Category: Retirement Savings Plans

A self-directed Individual Retirement Arrangement is an IRA that allows the account owner to direct the account trustee to make a broader range of investments than other types of IRAs. RS regulations require that either a qualified trustee or custodian hold the IRA assets on behalf of the IRA owner. Generally that person/company will be […]

Can you put an LLC in an IRA? Yes. It is legal. But doing so opens the door to a variety of potential missteps which could result, among other things, in your IRA losing its tax-deferred status. If an IRA owner is not very meticulous in handling the LLC’s transactions, problems are going to follow. […]

Can you use your retirement savings to start a business? That would seem to be a pretty straight-forward kind of question to most people. But it turns out that this is an area of the tax code where there are two different answers for what is essentially the same situation. That answer hinges on what […]

Here we will give a brief overview for a concept which candidly isn’t workable very often.  But when the planets align, it can yield substantial results. A long time ago, most retirement plans were of the type known as defined benefit (DB) plans.  This term means that what the retiree is ultimately going to get […]

Business owners, professionals and executives often find themselves in a situation where they would like to put a larger percentage of their earnings into their retirement plans, but they are told they can’t because they have already met the contribution limits. But this answer is only partly correct. It may be that they can’t put […]

The rules on retirement plans come primarily from 2 places: the US tax code and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (“ERISA”), which was the 1974 congressional act that made IRAs, 401(k)s and similar plans possible. Generally the rules only specify two kinds of assets as non-permissible investments: Life Insurance on the IRA Owner and […]

Unrelated Business Income Tax (UBIT) is the tax on Unrelated Business Taxable Income (UBTI; IRC Section 501), which comes from an activity engaged in by a tax-exempt organization or entity which is not related to its tax-exempt purpose. UBTI is a concept more broadly related to not for profit entities and certain trusts. But it becomes a retirement […]