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The IRS limits how much you can contribute to an IRA each year, yet some IRA holders don't know about the IRA limits. What happened to a married couple when they exceeded them and failed to rectify the error?

Is your spouse really your spouse (for retirement plan purposes)? We go through several court cases that illustrate how things may not seem as they appear when it comes to your "wives" and retirement plan beneficiaries.

On Monday, February 2, 2015, President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2016 Budget was unveiled to the American public, along with the Department of Treasury’s Greenbook, which provides further explanation and details of the proposals in the President’s budget. In truth, the President’s budget is really more of a “wish-list” than anything else, but here's a good indication of where the administration is headed when it comes to retirement planning.

For anyone who did a Roth IRA conversion in 2010, you have now fulfilled the 5-year waiting period for taking penalty-free distributions from your 2010 Roth conversion. You have also passed one test for taking a qualified distribution. Here's what else you need to know about the Roth IRA 5-year clock.

In this week's Slott Report Mailbag we answer questions on (dreaded) excess IRA contributions and the penalties involved as well as whether an individual can start taking RMDs (required minimum distributions) only to start working again and halt taking them.

If you’re one of the millions of Americans that will have some type of money riding on this weekend’s big game, your gambling wager could have both tax and IRA planning consequences. We break down what happens if you win or lose plus a prediction for Super Bowl XLIX.

Soon, you’ll be getting a copy of your 2014 IRS Form 1099-R if you took an IRA distribution last year. You will be sent a copy by Monday February 2, 2015. How do you decode your early IRA distributions on this form?

IRS has updated several retirement-related publications. They are now available on the IRS website, www.irs.gov under Forms and Pubs. They will all say that they are updated for 2014 so you can use them in preparing your 2014 federal income tax return. However, they also will have the current contribution limits and other necessary information for this year.

Today, federal estate tax has become a non-issue for all but the wealthiest of American families. As has been the case since the early 1980s, spouses can generally leave an unlimited amount of assets to one another without such a transfer being subject to estate tax. Most transfers to someone other than a spouse also avoid estate tax under current law. But will it stay that way?

When we think of retirement plan rollovers, we usually think about moving money between IRAs, or moving money from a company retirement plan to an IRA on a tax-free basis. For example, if you properly roll over money within 60 days from your IRA to another IRA or from your Roth IRA to another Roth IRA, the rollover is tax-free. Or maybe you retired and rolled over your 401(k) funds to your IRA. That rollover is also tax-free. But there is one type of rollover that is taxable.