Somewhere in the tax code there is a rule that says money you convert to a Roth IRA has to sit there for five years before you can touch it without a penalty.
Most people read that and think: annoying. A waiting period. A hurdle.
A smaller group of people read that and think: wait. Five years is a known, fixed, predictable number. What if I just kept starting the clock over and over?
That is the Roth conversion ladder. It is not a loophole, it is not aggressive, and it is not a trick. It is a scheduling exercise that turns a waiting rule into a pipeline.
And it solves one of the genuinely hard problems in personal finance: you have money locked in retirement accounts, you want to stop working before 59 and a half, and the government has attached a 10 percent penalty to that plan.
Here is how the ladder works, who it is for, and the three mistakes that break it.