, how do you know that this happened to you?
Hugh Baker: Well, you're right. It's difficult because in the end, you're trusting like, “Hey, I am a business owner. I'm a physician. I'm a mother. I've got all these things. I'm juggling. I'm trusting the professionals that I've hired to do right by me.” And I doubt that this was something done on purpose, but it's just a lack of checking to make sure you got credit for everything you were hoping to get credit for that you did throughout the year, so it's not enough just to do the steps. We need to understand the ins and outs of the accounts we're using if we are, especially something like this. We're usually waiting until around tax time when the accountant tells us exactly what their net compensation is and they say, “Here is exactly how much this person can contribute.”
So it's a matter of working with the other professionals in the client's life too to make sure that you're staying in your lane and everything is getting done correctly but then also reviewing when things are done to make sure that past the sniff test everything that we thought was going to happen looks correct.
So it's not enough just to do it, you really have to review and make sure that things are the way you–coming out the way you expect.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, there's also, I was trying to find this online, there's a good solo 401k, well, SEP slash solo 401k calculator. I’m trying to find it, and I can't–I'm drawing a blank. Hugh, can you think of any off the top of your head?
Oh, here it is. Oblivious Investor. Okay. So, and this is a solo 401k calculator. We don't, we want to see a SEP IRA. I'll see if I can find one. If I can find one, I'll put it in the show notes, but there's a ton of them online. You can find a SEP IRA calculator where you can just plug in your income for the year, and then it'll plug out or put it, spit out a contribution limit. And that's one way to do it is you can look at that. If you're self-employed to kind of double check what you actually contributed and kind of cross-check it with your tax return, or you could look at your prior year tax return, cross-check that with what's actually gone into your account.
So if you have an account at Fidelity or something, you could go log into your Fidelity SEP IRA to look at your 2023 or whatever contributions and then compare that to what your tax return from 2023 would be showing. And that's, I was going to look for where it is on the tax return. Yeah. It's on the deductions, business deductions section I believe, but I can, I'll look that up while we're chatting, see if I can find it. But when you find it, though, Hugh, same sort of thing, right? Like you can amend and correct. And should you put that on your accountant? I mean, is it partly your accountant's fault? What do you think about that?
Hugh Baker: Well, it depends on why the numbers are different. Like I tell you, this person is working with a new accountant since that happened, but I think it's a matter of, “Hey, you should review your tax return.” Hopefully, your accountant is also reviewing this with you and saying, “Hey,” going line by line for the important things like, “Okay, you told me you contributed this amount and it should be a red flag.”
“Well, I contributed $66,000. It says my deduction is $35,000. Why is that?” Well, they might say, “Well, based on the limit of percentage that you could deduct based on your net compensation, you can only deduct $35,000” or whatever it was, then the conversation from there should be like, “Okay, well, what about this extra money in this account? How do we get that out? What are our options?”
In this case, it was contributed in January of the next calendar year, so we're going to be able to apply it to the next calendar year's tax return. So it's a little bit easier in this situation to make sure that this person, it gets credit for the amount they contributed, but still you should be reviewing these things to make sure that everything you contributed lines up with what is on your tax return.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah. And it's one of those things, you know, the sooner you catch it, the better even if you did it like, I mean, it just becomes a bigger pain too, and if it's been three years or more, it's impossible to fix this kind of thing. So sooner they catch, sooner you catch it, the better.
Hugh Baker: Where does it go?
Daniel Wrenne: Tax return, know it’s–
Hugh Baker: I think it's maybe on Schedule C.
Daniel Wrenne: Is it on schedule C or is it on the–
Hugh Baker: There's definitely some kind of line that says self-employed retirement contributions. That's where I noticed it.
Daniel Wrenne: Okay, I found it and it's on schedule one and it's line 16. Ah, that's kind of, that's the thing. It's kind of like a little harder to find this one on your tax return.
So if you're looking at prior tax returns or, I mean, the simple thing would just if you work with an accountant, just email your accountant and say, “Just confirming how much I have accounted for contributing to my SEP IRA plan.” But if you're looking at it yourself, yes, schedule 1. This is on the 2023 return.
I imagine it hasn't changed since then, but it's line 16, which is the second page of the schedule 1. And those are the–schedule forms are the ones that come right after the 1040, which is that main two-page summary. Okay, third error we're going to talk about. Hugh, you want to jump into that one?
Hugh Baker: Yeah, so another one, the example that I'm thinking of here is another client that came to us from a prior advisor.
Daniel Wrenne: Are these the last two recent ones, right?
Hugh Baker: Yeah, fairly recent. Yeah, ones we're either still working through or just got done working through. So yeah, person came to us, they had an IRA that was really a rollover from probably residency or like a first attending job type of thing. Low six figures, but this person and they were working with their prior advisor, was also having them contribute to this IRA every year up to the maximum.
So this is now it's a mix of pre-tax dollars that they had contributed their salary deferrals with their prior employer. And now it's a mix of traditional IRA contributions, which again at this person's income level and having access to a workplace retirement plan, cannot deduct these contributions. So now you have a mix of after-tax dollars and with pre-tax dollars and you can probably guess no one was tracking the basis or the after-tax amount, the dollars that they have already paid tax on.
So after doing this for several years, this got up to about $ 35,000 of money that they have already paid tax on. And when they go to withdraw it in retirement, since there was no tracking of this person's basis, she would end up paying tax again on this 35,000 so.
Daniel Wrenne: That’s dumb. I mean, it's not smart to fund a Roth or a traditional IRA non-deductible and let it grow either in the first place.
