Ira Trusts: What's All The Hype About

By: Perry Fields
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:17:27
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A recent new development in estate planning is helping thousands of affluent people across the country with IRAs over 100,000 transcend estate tax and income tax. It keeps your beneficiaries from blowing all of the money you’ve worked so hard for.

Its gives YOU the control over the conditions which must exist before your beneficiary can access the funds (other than the mandatory IRA distributions).

It gives YOU control of your money long after the time you pass away.

It keeps your assets away from the spouse of the beneficiary you never liked or just keeps it out of the wrong hands.

It’s called an IRA Inheritance Trust, which only a very elite group of estate planning lawyers can do and they are few and far between. But armed with the ‘know how’ it can literally protect your money from your worst nightmares and insure that the assets we both know you worked so hard your whole life for are protected and even multiplied for future generations!

Warning: If you have IRAs in excess of $100,000(including any amounts you may rollover from a 401k or other employer plan),thanks to new tax laws, they may eventually be worth millions to your loved ones OR may be seriously exposed by your current estate plan!

Your Living Trust or Will more than likely will NOT properly protect your IRAs.

Now there is another thing I want to tell you about, and this is a little unique, that is we actually care about our clients’ financial well-being beyond just doing a will or a trust.

Most of us seniors, I have found, have even more trust in some financial areas that affect them immediately today than in planning their estates! If you want to avoid probate (a costly and time consuming legal process), you set up a Living Trust. If you want to maximize your IRA, protect it and use this tax stretch-out for your beneficiaries it can provide, you must PLAN NOW!

You may say that your IRA is NOT you biggest asset…One of the secrets I am going to help you discover is because of new income tax rules, your IRAs, when inherited, may, in fact, wind up being the LARGEST ASSET YOUR LOVED ONES RECEIVE FROM YOU!

But guess what? Your IRAs, while potentially being the largest assets you leave your loved ones, can also face Triple Taxation! AND you also have a potential estate tax up to 48%!

The bottom line: Do you want to maximize your IRA so that it is potentially worth millions to your family in the future (left and distributed in your exact wishes to charity and family) OR will you take the risk and leave it unprotected and ready for the government to eat chunks out of it?

If you plan properly today, you can pass more wealth down to several generations of beneficiaries. Let’s look at this real life example (one that we see on a very regular basis).

A lot of people tell me that their kids ARE responsible. They say,

“I know who my beneficiaries are and they will make the right choices.” First of all most people don’t know the rules regarding taxation on IRAs.

This is a true story:

Mom dies. Daughter finds out she’s the beneficiary of Mom’s IRA. Daughter goes in and cashes it out. She takes the check and the moment she negotiates that check, she has to pay all the taxes! She cannot rollback that tax.

When YOU take that money out of your IRA, you are not taxed on it if you replace it within 60 days, but your beneficiaries don’t have that same rule. So, if they take it out, even for a day, they can’t reverse that and put in back in.

Now, some beneficiaries do it this way. She calls a custodian (the bank, mutual fund, or trust company that actually holds your IRA assets. She says, “What do I do?” They say, “Send us the death certificate,” which she does and they send her a check. She gets a check for several hundred thousand. She banks it and what do you think she does for the rest of the year? Spend it. She sees her accountant the next year and the accountant says, “you’ve got over $100,000 of tax due here.” And guess what she says? “I don’t have the money.”

And here is another problem that happens all the time!

And sometimes your non-spouse beneficiaries, which it’s pretty safe to say that most of you have them or will have them, inherit your 401K. They have a different set of stretch-out rules. (Stretch out means....) That plan overrides the normal IRAs stretch out rules.

Some of your kids or beneficiaries might think, “I’ll just take that 401k or Mom’s IRA and roll it over into our own IRA tax free.” Uh-huh.. How many people can do a tax free rollover? You and your spouse. A non-spouse beneficiary can’t do that.

HERE’S THE REAL CLINKER: If an individual inherits your IRA directly, they usually take it out a lot quicker than they should for tax reasons. If you name an individual as a beneficiary, all kinds of problems can occur… And there are still more problems that I’ll be giving you the opportunity to find out about..

You can save huge amounts of money on taxes and create huge amounts of money with the IRA you have right now (whether it’s big or small).

Some ask why they need a separate trust? You may have already have a Living Trust. IRA Trust provisions often contradict those in a Living Trust. Even if you had special language in your Living Trust, you will lose that stretch-out benefit and will be prematurely taxed!

If you want to:

Assure your beneficiaries take advantage of the maximum income tax “stretch-out” and allow your IRA to compound income tax free for generations!

Protect your loved ones from losing your IRA to a divorce, lawsuit, creditors or government claims!

Pass your IRA from your children to grandchildren-estate tax-free!

..or Prevent your beneficiaries with poor money management skills from blowing it all!

Does this IRA Trust seem to good to be true? It’s not. The IRS has approved it, but obviously it can only be drafted and executed by IRA Trust Trained estate planning lawyer.

Article source: Expert Articles