roth IRA overcontributions

[Sterling Hiebert]

hello all,

so here is the situation, I am just now learning how to handle my own finances. a few years ago I opened a managed roth IRA but this summer I decided it was time for me to actually learn where my money was going and take responsibility for my own future. I set up a Roth IRA with Fidelity and rolled my existing Roth over. I looked at the old Roth (which offered very limited information since I was not the account manager) and it said that I had made no contributions to the account (despite a monthly contribution). I was unsure why it would show as having had no contributions for that tax year. I assume that when it was set up the manager rolled my contributions into previous tax years to allow additional contributions if necessary (can anyone provide confirmation?). since the info page showed no contributions I decided to max out my contributions through fidelity.

now I am paranoid that I'm going to get dinged come tax season due to an overcontribution. I understand that one way of getting around this is to recharacterize the overage plus earned interest into a traditional IRA for the new tax year (which I am assuming will come with some sort of tax penalty). since I plan on making more in retirement than I do currently, I would like to continue to hold all of my assets in a Roth vs traditional IRA) so here is my idea and some questions about this particular noob situation.

1. why would my old roth account show no contributions even though I was making monthly contributions? the account was through TD Ameritrade if that information helps. 

2. how do I calculate the earned interest when my holdings are split across several assets (is it just the overage times the average account earned interest?) 

3. is there a tax ding for converting these overaged funds over to a traditional IRA

4. now here is where my "bright" idea comes into play. even though this feels quite complicated, is it possible to recharacterize this overage to a traditional IRA and then immediately set up a backdoor roth and then merge the backdoor roth with my existing roth?

5. since I've never done any of these things, I am uncertain if this would incur fees which would probably exceed the tax penalty on a couple hundred dollars worth of overage. if I did go with this strategy, I would likely keep everything in-house with fidelity so if any of you has experience with this particular brokerage that would be a huge plus.