Roth conversion, maybe a simple solution?

I, too, have a desire to model a Traditional IRA to Roth conversion. I have read all the posts I could find on the topic and came away with you can kinda do it if you bend the situation to fit ESPlanner. I wanted to make what seems to me on the surface to be a simple change to ESPlanner to better handle this and maybe even other situations. Given the lifting of the conversion AGI limit next year, I think having a way to model the conversion more precisely would be a big plus.

The most discussed solution in the forums - leaving conversion amount out of Traditional IRA balance, using taxable receipts for the conversion amount to generate the tax bill, and putting corresponding contributions in the Roth to build up the Roth balance - fails to take into account the income the Traditional IRA balance is earning before conversion. This might be small of a one year conversion in the first year of a profile but what if you want to make small conversions in many multiple years to stay in lower tax brackets.

The feature that ESPlanner is missing is a way to remove money from the IRA balance in specific years. A simple way to implement that feature may be to just allow negative contributions on the Retirement Accounts->Contributions screen. That screen already allows you to set specific amounts for specific years If you implement it so that a negative amount has no tax effect then it does nothing but reduce the Individual, Employer or Roth balance available for earning income and making distributions in future years. I think this feature might also let you model a charitable contribution directly from an IRA and give you a start at modeling taking a loan from your 401k.

I suggest implementing the feature as a negative contribution because the UI on that screen has everything needed, except for allowing negative amounts. And being a programmer I can at least envision the possibility that non-taxable negative contributions might be able to make their way through the Compute Engine without any/many changes.

I realize negative contributions might not be as intuitive a concept as Withdrawals but I think it would take more UI work on the Withdrawals screen to implement. But if you wanted to take on more work for the sake of intuitive use then copying the UI from Contributions to Withdrawals and adding an option to allow you to specify whether the amounts to are be taxed or not. You then would have effectively created a way to model any distribution and/or conversion pattern someone wants to enter. Don’t remove the current method on the Withdrawal screen, instead make the user choose which method to use – based on age start and finish or based on specifying specific amounts by year.