Timothy Sumer

If you “love” your 401(k) plan at work, you’ll be pleased with today’s IRS announcement about contribution limits. The amount that you can contribute to your 401(k) will be higher in 2022, increasing to $20,500 from 2021’s limit of $19,500. This new limit also applies to 403(b) plans, most 457 plans and Thrift Savings Plans. The IRS defines 403(b) plans as being for “certain employees of public schools, employees of certain Code Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organizations and certain ministers,” while 457 plans are deferred-compensation retirement plans available for government and non-government employers. Thrift Savings Plans are retirement and savings plans for federal employees and those in the uniformed services. Note that people who are age 50 and up can contribute a “catch-up contribution” to the retirement plans listed above in 2022 of $6,500, which has not increased from 2021. By adding the overall increase to the catch-up contribution, a 50-year-old (or older) partic...

Dear Liz: My husband and I have a combination of traditional and Roth IRAs naming our children and grandchildren as beneficiaries. With the passage of the Secure Act requiring distribution of inherited IRAs within 10 years, we want to revise our plan of leaving all of the investments to our children, as such inherited income would affect their tax bracket also. Do you have recommendations to alter the inherited IRAs to avoid this issue? Our annual fixed income puts us at the top of our tax bracket, meaning we usually cannot manage a traditional IRA to Roth conversion. Answer: The Secure Act dramatically limited “stretch IRAs, ” which allowed people to draw down an inherited IRA over their lifetimes. Now most non-spouse inheritors must empty the accounts within 10 years if they inherited the IRA in 2020 or later. There are some exceptions if an heir is disabled, chronically ill or not more than 10 years younger than the IRA owner, says Mark Luscombe, principal analyst for Wolt...