For anyone who has ever had a 401(k), 403(b), or a deferred compensation (457) retirement plan, (which is a high percentage of you, I assume) – there’s a major difference to an IRA that you might find interesting and/or useful. The difference is in the legal requirements for beneficiary designation.
ERISA
The Employee Retirement Income Security Act [...]
Posts under ‘IRA’
Your IRA and Your Spouse – Or Maybe Not
Real Estate Investing in Your IRA
From time to time this question comes up: why can’t I use my IRA account to purchase a retirement home? After all, for many folks, the IRA represents a pretty large account, possibly even enough to purchase a retirement home outright – so why not?
No Personal Use
This is a thorny question, because there are lots [...]
IRAs Do Not Pass Through Your Will
Here’s a little fact that you may not realize: when you assign a beneficiary for your IRA account, you are effectively bypassing any outside action against that account – assuming that the beneficiary assigned is appropriate.
For most assets that you own, when you pass away, your last will and testament determines who will receive the [...]
Choosing a Beneficiary for Your IRA
One of the very important tenets of estate planning is to ensure that you’ve made an appropriate choice, or set of choices, for beneficiary(s) of your IRA account(s). The title of this article could be a bit misleading – the point of this article is to list some of the consequences of various choices for [...]
Eligible Rollover Distributions (ERDs)
So what funds can be rolled over from your retirement plan into another retirement plan or IRA? Interestingly, the IRS doesn’t specifically tell you what can be rolled over – but rather, what can not be rolled over.
Let’s look at the definition from the IRS…
Definition
Only Eligible Rollover Distributions, or ERDs, can be rolled over, according [...]
What Hath Congress Roth?
… or better yet, what will they Roth in the future? You’re right, terrible attempt at a pun.
In case you aren’t a retirement and financial planning geek like myself, there has been a proposal put forth by the current administration to require all employers to automatically enroll employees in a retirement plan. I find it [...]
Double, Double, Toil and Trouble
Avoiding Double Taxation on an Inherited IRA
Did you know that if you don’t pay close attention, you could be paying tax a second time on an inherited IRA – if the original owner’s estate paid estate tax. You won’t find much (if anything) about this at the IRS’ website… not really sure why, but nonetheless, [...]
Roth Conversion – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
It is expected that in 2010 there will be more Roth IRA conversions than in any year in the past – maybe all years added together. With all this converting and cavorting going on around IRAs and Roth IRAs, there are bound to be some problems arise.
One particular type of problem that could arise would [...]
Roth Conversion Timing Where After-Tax Contributions Are Involved
Yet another point that you need to keep in mind as you plan your Roth IRA conversion strategy is the timing of the activities. This is especially true when you have after-tax contributions to your IRAs in addition to the growth on those contributions and the typical deductible contributions. As you’ll see below, in some [...]
Things to Consider as You Set Up a SOSEPP
So, you’ve decided that you’d like to begin taking distributions from your IRA funds – and you’re under age 59½, so you need to structure your distributions as a Series of Substantially Equal Periodic Payments (SOSEPP). (For more background information on the SOSEPP, see this article.) It is important to do this right, because once [...]
