Dear Liz: My sister and I are in the middle of distributing our parents’ estate. The beneficiary of the estate is a trust. Part of the estate consists of a traditional IRA, which will be split between my sister and me. The problem is that because the IRA will be distributed from the trust and is considered a non-spouse distribution, I’m told that we’ll have to pay taxes on the entire distribution. It’s a good chunk of change. I’m almost 60. Is there any way that I can roll the IRA into my own and take minimum distributions? I’d rather not pay the tax all upfront.
Answer: That’s understandable, since it’s typically much better to stretch distributions out as long as possible so that the money can continue to grow (and you can replace one big tax bill with smaller ones as you take distributions).
Unfortunately, the way your parents structured their estate ties your hands, although perhaps not to the extent you’ve been told.
It appears from your question that the IRA either failed to name a beneficiary or named the estate as the beneficiary, said Mark Luscombe, principal federal tax analyst for tax research firm CCH.
“Assuming that is the case, since estates do not have life expectancies, the IRA cannot be distributed over a beneficiary life expectancy as it could have been had an individual been named the IRA beneficiary,” Luscombe said. “Instead, it must be distributed under the terms of the IRA document over a period that cannot exceed five years.”
The exception is if the IRA owner before dying had already reached the age of 701/2 and begun distributions, Luscombe said. In that case, distributions can continue to the estate over the IRA owner’s life expectancy. If the IRA owner was quite elderly when he or she died, this might not give you much time to stretch out the distributions, but it probably would be better than paying all the taxes at once.
Another exception, which doesn’t appear to apply in your case, is if the IRA named the trust as the beneficiary. If that were true, “it is possible that the distributions could be based on the life expectancy of the oldest trust beneficiary,” Luscombe noted.
As you can see, this is a complicated area of estate planning and taxation. Getting good advice about how to name beneficiaries for your accounts can save your heirs a lot of money.
I have been the trustee of my parents trust for the past two years. Part of their estate (and actually about 50% of it) was an IRA. The trust was the beneficiary of the Ira. Through my attorney, we determined that we could spread the distributions over the life expectancy of the oldest beneficiary of the trust (as inthe second to ladt paragraph above) There was even a ruling that provided legal precedence, so it can be done, but it often takes time to convince the Ira administrator (in our case Schwab). Re check the Ira beneficiary docs and discuss with your attorney.
Thanks for sharing your experience, Susan. Any time you’re dealing with an inherited IRA, you shouldn’t assume the administrator is any kind of authority…this is a complicated area.