Retire Secure!

With New Year’s celebrations behind us, it’s time to look toward what the financial world has in store for us in 2017. Unfortunately, retirement and estate plans may be taking a huge tax hit from the IRS this year. As Jim mentioned in Part I, the “stretch IRA” has been an invaluable tax-management tool for investors and estate planners for decades. Today’s rules allow beneficiaries of inherited IRAs to limit distributions to the minimum, which maintains money in the tax-deferred environment and allows for compound tax-deferred growth - potentially a very lucrative strategy. But in September of 2016, the Senate Finance Committee unanimously voted to kill the stretch IRA. It is very likely that this change will become law this year - and that the new law will require those who inherit an IRA to pay taxes on all but $450,000 of the money within five years. While the strategies in Jim’s new book, The Ultimate Retirement and Estate Plan for Your Million-Dollar IRA (available for free at www.paytaxeslater.com) ca