Are You (or Have You) Drafted IRA Trusts? You Better Make Sure You Do THIS!

By Kristina Schneider, Practice-Building & Marketing Specialist As you may be aware, the SECURE Act threated to reduce the IRA beneficiary stretchout from life expectancy to only 10 years. However, after passing through the House in late May, it has yet to make its way through the Senate. It’s still unclear if and when it may get passed and now into December, it doesn’t seem likely to pass sometime this year. If you have been and/or are drafting standalone IRA Beneficiary Trusts (or IRA Inheritance Trusts®) for your clients, you may nevertheless have these or other law changes in the…

Will New Legislation Kill Stretchout and the IRA Trust?

By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Over the past couple of years, I have had a lot of colleagues ask me if pending legislation to limit IRA stretchout would then kill the IRA Inheritance Trust®.  For some time, nothing was certain.  Details of proposed legislation were vague and it was not clear exactly how it would affect IRA planning. Finally, in September of last year, under the assumption that a change in the IRA stretch law would bring in $5.5 billion over the next 10…

IRA Trusts: Conduit or Accumulation?

Download Printable Article By Philip J. Kavesh, J.D., LL.M. (Taxation), CFP®, ChFC, California State Bar Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Trust & Probate Law Recently, I’ve seen and heard a great deal of debate regarding the proper way to draft an IRA Trust (or what I call an IRA Inheritance Trust® and is also known as a Standalone IRA Trust and Standalone IRA Beneficiary Trust). The debate centers around whether the individual beneficiaries’ subshare trusts should, as a “default” position, be structured as conduit or accumulation trusts. Before I address this issue, let’s briefly deal with some background matters. First,…