Children’s RMD when Spouse dies with inherited IRA

Submitted by David Rains on Fri, 2017-10-27 20:36

A spouse is trying to decide whether to roll her deceased husband’s IRA account to her own IRA or keep it as an Inherited IRA. She is under age 59.5. Her husband was 65 and had not begun taking RMD’s.

Her main goal is to allow her children the option of stretching this IRA over their life expectancies. If she keeps the Inherited IRA and unexpectedly dies before her husband would have reached 70.5 will her kids ages be used in computing the their RMD’s?

She plans on rolling the inherited IRA funds to her own IRA just after she turns 59.5 but If she begins taking RMDs from the inherited IRA based on her husband reaching 70.5 and then she dies before rolling the IRA over, will the kids still be able to use their lives for their RMD calculations or will they be required to continue using the same life expectancy that she was using?

To rephrase the question; How are RMD’s calculated for an inherited IRA when the second spouse dies before she is required to take RMD’s and how does that change if she dies after she begins taking RMD’s.

Thank you,



Submitted by Alan - IRA critic on Fri, 2017-10-27 20:54

  • If a SOLE surviving spouse beneficiary passes prior to 12/31 of the year that the deceased spouse would have reached 70.5, the children will still get their life expectancy stretch. However, if the surviving spouse continues to take beneficiary RMDs after that, the children’s stretch will be restricted to the RMD schedule of the surviving spouse except that a 1.0 divisor reduction will replace recalculation of the single life table that the surviving spouse was using before passing. For this reason, it is usually recommended that once the surviving spouse passes 59.5 they roll the inherited IRA over to their own to eliminate the risk of forgetting to do that later on.
  • Finally, in this example if the surviving spouse is more than 11 years younger, she will have to take beneficiary RMDs before reaching 59.5 so if she wanted to eliminate those beneficiary RMDs she would have to roll the IRA over earlier than 59.5. That could create a penalty if she actually needed to take distributions from her then owned IRA prior to 59.5. 

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