Taxpayers have a little more than a month to take advantage of the special 2010 opportunities for saving taxes with Roth Individual Retirement Accounts.

That’s because 2010 delivers special benefits to people who convert their IRAs into Roth IRAs.

Starting in 2010, all taxpayers, regardless of their income level, are allowed to move money from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. Before 2010, only people earning less than $100,000 could do that. Beware, the benefit expires at the end of this year, but many believe it will be extended along with a large portion of Bush tax cuts.

But another key benefit is now starting to make the Roth conversion seem even more attractive: That’s the one-time-only offer, good in 2010, to convert from a traditional IRA to a Roth and then spread the resulting tax burden over 2011 and 2012. As many Washington insiders expect income tax rates to remain the same for the next year or so, converts can take advantage by locking in relatively low tax rates on conversions and still defer the tax burden for a year or two.

Here are some year-end tax tips for saving taxes with a Roth IRA

* Know your tax rate. The key to making a smart decision about whether to convert to a Roth is knowing what your tax rate is now, and having a good guess about what your tax rate will be in the future. Conversions work best for people who expect their tax rates to be higher in retirement than they are right now. That could happen if Washington decided to raise income tax rates over the next few years, or if your income is so high (and you have so much money in tax-deferred retirement accounts) that you actually expect your retirement rate to go up.

* Break it up. Don’t convert all of your IRA at once, advises Karen Goodfriend, a Los Altos, California, CPA and personal financial advisor. She suggests that taxpayers phase in their Roth conversions over several years, converting only as much as they can in any given year without pushing themselves into a higher tax rate.

* Don’t put it all in the same place. If you have the ability to deal with details and uncertainty, consider splitting your Roth money into several accounts and putting a different asset class in each account, says James Lange, publisher of the Roth Ira Advisor Website, that way you could undo the conversions of those Roths that actually drop in value between now and next October, and keep the Roths that have started earning you money right away.

* Think of your kids. There are a couple of great advantages to having a good-sized Roth IRA when you retire. The first is that having access to tax-free withdrawals could have the effect of lowering your income tax rate across the board, because it would lower the amount you’d have to withdraw from a tax-deferred account.

A second advantage? Inherited Roth IRAs are awesome, says Lange. People who bequeath Roth IRAs to their kids are delivering years and years of tax-free growth and withdrawals to the next generation.

* Do the math. Web-based calculators designed to tell you whether you should convert to a Roth aren’t ideal; they don’t include all of the variables that might define your unique situation. But they’re not bad for a ballpark estimate, either.
* Don’t just defer the taxes, defer the tax decision. If you convert to a Roth IRA in 2010, the IRS default setting would have you spread the resulting taxable income between 2011 and 2012. But you don’t have to do that. You can declare the entire conversion amount in 2010 and pay taxes on it with your 2010 tax return. That means you have until April 15, 2011, to decide whether you want to pay now, or later. If you’ve had a really bad year this year, and your tax rate is really low, you might want to take the income right away.