If your retirement accounts are $200,000 or more in total, your heirs may be at risk of losing more than half of the balance to taxes!
Money you have intended for your loved ones could go to a creditor, a divorcing spouse, a lawsuit, the state, or even a bankruptcy creditor. The money in those retirement accounts can also be stretched out over your children’s lifetimes often amounting to millions of dollars. To calculate your child’s expected stretch out of your IRA, 401(k), defined benefit plan, or other qualified retirement account, see my calculator at Inherited IRA Calculator.
Protecting Your Children’s IRA Inheritance is designed to guide you through a unique and innovative legal solution to this problem. With a Retirement Protector Trust, you can create a barrier between creditors and your child who will inherit your retirement accounts. This is important not only to protect a child from a divorcing spouse, lawsuit or a bankruptcy, but also from the state requiring a spend down of the asset in order for a special needs person to gain access to critical government programs such as SSI and Medicaid. In addition to the creditor protection this unique trust offers, by using a Trustee (which could even be your child), you can stretch the account through the trust keeping the IRA, 401K or other retirement account in a tax deferred environment longer. The compounding effect of tax-deferral is so powerful. To calculate your own projections, use my calculator at Inherited IRA Calculator.
“Estate planning for retirement accounts is a complex area of the law. This book takes the hard-to-understand and transforms it into bite-sized pieces of valuable and usable information that will help you protect your hard-earned retirement accounts for the next generation. It’s a great and timely read. I highly recommend it.”
David M. Frees, III, J.D.
-Partner of Unruh, Turner, Burke & Frees