The Slott Report

Does one of your clients have a special needs child? Are you starting to plan yourself for a special needs child? Jeffrey Levine details 3 tips you should follow when planning for a special needs child.

If you are an IRA owner and are over age 70 ½ this year, you have to take your required minimum distribution (RMD) by December 31, 2013. If you want to give money to charity this year and haven’t yet taken your IRA RMD, you should consider giving your RMD directly to the charity.

Do you have a will? Most people who need one, realize that they need one. Most of those people actually do something about it and put a will in place for their estate. But what is your will really doing for you?

It's that time of year. The leaves are falling. The holidays are coming. And retirement planning quickly turns to year-end conversion questions. To help the financial advisor-client team with your year-end Roth conversion planning, we have assembled a FAQ list below.

If you are married, you can choose between filing your federal income tax return as a joint return or as a separate return. In general, the married-filing separately (MFS) status typically gives you fewer tax benefits than filing jointly. We explain in detail below.

IRS has released the 2014 inflation adjusted numbers for estate and gift taxes. See the table at the link below for the numbers and the paragraphs following for a more detailed explanation.

In this month's Ruling to Remember, we look at Private Letter Ruling 201339002, wherein a Taxpayer we will call Sue claimed that her old financial institution never adequately explained the 60-day rollover rule, costing her the ability to roll an IRA distribution over to a new IRA at a new financial institution.

This week's Slott Report Mailbag gets into the Roth IRA 5-year rules - as well as the once-per-year-rollover-rule and disclaimer planning. These topics showcase the depth of IRA distribution and retirement planning and the intricacies, detail and potential danger involved in this area.

With Veteran's Day quickly approaching, Ed Slott and Company IRA Technical Consultant Jeffrey Levine detailed 3 retirement-related tax breaks members of the United States armed forces can take advantage of before year-end.

When you first open an IRA with a financial institution (custodian), you have to sign the custodian's IRA contract. This IRA contract must contain an IRA agreement and an accompanying disclosure statement. Usually both these documents are contained in one IRA contract, with the disclosure statement attached right behind the IRA agreement.