Pub. 1 2020 Issue 2

www.cbak.com 14 In Touch T he new year promises to provide plentiful opportunities for financial advisers to gain business and to demonstrate expertise to existing clients. As you likely know, the SECURE Act was signed into law on December 20, 2019. Many of the Act’s provisions took effect on January 1, 2020. Most of them offer real benefits to your clients; other provisions may not be as helpful, but you still need to understand them to provide the best service possible. This Retirement Spotlight focuses on a half-dozen SECURE Act provisions that will make the most significant impact on your retirement plan practice. Let’s start with three provisions that you will most certainly get questions on. 1) Traditional IRA owners can now contribute after age 70½. Since they were first available in 1998, Roth IRAs could receive contributions from individuals over 70½ provided that they were otherwise eligible. That is, Roth IRA owners had to have earned income—but not too much income. Now Traditional IRA owners will enjoy the same benefit. Your clients that continue to work—or that have working spouses—will be able to contribute even after they reach age 70½. More of your clients may be working well past the “normal retirement age”; now they can also keep contributing to their Traditional IRAs. Even though they may have to take required minimum distributions at the same time that they contribute to their IRAs, there is a good chance that they will be able to contribute more than they have to distribute each year. So this provision is a great way for your clients to ensure that they have sufficient retirement assets once they stop working. 2) Traditional IRA required minimum distributions (RMDs) will now start at age 72. Not only can your clients make Traditional IRA contributions past age 70½, but now they can begin taking RMDs later. If your clients turn age 70½ in 2020 or later, they now can wait until age 72 to begin taking RMDs. Specifically, they will have until April 1 of the year following the year they turn 72 to take their first RMD. This year-and-a-half delay is not necessarily the big relief that some in the retirement industry had hoped for. But this change certainly provides some benefit. Based on increased life expectancies over the past several decades, Congress could have increased the starting age to 75 or later. There are, however, significant revenue implications for any delay in the RMD starting date. So this age-72 requirement was a bit of a compromise. The important thing to remember is this: if your client already turned age 70½ by the end of 2019, then RMDs cannot be delayed under the new rule. In other words, all of your clients born on or before June 30, 1949, are subject to the old rule, which makes the 70½ year the first distribution year. 3) “Stretch IRAs” as we now know them are disappearing. For decades, IRA and qualified retirement plan (QRP) beneficiaries were able to take death distributions over their life expectancies. For example, a 20-year-old grandchild could distribute a grandparent’s IRA balance over 63 years. But now this generous provision has been altered to require faster distributions (generally over a 10-year time frame), which is designed to increase federal revenue. Nonspouse beneficiaries of account owners who die on or after January 1, 2020, are subject to this new rule, unless they are: JANUARY 2020 SPOTLIGHT ON IMPORTANT SECURE ACT PROVISIONS FOR FINANCIAL ADVISERS BY BARB VAN ZOMEREN SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT - ERISA, ASCENSUS RETIREMENT SPOTLIGHT