In Private Letter Ruling (PLR) 201425023, released by IRS on June 20, 2014, the IRS ruled that a surviving spouse who received IRA proceeds through a trust, which was the beneficiary of her deceased husband’s IRA, could not roll over the IRA funds she received because more than 60 days had passed since she received the funds. The IRS denied her request for more time to do the rollover because she didn’t provide sufficient proof of financial institution error. More importantly, the PLR is a good example of what not to do when a trust is the beneficiary of an IRA.
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 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.
The 60-day IRA rollover rule is well documented, but there's another special rule (the 65-day rule) for IRA trust beneficiaries and trustees. Ed Slott IRA Technical Expert Jeffrey Levine takes you through the nuts and bolts of the rule in the IRAtv video below.
An interesting question came up recently that went something like this… Mom died with two IRAs. She had two children, who we will call Deborah and Edward. The beneficiary of one of her IRAs was her children, 50% each. The beneficiary of the other IRA was a trust for the benefit of her children. Each child was a 50% beneficiary of the trust. Click to read more about this complicated scenario.
Ed Slott, America's IRA Expert, details the importance of having a current beneficiary form and describes how missing this key point can be costly for your intended retirement account beneficiaries. This IRAtv video goes through naming beneficiaries, using trusts as beneficiaries and lessons to learn to avoid costly mistakes and keep retirement plans updated.
We have written several times about the various aspects of naming a trust as beneficiary of an IRA. We have indicated when it would be appropriate to do so, as well as defined the complexities involved with such an undertaking.
The number one problem I see when a trust is named as an IRA beneficiary is that at some point, either during the account owner's lifetime or when the trust inherits the IRA, the IRA gets transferred into the trust. An IRA is an Individual Retirement Arrangement and it must be owned by an individual. The transfer into the trust is a taxable event and cannot be undone, but it can be avoided.
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