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With college expenses at some of the best schools now exceeding $60,000 per year, education related expenses are fast becoming one of the biggest obstacles many baby boomers face when saving for their own retirement. For many families, planning for a college education goes hand in hand with IRA’s and retirement planning. Below are three ways smart IRA planning can help you pay less for college.

Can you contribute to a Roth IRA if you are already allocating salary deferrals to a Roth 401(k)? We provide the answer and look at the contribution requirements for both Traditional and Roth IRAs.

This week's Slott Report Mailbag looks at converting non-deductible funds to an IRA and the rules for taking a Roth distribution of contributed and converted funds.

Life insurance and Roth IRAs have a lot in common. They are both often used as wealth transfer tools to help facilitate an efficient transfer of assets from one generation to the next, and they are both able to provide a tax-free legacy, just to name a few. Despite their many similarities, however, Roth IRAs and life insurance are very different and the rules that apply to one don’t always apply to the other. In fact, more often than not, that’s the case. Below, we discuss three such examples.

If you own a business and you’re thinking about starting a retirement plan for 2014, you may want to look at a SIMPLE IRA Plan (Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees). We look at the plan's basic tenets and urge interested parties to plan now. The deadline for starting a new SIMPLE IRA plan for this year is right around the corner.

The Slott Report (www.theslottreport.com) is Ed Slott and Company’s digital publication for IRA, retirement, tax, financial planning and personal finance...

In private letter rulings (PLRs) 201430026 and 2014130029, IRS allowed the surviving spouses to roll their inherited IRAs through a trust to their own IRAs. The twist here is that the trust beneficiary was the spouse’s own trust, not a trust established by the decedent. In nearly identical situations, a husband named his wife’s trust as the beneficiary of his IRA. Both husbands died before attaining age 70 ½. Properly titled inherited IRAs were set up for the trust beneficiaries. Each wife was the trustee of her own trust and had no limits on her ability to take distributions

This week's Slott Report Mailbag looks at how many times you should convert funds from the same Roth IRA and if a fee to close an IRA account is considered a distribution for tax purposes. As always, we recommend you work with a competent, educated financial advisor to keep your retirement nest egg safe and secure. You can find one in your area here.1.I'm moving my traditional IRA to another company and will be charged $100 to close the account. Will that $100 be considered a distribution for tax purposes? Can I send a check for $100 to the new company so the full amount is transferred?

The creditor protection rules that apply to retirement accounts are complex and frequently misunderstood. In an effort to correct some of the most frequently misunderstood concepts and provide some clarity in these seemingly murky waters, below we explore 5 Retirement Account Creditor Protection Myths and then give you the real facts behind them.

The financial institution where you have your IRA, what we call your IRA custodian, is allowed to charge fees for maintaining and administering your IRA. If there are any fees associated with your IRA, they must be disclosed to you. The fees are usually listed in the IRA disclosure statement, which is one of the documents you received when you opened your IRA. IRA fees are usually in two broad categories: administrative fees and sales commissions Below we explain how to pay these different types of fees.