Stretching a retirement account

My dad passed away at 81 years in July of 2007, leaving a multitude of retirement type accounts. One is a small( $27,000 ) profit sharing account of which my mom (80 years) is the beneficiary. She has been told to roll the money over to a taditional IRA. Her inclination would be to list her 3 children as beneficiaries of her IRA. If I do not need my share of the money, would there be any benefit to my asking her to list my 3 children as beneficiaries instead of me? Could they ultimately distribute based on their life expectancy?



Each of child would be able to [url=http://www.retirementdictionary.com/Stretch-IRA.htm%5Dstretch%5B/url%5Dtheir share over his/her life expectancy, providing the assets are segregated into separate accounts by December 31 of the year following the year of death.
If separate accounting does not occur by that deadline, they would be required to stretch distributions over the oldest beneficiary’s life expectancy.



They could do that if separate accounts were created for each beneficiary by 12/31 of the year following your mother’s death.



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