5/26/2015 – How to Protect your IRA (CBS MoneyWatch)

Failure to name a person as a beneficiary means the IRA assets pass through your estate and that’ll cost your heirs. That’s because if you hadn’t already started taking distributions by the time of your death, the IRA assets must be distributed to your estate’s heirs within five years of death. Or if you had started, distributions must be paid out to the heirs over what would have been your remaining life expectancy. If instead you name a person, or multiple people as the beneficiaries of your IRA, they are permitted to “stretch out” the tax-deferred assets over their own lives and this can reduce the taxes paid each year.

Read the full article on CBS MoneyWatch.