Roth Conversion Software & Roth IRA Tool for Advisors

RetirementAdvisorPro is planning software built for financial advisors. Its Roth tool answers the question a spreadsheet cannot: what does moving money from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA cost the client over a lifetime, and what does it save?

Our Roth tool:

• Takes the move you want to test: which accounts, how much, and when it starts.
• Runs the client’s whole retirement plan with the move and without it.
• Shows lifetime taxes, premium surcharges, and required minimum distributions on both paths.
• Shows how much Social Security the client keeps on both paths.
• Compares every window from one to fourteen years and marks the cheapest.
• Puts the before-and-after on one page you can show the client, and on a slide in the client presentation.

The numbers are big. In one household we modeled, a $2,000,000 pre-tax 401(k) cost the surviving husband or wife $795,611 in lifetime taxes and surcharges. Moving $80,000 annually to a Roth from age 65 to 72 cut that to $401,176. The full case is in how large 401(k) balances trigger retirement taxes.

A Roth conversion moves money out of a pre-tax account. The money moved is taxed as income that year. Since 2018 it cannot be undone, so the amount has to be right the first time. Five things decide whether it is.

• Tax brackets. In 2026 a married couple stays in the 22% bracket up to $211,400 of taxable income and the 24% bracket up to $403,550. Go past a line and the extra dollars are taxed at the next rate.
• Premium surcharges. The money moved counts as income for the surcharge. In 2026 the surcharge starts at $218,000 for a couple and $109,000 for a single filer. It is charged two years later, to both people.
• Required minimum distributions. The first RMD comes due at age 73, or age 75 for anyone born in 1960 or later. Money moved to a Roth before then never becomes a forced withdrawal.
• Social Security taxes. Up to 85% of the benefit becomes taxable once income passes $25,000 for a single filer or $32,000 for a couple. Those limits were set in 1983 and have never moved.
• The senior deduction. From 2025 through 2028, each person 65 or older gets an extra $6,000 deduction. It shrinks once a couple’s income passes $150,000. A $100,000 conversion can add $112,000 of taxable income once the lost deduction is counted.

The two limits that matter most, the brackets and the surcharge tiers, do not line up. Filling the 24% bracket crosses four surcharge tiers.

Timing makes it harder. The surcharge is set from the return filed two years earlier. A move in 2026 raises the 2028 premium, long after the recommendation was made.

Free calculators are a fair first screen. They take an account value, today’s rate, and a guess at a future rate, and stop there. They do not see the two-year lookback, the survivor filing single on roughly half the limits, or the required distribution growing every year. A spreadsheet that handles all of that is a project to maintain, not a tool to run in a client meeting.

Whether you evaluate RetirementAdvisorPro or any other conversion planner, hold it to one standard: it should model the whole household over the whole retirement, with a tax projection for every year, not a single-year rate comparison.

The Roth tab lives inside the client’s retirement plan. It already knows the income, the accounts, the Social Security, and the state. Three steps:

The fastest way to judge any conversion calculator is to run one of your own clients through it and look at the tax impact of each window. That is what the trial is for.

The surcharge. It is taken out of the Social Security payment, so crossing a tier shrinks the deposit the client sees. In one modeled single filer, the same $1,575,798 of Social Security paid out $193,305 more on the Roth path, and all of the difference was surcharge. The year-by-year math is in what moving to a Roth changes about Social Security.

The survivor. When a husband or wife dies, the survivor files single on roughly half the brackets and half the surcharge tiers, while the inherited IRA and its required distributions stay the same size.

Software that stops at the joint return has skipped the period when the client is most exposed. RetirementAdvisorPro runs the survivor period in the same plan, with MAGI management and the income limits built in.

RetirementAdvisorPro is $139 per month per user. Every account starts with a 7-day free trial with full access. Build one real client, run the numbers, and decide. If one household signs because of the before-and-after page, the software has paid for itself.

Prefer to see it on a real case first? Book a live demo below and we will model one of your households on the call: the schedule, the rate it lands in, the surcharge it triggers, and the survivor period.

Then keep exploring the rules behind every recommendation.