"Can I still make an IRA contribution?
We get this question a lot at this time of year. A client has his tax return on extension, the return is being prepared now, can the client still make an IRA contribution? Click to find out.
Retirement planning is complicated. It's a personal and situational endeavor with plenty of possible pitfalls in the way of success. This week's Slott Report Mailbag illustrates several various situations in which the individual sought help from either publications or professionals and is still left confused. Click to read this week's Q&A with our IRA Technical Consultant.
We get this question a lot. I have income from _________(fill in the blank). Can I make an IRA contribution? Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes it is no. Click to read about the different scenarios.
There are three life expectancy tables used by IRA and employer plan account owners and beneficiaries. These tables were last updated by IRS for optional use in 2002 and were mandatory in 2003. You cannot choose which table you would like to use. Each one must be used in certain situations. Click to learn more about each table.
You name a trust as the beneficiary of your IRA. How many beneficiaries are there of the IRA? One. You name a trust as the beneficiary of your IRA. The trust beneficiaries are your six children. How many beneficiaries are there of the IRA? One – the trust. That’s right. There is only one beneficiary. The children do not get to split the IRA. They do not get to use their own life expectancies, they all have to use the age of the oldest trust beneficiary. They do not get to choose whether to take stretch distributions or take their entire share in one lump sum. They are not the beneficiaries – the trust is the beneficiary.
There are several ways you can end up with a missed required distribution and a pile of penalties and tax-time confusion. We detail each of them below.
We end Roth Conversion Week with a list you never want to be on. Roth conversions are powerful, tax-free retirement vehicles if handled correctly, but if a mistake is made, you may owe a good portion of your hard-earned savings to taxes and penalties. Here's a list of the Top 10 Roth IRA (and conversion) mistakes you must avoid.
A taxpayer we will call "Rebecca" represented that she received a distribution from her IRA on December 4, 2009. It was always her intent to rollover that distribution back into the IRA by the 60-day rollover deadline. She was informed in writing by her financial institution that the redeposit deadline was February 4, 2010 (a date which was actually after the deadline). She followed that procedure and gave her financial advisor a check for the entire rollover amount for redeposit on the specified deadline date (February 4, 2010). Unfortunately, Rebecca's rollover actually happened on day 62.
There are three categories of beneficiaries that might want to stretch distributions from their inherited IRAs. A beneficiary's options will depend on which category they find themselves in. We detail these 3 categories below.
IRS has announced that they are going to go along with the Tax Court decision in the Bobrow case, but they won’t do so until at least January 1, 2015. What's this mean? We detail this ruling below.
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