7 Smart Moves People With $2M+ in Their IRA Are Making in 2026

Roth conversion laddering means converting a deliberate, bracket-aware slice of a traditional IRA to Roth every year during the "gap years," the stretch between retirement and age 73 when RMDs haven't started and income is often at its lowest point in decades. Instead of one large conversion, the balance moves over in controlled pieces, each one sized to fill a specific bracket and stop before the next one starts.

The math is straightforward even though the execution isn't. Every dollar converted today is taxed at today's rate. Every dollar left in the IRA is taxed later, at whatever rate an RMD, a widow's bracket, or an heir's bracket happens to be at the time. If today's rate is lower than the rate that dollar would otherwise face, the conversion wins. If it's higher, it doesn't. That comparison has to be run year by year, not decided once and forgotten.

The visual below shows why the window matters. An untouched $2M IRA at 65 keeps compounding, and so does the IRS's implicit claim on it. Every year the conversion is deferred, the account gets larger and the eventual tax bill grows right along with it.

A Qualified Charitable Distribution sends money directly from an IRA to a qualifying charity. If you're 70½ or older, you can direct up to $111,000 (2026 limit, indexed annually) this way, and the amount counts toward satisfying your RMD without ever showing up as income on your return. That's a meaningfully different outcome than writing a check to the same charity and claiming an itemized deduction, because a QCD reduces your Adjusted Gross Income directly, which also helps keep you under IRMAA thresholds and below the income levels that make Social Security more heavily taxed.

QCDs are most useful for households that give to charity anyway. Redirecting that giving through the IRA, rather than from a brokerage account or a paycheck, effectively makes the RMD dollars that would have been taxed at your marginal rate into dollars that are never taxed at all. For a household with $2M+ in pre-tax accounts already giving five figures a year to causes they care about, this is one of the lowest-friction moves on this list.

A Qualified Longevity Annuity Contract lets you move a portion of a traditional IRA, up to $220,000 for 2026, into an annuity that doesn't start paying income until later, as late as age 85. The key mechanical benefit: the dollars inside a QLAC are excluded from the RMD calculation entirely until the contract starts paying out. That shrinks the balance the IRS uses to compute your RMDs during your 70s and early 80s, which lowers the RMD itself, the IRMAA exposure that comes with it, and the taxable income that gets stacked on top of Social Security.

A QLAC isn't primarily a tax play, though. It's longevity insurance first, and a smaller current-year RMD second. It works best for households who are less concerned about liquidity on that slice of the account and more concerned about guaranteed income if they live well into their 90s, since the deferred payout is structured to start exactly when other income sources are more likely to be running thin.

Medicare Part B and Part D premiums increase in tiers based on your Modified Adjusted Gross Income from two years earlier. Cross a tier threshold by even a dollar, and the higher premium applies to the entire year, for both spouses, not just on the income above the threshold. This is a cliff, not a slope, and RMDs are one of the most common ways households get pushed over one without realizing it until the premium notice arrives.

Because IRMAA looks back two years, the income that determines next year's premium is often already locked in by the time you'd want to react to it. Managing IRMAA well means projecting MAGI forward, including RMDs, Roth conversions, and any one-time income events, and deliberately keeping distributions below the nearest tier boundary rather than only watching the tax bracket.

When one spouse dies, the survivor moves from filing Married Filing Jointly to Single, typically starting the year after death. The federal tax brackets for a single filer are roughly half as wide as the brackets for a married couple, and the IRMAA thresholds compress the same way. The RMD on the same account doesn't shrink just because one spouse is gone. The result is the same dollar of income taxed at a meaningfully higher marginal rate, arriving at exactly the point in life when the surviving spouse has the least capacity to absorb a surprise.

This is a predictable event, which is exactly why it's planning-able. Reducing the pre-tax balance before death, through conversions, QCDs, or QLACs, shrinks the RMD the survivor will face as a single filer. Holding a larger share of assets in Roth accounts before the first spouse passes gives the survivor tax-free income to draw from instead of pre-tax dollars stacked on top of an already compressed bracket.

Under the SECURE Act, most non-spouse beneficiaries, including adult children, must fully distribute an inherited traditional IRA within 10 years of the original owner's death. There's no stretch option for most heirs anymore. If the account is still largely pre-tax when it passes, every distribution during that 10-year window is taxed at the heir's ordinary income rate, and heirs are frequently in their peak earning years exactly when they inherit, which is close to the worst possible time to add six figures of ordinary income.

"Beneficiary architecture" means deciding, in advance, how much of the account should remain pre-tax versus how much should be converted to Roth before it passes, how the account is titled, and whether a trust is appropriate for control purposes. A Roth IRA inherited under the same 10-year rule still has to be emptied within 10 years, but the distributions come out tax-free, which changes the entire calculation for a working-age heir.

Most retirees hold three kinds of accounts: tax-deferred (traditional IRA, 401(k)), tax-free (Roth), and taxable (brokerage). Where a withdrawal comes from in any given year changes the tax outcome substantially, even when the dollar amount needed is identical. Pulling from a Roth account produces no taxable income at all. Pulling from a brokerage account can produce capital gains, taxed at lower rates than ordinary income. Pulling from a traditional IRA produces ordinary income that stacks on top of Social Security, and once RMDs start, that stacking happens automatically whether it's convenient or not.

Sequencing well means deciding, before the year starts, how a given income need should be split across those three buckets to land in a target bracket, stay below an IRMAA threshold, and avoid pushing Social Security into its most heavily taxed range. It's the connective strategy that ties the other six moves together: every conversion, QCD, and QLAC decision changes what the ideal sequencing looks like the following year.