Successor Beneficiary
A client age 63 is a Successor Beneficiary of an inherited stretch IRA (decedent age 86). What are his options? If this stretch IRA can be rolled over into a newly opened account (trustee to trustee), how should the account be titled to maintain the “stretch” status? In addition, can a stretch IRA be rolled into an existing IRA (traditional) and maintain its “stretch” status?
Permalink Submitted by mk foss on Mon, 2008-11-24 22:52
If he is the successor beneficiary of an inherited account, he can only take the distributions over the remaining period that the first beneficiary did not use. The age of the primary beneficiary at death is not relevent, you need to know how old that person was in the year after the original account owner died. Then you’d subtract from the single life table 1.0 for every year that elapsed since that time.
This IRA cannot be combined or rolled over to any other IRA unless the person was the successor beneficiary to more than one IRA having the same original owner and beneficiary.
You should be able to transfer the inherited account to a new custodian. I’m not sure how IRS would like to have this titled. I’d guess something like:
Jimmy Smith successor to John Jones beneficiary of Mary Jones IRA.