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As the founder and lead retirement planner at Rich Life Advisors, Beau Henderson’s advisory practice focuses almost exclusively on serving investors who are within a 10-year window of retirement.

Can you explain how a special-needs trust works? We have an adult child on disability and have been told we can set up a special-needs trust for her. We have an individual retirement account that we could assign to the trust, but we aren’t sure what the tax requirements are or if there has to be a required minimum distribution.

When it was passed into law at the very end of 2019, the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act moved the age for required minimum distributions (RMDs) from 70.5 to 72.

The issue involves the 10-year rule that most non-spouse designated beneficiaries (like adult children or grandchildren, and certain qualifying trusts) who inherit individual retirement accounts will be subject to under the SECURE Act. It was expected that the 10-year rule would work the same way as the 5-year rule: There wouldn’t be annual required minimum distributions, but the entire inherited IRA account balance would have to be withdrawn by the end of the 10-year term.

The real estate market is hot. It is a seller’s market in much of the country and buyers face challenges. They may need to move quickly or come up with cash fast to make a better offer. They may also need to show adequate resources to get financing. Realtors and mortgage brokers eager to close a deal may encourage buyers to tap any available resource to secure a dream property.

Searching for "retirement planning rules" produces 221 million results on Google. Yes, there's a lot of advice out there. But even the most common tips can put you on the wrong path, leading to retirement planning mistakes. Here are some of the leading legends, and why they should be taken with a large helping of salt:

Taxes don’t go away when you retire. In fact, for many of you reading this post, taxes may be even more onerous in the future once you are retired. Ignoring the ticking time bomb of taxes in retirement could dramatically lower your standard of living in retirement.

This is my third update on the confusion about the 10-year rule on required minimum distributions under the SECURE Act, and it won’t be the last. Last Thursday, the IRS acknowledged that IRS Publication 590-B, which contains the tax rules for withdrawing funds from IRAs, is being revised, likely to fix the error I wrote about twice before here, in “IRS: SECURE Act’s 10-year RMD rule is not w

Congress has come up with what some are calling SECURE 2.0, or Son of SECURE — a bill entitled Securing a Stronger Retirement Act that includes many positive changes to encourage retirement savings. However, one seemingly pointless proposal in the legislation would raise the required minimum distribution age from 72 to 75 over 10 years. Most advisers might argue that consumers will probably love this.

Far and away, the most frequent questions that pop into the HerMoney Mailbag are on the topic of retirement: Planning for retirement. Managing our money in retirement. How much to save for retirement, and where to save for retirement… and it’s that last one that we’re diving into this week. Specifically, we’re tackling all things IRAs — individual retirement accounts — because there is SO much there. There are traditional IRAs. There are Roth IRAs. There are IRA conversions. There are IRA misconceptions that need to be dispelled.