Reporting Roth IRA converstion on 8606

[Guest Felicia77]

Please help! I'm having a hard time understanding where to put the conversion amounts on the tax forms

(8606/1040).

Ex. $10,000 non-ded converted to Roth

Ex. $10,000 trad IRA converted to Roth

and these conversions were done with the 4 year payment terms in mind.

[Guest Del Rae]

Can I ask a question first... where are the earnings in your numbers? Is the $10,000 your basis in the nondeductible and there is actually more $ that include the earnings in the total distribution? i.e. did you make 5 $2,000 of which were 100% nondeductible? (And you did in fact transfer $20,000 (plus their earnings) of traditional IRAs to a Roth IRA? - well okay that's two questions)

[John G]

More questions: do you have only a single IRA account with all your IRA assets? Or do you have more than one, and you are only talkings about converting some of your IRA assets.

Lots of folks don't realize that the IRS pools all of your IRA assets into one pile. When you convert, the IRS does not see this as changing a single account but changing part of the entire blended IRA assets. This can get messy, so I suggest that you see a CPA or accountant, you probably need a specialist to get it right. I do not recommend the tax prep mills -- too many mistakes.

[Guest Felicia77]

Del Rae: yes, $10k is my basis. All non-ded, $2k/yr for 5 yrs. There may have been earnings. Let's say, $1k in appreciation so it's worth $11k as of 12/31/99. It's in it's own acct.

Yes, all of my trad. are now Roths.

John: all of my trad. IRAs are converted to Roth. The first $10k acct is from the $2k/yr allowed by the gov't. The 2nd IRA came from a 401k rollover, so no taxes ever were paid from that.

Thanks for your help in this.