Category: IRA
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Identify Year of IRA Contributions
April 15th is right around the corner and many of you will be making your 2007 IRA contributions right now, that’s great news. Putting money away into a Roth or Traditional IRA is one of the best ways you can save for your retirement, so kudos to you for doing it. Many brokerages and mutual…
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Withdrawing IRA Funds Without Penalty: First Home Purchase
As we mentioned last Friday, there are two positive ways you can withdraw funds from an IRA without the 10% penalty. The first is for eligible educational expenses, the second, which we will discuss now, is for the purchase of your first home. The government has always been a friend of the prospective homeowner (private…
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Withdrawing IRA Funds Without Penalty: For Education
There are two positive ways you can withdraw funds from an IRA without penalty, the first is for the purchase of your first home and the second one, which we will discuss right now, is for qualified education related expenses. The rules regarding penalty-free withdrawals for education are actually quite simple: The student has to…
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Tax Inefficient Mutual Funds are Good in IRAs
Some mutual funds are very tax efficient. They realize very little in the way of realized capital gains, they pay out very little in dividends, and they have protocols in place to reduce how much buying and selling occurs so those events don’t happen. Some mutual funds, on the other hand, are not very tax…
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Fidelity, Vanguard Easily Manage Required Minimum Distributions
After writing the article on required minimum distributions, I checked with some popular retirement brokerages and saw that many of them handle required minimum distributions quite gracefully. At Vanguard, they will: * Calculate your RMD. Each January, we’ll notify you by mail of the amount you must distribute by year-end. * Distribute your RMD, if…
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IRA Required Minimum Withdrawals
The government requires that by April 1 following the year in which you turn 70.5, you are required to being taking minimum withdrawals from your IRAs, excluding the Roth IRA. The amount you are required to withdraw is based on a calculation (use this calculator) and that value is an annual number. The example calculation…
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Eleven Types of IRAs
You’ve probably heard of the Roth IRA and the Traditional IRA, but did you know there are eleven varieties of IRAs? Yeah… there are a combined total of eleven types of IRAs and most of them are variations of the traditional or Roth IRA. For your reading pleasure, the eleven IRA types (and their descriptions)…
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Avoid IRA Annuities
When you retire, should you roll over your 401k into an IRA? Yes. Should you roll over your 401k into an IRA Annuity? Ummmm probably not, says Walter Updegrave. An IRA Annuity is basically an annuity held inside an IRA and it’s probably going to be too expensive for what you’re getting out of it.…
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Introduction to Self-Directed IRAs
Wouldn’t it be cool to invest some of your retirement money on a movie production company? What about an apartment complex or some other non-traditional investment? Well, if you have a self-directed IRA, you’re allowed to as long as you follow some basic rules. The basic rule is that you can’t benefit from the investment…