Whether you won or lost on Super Bowl Sunday, your gambling wager has tax and IRA planning consequences. Super Bowl XLVII was held in New Orleans this past Sunday. After San Francisco played a “lights out” second half after the lights went out, the Baltimore Ravens held on to win the game 34–31. Although Baltimore won the game and got to raise the coveted Vince Lombardi trophy, it wasn't the only winner this past weekend. In fact, millions of Americans became winners themselves as a result of legal and illegal gambling.
As we gather our information to prepare our federal income tax return for 2012, don't forget about that Roth IRA conversion you did all of the way back in 2010. A conversion you did from a company plan or IRA to a Roth IRA in 2010 will likely need to be reported on your 2010 tax return.
If you took a withdrawal from any IRA or employer plan last year, you will get a copy of IRS Form 1099-R, Distributions From Pensions, Annuities, Retirement or Profit-Sharing Plans, IRAs, Insurance Contracts, etc. very soon. The IRA custodian or employer plan was required to send you a copy of Form 1099-R by January 31, 2013 for any 2012 retirement plan distributions you took.
This week's Slott Report Mailbag talks about the act of "moving money" from one retirement account (yours or an inherited account) to another. There are many tax and penalty pitfalls at play, and we dissect the right way to go through these procedures in the question-and-answer below.
A Washington, D.C. district court handed down a ruling that affects all of us as the 2012 tax season gets underway. The court ruled in Loving et al vs. IRS that the Internal Revenue Service did NOT have the authority to regulate persons who prepare or help prepare tax returns for a fee. They couldn't order these individuals to pass a test or maintain a minimum required level of competency.
The retirement plan rules are constantly changing. They can be complex. Often, taxpayers are looking for good, free sources of information. While Internet searches can be helpful, caution should be used because there is no guarantee that the information you have found is timely or accurate. So where can you get accurate information on retirement plans? We explain below.
The 2012 tax law changes, passed by Congress after the fact in 2013, have necessitated some changes in forms used to file your 2012 taxes. IRS has just updated Form 8606, Nondeductible IRAs. This latest version is dated January 15, 2013.
We have covered the new tax law (the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012) from both a retirement planning and tax planning standpoint since it was signed into law by President Barack Obama on January 2, 2013. We wrote a quick analysis of the law complete with a 5-plus-minute video on 5 key planning points. We followed with a detailed look at qualified charitable distributions (a topic we get frequent questions about), and how they were affected by the new law.
Now that 2012 has passed and you are starting to think about gathering the information to prepare your 2012 tax return, you may have noticed that you forgot to take your IRA required minimum distribution (RMD) for 2012.
If you wanted to have a 2012 Roth IRA conversion, the conversion funds had to leave your IRA account by December 31, 2012. They don’t have to be in the Roth IRA in 2012, they just need to be out of the IRA in 2012. You can take a distribution payable to yourself in November or December 2012 and within 60 days, sometime in January or February, roll over the funds to a Roth IRA. You can even take the funds from an IRA at financial institution A and roll them over to a Roth IRA at financial institution B.
