Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I'm still stuck back at "retiring at 50."  

That is great for you, and a pipe dream for me.  

yet another reason to at least consider or have a Roth IRA.

RMDs (required minimum distributions) are not required in retirement for you as the original account Roth owner.  that too is a feature for it.  any beneficiaries who take ownership will be forced to withdraw starting 10 years post inheritance (current law).

the act of converting is not hard, especially with a large online broker.  the backdoor roth process is a piece of cake.
1. fund the IRA on one day in cash.  2. day two convert to Roth IRA 3. handle your Form 5498 (IRS form for conversion).
this basically eliminates any tax as the 'cash' is presumed to have been taxed previously as earned income or some other form of post tax cash, most importantly there are going to be no 'gains' or fractional interest 1099 income.

separately,  taking a chunky traditional IRA and converting it, yes, you have to prepare for that tax bill.

If I understand what you're saying, you're talking about taking a large sum and putting it in an IRA and then converting it.  Presumably around retirement?

It doesn't seem like a lot of people would have a huge wad of cash laying around to put into an IRA.  And if they did, it likely would've benefited their bottom line much more to have it in an IRA for the years it took to build it and bite the tax conversion, than to have kept it our of a market-tied fund.  

I have a Roth IRA, and I'm happy to pay the tax on the income now.  Never know the future, but if my life goes anywhere close to what I think it will, I'm better off doing it this way than doing a traditional IRA and converting later.  

Hell I'm way younger than badger that old fart.

Thinking about back then, here on the retirement thread, makes me think of what I refer to as my "old life" back in Austin.  I'm one of the rare cases who went backward in their career.  Checking an inflation calculator, I'd have to make in the mid-100's now to have the same buying power as what I earned back then.  And that doesn't even account for the fact that my income still had plenty of room to grow in that business, at least for a while.  I keep in intermittent touch with some old coworkers just enough to know that things changed in that business, and so there's no guarantee my income would've kept pace with inflation or resulted in material raises.  But it is a possibility, in that I may have eventually made the connections possible to stop working for the business and moved into participating in the business, as several savvy guys I used to work with did/do.  

Needless to say, I don't make anywhere close to what I used to, and my purchasing power is even that much less considering inflation.  

I sometimes wonder how my outlook might look different now if physical/medical problems hadn't ate up my 30's and everything I had built to that point.  tbf, I hadn't done as much investing as I should have even in that time frame, since I had it in my head I was going to save a bunch of money and buy a house with cash in the Kyle/Buda area.  I would've needed to have worked for another year and a bit, at the rate I was going.  The cash savings did come in handy when medical bills piled up, though, albeit with no equity or roof over my head when I was done with it.  

I don't dwell on it, because then it would just go in the Grumpy thread, but sometimes I look back at my situation then and my plans for life, and then look around at now and the way things are pretty locked into going, and think "WTF happened??"