This week's Slott Report Mailbag looks at utilizing the pro-rata rule to calculate tax consequences for your Roth IRA conversion plus what life expectancy table an IRA inheritor should use to calculate their RMDs (required minimum distributions) moving forward. 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.
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.
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 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.
This week's Slott Report Mailbag looks at IRA trust beneficiary maneuvers and how to disclaim yourself as an IRA beneficiary. Click to read this week's Q&A with our IRA Technical Expert.
If you are married and participate in your employer's ERISA covered retirement plan, such as a 401(k) or pension plan, your spouse must generally be the beneficiary of that company plan. Even if you didn’t name your spouse as the beneficiary, possibly because you weren’t married at the time you started working there, your spouse is usually automatically treated as the beneficiary of your company retirement plan - but they do not HAVE to be.
This week's Slott Report Mailbag looks at combining IRA monies into one big IRA, how 401(k)s affect calculating yearly IRA distributions and whether leaving equal IRA shares to your three children is possible. Click to read this week's Q&A with our IRA Technical Expert.
When you retire or switch jobs, you will be entitled to receive the funds from your company retirement plan. At that point you will be notified of your options on what to do with that money. The basic options you have are to receive the funds personally or do a direct rollover (sometimes called a direct transfer) of the funds to an IRA. If you want to do a rollover to your IRA, there are problems if you choose to have the money distributed to you personally. We detail these problems below.
This week's Slott Report Mailbag includes two great questions, including one that piggybacks off an answer in last week's mailbag referencing RMDs (required minimum distributions) at age 70 1/2 and still working. Click to read this week's Q&A with our IRA Technical Expert.
A recent IRS private letter ruling (PLR) showcased what can happen when a company retirement plan is terminated, and a common mistake that can occur when paying out those funds to employees or ex-employees. When a company retirement plan such as a 401(k) plan is terminated, the company has to go through a lot of formal steps to terminate it beyond simply deciding to discontinue the plan. These steps as well as what you can do to take action are detailed below.
