The Cliffs After Sixty-Five

Between 65 and 75, your tax bill isn't set by your bracket. It's set by lines you can't see on your tax return.

One dollar over a Medicare surcharge line costs you that tier's surcharge for a whole year, for each of you, two years later. Between two Social Security lines that have never been raised for inflation, every extra dollar you take pulls up to 85 cents of your benefits into tax with it. A deduction for people over 65 shrinks as your income rises, and ends after 2028. A capital gain taxed at 0% still counts against every one of them.

This book shows you where those lines are, what each one measures, and what each slice of extra income really costs you. Then it gives you one routine to run every fall: find this year's lines, price the room below them, and decide how much income to take, and from which account.

Inside:

• The four different income figures the IRS, Medicare and Social Security use, and why municipal bond interest can push you over a Medicare line
• A slice-by-slice price map for Roth conversions, showing why a small conversion can be the most expensive kind
• The RMD test: one ratio that tells you whether converting after you claim Social Security is likely to pay at all
• Three households followed year by year, including the years before Social Security begins, when conversions paid the most
• How to ask Social Security to lower your Medicare surcharge after retirement or a spouse's death, and which events never qualify
• Qualified charitable distributions, the first-year RMD trap, and why an RMD can't be converted
• The survivor year: why a widow or widower can pay more tax on less income, and what a couple can do while both are alive
• A one-page Income Ceiling Sheet, and a completed example

What this book won't do: sell you a Roth conversion, an annuity or a fund. For some readers the right conversion is zero, and the book says who they are. Every rule is cited to the statute, regulation or agency publication it comes from. Every figure that changes each year is in one dated appendix.

For US retirees and near-retirees aged 64 to 75 with savings in a traditional IRA or 401(k). If you are still in the years before Medicare, start with The Gap to Sixty-Five.