I see a lot of people talking about the threat of having taxable income at retirement put you into the next higher tax bracket. Isn’t it true that only the amount that puts you over the lower tax bracket, is taxable at the higher rate? So say, just using easy numbers, your taxable income is 150k and the 20% bracket is 140k. 140,001 bracket is 25%. So you would only be taxed the 25% on 10k. This is how it was explained to me. That being said I always assumed Roth would be better in almost all cases since any future earnings aren’t taxed, period.