RMDs

If a person, age 80 dies, and leaves their traditional IRA to their spouse as a 100% primary beneficiary, and the decedent hadn’t taken out their RMD for 2018, must the surviving spouse distribute the RMD to themselves prior to transferring the IRA to their own IRA?



  • No. As long as the surviving spouse elects ownership and the IRA is then directly transferred (non reportable) to the surviving spouse’s own IRA account, there is no RMD issued since there is no distribution and no 1099R. The surviving spouse can then complete the year of death RMD from their own IRA account, preferably in the year of death. But if it doesn’t get done until the following year, the IRS will waive the penalty with a properly filed Form 5329 requesting a waiver per “reasonable cause”.
  • If a custodian hassles a surviving spouse about this, it may be easier to simply tell the custodian that the year of death RMD had been satisfied from another IRA held elsewhere, which is perfectly proper under the RMD aggregation rules. 

Just to be certain, there’s no RMD required for the decedent in the year of his death even though there was a 12/31/17 balance and he was over 70 1/2?

The decedent’s 2018 RMD *is* required to be completed by the spouse, but it does not have to be done prior to transferring ownership of the IRA to the spouse by trustee-to-trustee transfer or by retitling.

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