Roth Conversion and IRMAA Review
A 30-minute working session, not a seminar — your tax brackets and Medicare surcharges reviewed together, in plain language.
Is your Roth conversion about to raise your Medicare premium? The tax brackets are ladders. The Medicare income surcharges are cliffs, and one dollar over the line can cost a married couple thousands a year. Most year-end conversion plans look at one table and not the other.
I review both with you in thirty minutes, and you leave with a straight answer: convert, how much, and when.
No cost, no obligation, and nothing sold during the review.
Why Fred Saide
- Fred Saide, Ph.D. — fiftieth year of practice
- 100% client-first fiduciary
- NSSA certificate holder, Social Security
- As published in ThinkAdvisor and Rethinking65
- Author, When Life Shifts (2026)
What the thirty minutes covers
Four questions, your actual numbers, one page of notes you keep.
Your conversion window
The 2027 brackets are set. We find how much room you have in your current bracket and whether filling it makes sense this December or next year.
The IRMAA cliffs
Medicare prices your premium from a tax return filed two years ago, and the surcharge tiers are cliffs. We check where this year's income lands you in two years, before you lock it in.
The appeal you may be owed
If you retired, lost a spouse, or sold a business, you may be paying a surcharge on income you no longer have. There is a one-page federal form that fixes it, and most people never file it.
Social Security timing
Conversions, premiums, and your claiming age all pull on each other. We make sure a move on one table does not set off a problem on another.
Who this review fits
People within a few years of Medicare, or already on it, who are weighing Roth conversions. And anyone whose life just changed: you retired this year or last, you sold a business, you lost a spouse. Those are the years the two-year lookback gets wrong, and the years when a half-hour of arithmetic pays for itself many times over.
The person across the table
I am Fred Saide, a fiduciary retirement planner in my fiftieth year of practice and the founder of MoneyMattersUSA®, Advisory LLC, with offices in Bridgewater, Short Hills, and Cranford, New Jersey. I hold the NSSA certificate in Social Security, wrote the Gannett-syndicated column Window on Wall Street, and my recent work on these exact decisions has run in ThinkAdvisor and Rethinking65.
My book, When Life Shifts, is about how people make money decisions when life changes under them. This review is that book applied to one decision, with your numbers on the table.
Year-end is when the two tables get planned together
Thirty minutes, your numbers, a straight answer.
Tax brackets and Medicare surcharge thresholds change annually. Nothing on this page is individualized tax or legal advice.