If she has some documentation of what she was told, she would probably have recourse against TD Ameritrade. But if she thought she would need the money, why would she have objected to RMDs? Of course she really would NOT have had beneficiary RMDs if she was sole beneficiary because those do not begin until deceased spouse would have reached 70.5. Therefore, this is a case or erroneous assumptions about RMDs as well as faulty planning. Premature spousal rollovers have been occurring for decades now in error, and the usual result is the spouse is forced into a rigid and risky 72t plan in order to withdraw funds without penalty. Many surviving spouses end up needing more money at some point, the plan is busted and then they owe retroactive penalty and interest back to the first 72t distribution. Such a plan could be intiated here, but 10 years is a long time to adhere to a plan when living costs will be variable. I suppose she could hedge her bets, partition the IRA into separate accounts and use only one of them for the plan. The other could be used for emergencies or even for a second plan down the road. But executing this will require extra care, and she would need to fully understand how such plans work. To answer your question though, there is no way to switch an owned IRA back to a beneficiary IRA without a PLR. PLRs could around 17k including legal costs with no guarantee of success, so I would not go there unless she has evidence in writing of the bad advice.

• Flag as spam
• Log in to Reply