That's not a good strategy in itself, but it's even worse to mix the whole non-deductible. So it's like doing the first step of the backdoor Roth IRA but without converting it to Roth, that's what he was talking about. Like he was only doing one step of the backdoor Roth IRA strategy. We're just funding the IRA-only, which is not a good strategy because it's like I said, it's, well, you end up having to pay tax on that growth when you could have otherwise avoided it by converting to Roth.
So that part's a bad strategy, but it's especially bad when you mix it with an already pre-tax thing. So it's like nobody can keep up with that. It's just even if somebody probably, maybe somebody had good intentions about keeping up with it, but that's very difficult. Technically, there is a spot on the tax return.
You're supposed to account for those non-deductible contributions where you theoretically would be keeping up with it, but that's one that's extremely common. Like I've seen a million of these where the accountant, even when the accountant's doing it, it's just not even mentioned on the tax return that you contributed to that IRA.
I think the first mistake is mixing up tax types. Like I would just never do that. Like never mix two different types of accounts. Rollover IRA, you're going to do that, which that's usually dumb too, just because why wouldn't you just leave it as a 401k, but it's probably because the AUM advisor wanted to make money on it.
Hugh Baker: Bingo.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, right. Yeah. So, I mean, that's usually a dumb idea in the 1st place, but even if you just want to have an IRA for some reason, turn it and do a rollover IRA. There's a specific type of rollover IRA. You can even title it a rollover IRA at certain institutions, but at minimum, you can keep it separate and just don't mix it with anything.
And then if you're going to fund IRAs, use a separate account. But then if you do backdoor Roth IRAs, that gets messed up anyway. I'm not going to go there ‘cause that gets, it's confusing, but to me, that's the big mistake is mixing account types. That's just a dumb idea.
Hugh Baker: Yep, that's right. So really what we were able to do just and I just found this out through a conversation like what have you been doing in the past?
Well, every year around tax time we contribute to our IRAs. Okay, review tax return. There's no form 8606. That's the tax form where you can track the dollars in the account that you have already paid tax on. So really what we ended up having to do was logging on to this person's platform and going back through all the years of tax documents and finding tax form 5498, that's the one that shows how much you contributed to these individual retirement accounts.
And we just accumulated all of those, gave it to the, once again, new CPA. And then, yeah, this was actually just recently filed because she filed for an extension, so we get all this stuff cleaned up. Now the basis is tracked. So now the $35,000, it's already documented that tax has been paid, but it is a thing that's going to have to be ongoing unless we find some other solution here, which we're working on.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah. So I think it's smart to save those tax forms even for a long time. Well, ideally you just don't make the mistake, but like there's two tax forms to save related diaries. There's, especially if you're doing backdoor Ross, there's the 1099s that you get at the end of the year, beginning of the year, or I guess it would be early in the year for the next year after, so 1099, and then there's the 5498.
And the 5498 comes in like May, so it's good. So I keep those every year forever, just ‘cause I want, that's like proof that what happened happened in terms of your IRA transactions. And IRAs can get really complicated because of this whole tax treatment, like sometimes they're free tax, sometimes they're not. And those are kind of like the golden tickets that back up your case for it.
Hugh Baker: Yep. That's right.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah. So words of wisdom, how should we close out? I think, never trust anyone. I mean if you work with a, you have an advisor that charges assets under management and you're doing some of these strategies, I would for sure check them out.
If you're doing it yourself, always, you want to review your tax return. So you probably need to understand exactly what we're talking about. If you're not clear on the type of things we were just talking through pretty quick and you're doing it yourself, I would encourage learning about what these things are.
It doesn't hurt to review your tax return even if you're working with advisors. It's painful. It's painful to look at your tax return.
Hugh Baker: It is, but for me, it's kind of like a, will be like a treasure hunt sometimes.
Daniel Wrenne: It's not painful for us. We're like complainers.
Hugh Baker: People love it when you can save them taxes.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, and then if you find out your advisor's messing things up, call Hugh. He can help you.
Hugh Baker: I think the key takeaway is just make sure that you don't have to know all the ins and outs necessarily, but you do have to learn enough to ask good questions whenever recommendations are presented to you, asking, “Okay, how is this going to help me? How is this going to help my tax situation? Do you know how this should look on the tax return?” And then when you get the tax return, review it with that person that's recommended that. That way they can also, they should be doing this proactively, but that way, they can recognize anything that's maybe off.
If you have questions like, “Hey, this is–I had paid tax here on this Roth conversion or this IRA distributions lines as I paid tax. Like, how is that helping my situation?” And there might be a logical explanation. It might be, “Yeah, this is going to be–you're a resident graduating next year, and this is going to be the lowest tax year you'll ever have, maybe. So, let's maybe convert all these pre-tax 403B dollars you have to Roth.” That could be a perfectly logical explanation, but yeah, I think that's really just the key takeaway. Just ask good questions, understand how what you're doing is going to help you.
Daniel Wrenne: Yep. And if you work with us, we're happy to talk through those. We typically will look at the text turns proactively.
So hopefully, we're catching those ahead of time and avoiding them in the first place, but we are human and we make mistakes. Let us know, or just, we're happy to chat through those sorts of scenarios just to make sure you're learning what you need to know. So anyway, Hugh, it's been fun talking about taxes and not election for once today on election day. So I'm glad we got to catch up on election day here and talk taxes.
Hugh Baker: Yeah. Are you sure you don't want to endorse a political candidate before we go?
Daniel Wrenne: No, I already told you, we're not talking about that. So there will be no endorsements whatsoever.
Hugh Baker: Okay, well, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
No guests or clients appearing on the podcast received any form of compensation for their appearance and obtained no other benefit from us. It should not be assumed that every client has had the same experience.
