Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits

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438 Life and Death Planning for Retirement Benefits
considered “required minimum distributions” for purposes of the rule that minimum distributions
are not eligible for rollover.
10.3 Buying an Annuity Inside an IRA or Other DC Plan
10.3.01 Purchasing an immediate annuity inside an IRA
Reg. applies to defined benefit plans. It also applies to “annuity contracts
purchased with an employee’s account balance under a defined contribution plan.” T.D. 9130,
2004-1 C.B. 1082. Thus, if a retiring employee’s 401(k) balance is used directly to purchase an
annuity contract, the annuity contract must comply with the DB plan rules, even though a 401(k)
plan is a DC plan.
The same is true if the employee rolls his 401(k) plan balance over to an IRA (another form
of DC plan), and uses part or all of the IRA funds to purchase an annuity contract. Reg.
A-1(e), second sentence. In the year of the purchase, the account is still subject to
the DC plan RMD rules; for that year only, distributions under the annuity contract will be taken
into account as satisfying the RMD requirement for the account under the DC rules. Reg.
A-1(e), third sentence.
(Note: Another approach is to take cash out of the DC plan, pay the income tax on the
distribution, and use the after-tax proceeds to purchase an annuity outside the plan. That scenario
is not what is being discussed here.)
If only part of the employee’s benefit in a DC plan is used to purchase an annuity, the
regulations treat the two portions of the employee’s account as two separate accounts, beginning
the year after the year of the purchase. The annuity contract must comply with Reg
(the DB plan rules) and the rest of the account must comply with the DC plan RMD rules (Reg.
. See Reg. A-1(e), A-2(a)(3).
If the annuity contract is purchased after the RBD, all distributions received under the
annuity contract are considered required minimum distributions and accordingly cannot be rolled
over. Reg. A-1(e), third sentence;
see B).
Roz Example: Roz, who turns age 73 in 2005, owns an IRA. The account balance was $2 million
as of December 31, 2004, so her RMD for 2005 is $80,972 ($2,000,000 ÷ 24.7, the divisor for age
73 from the Uniform Lifetime Table). In July 2005, she uses $500,000 of the IRA balance to
purchase an annuity contract which will pay her $5,000 a month for life, on the first day of each
month, starting August 1, 2005. According to Reg. A-2(a)(3) (which is made
applicable to IRAs by Reg. A-1(a)), the IRA will be treated as two separate accounts
for RMD purposes, beginning in 2006: The RMDs for the “DC portion” of the IRA will be
computed based on the prior year-end account balance excluding the value of the annuity contract;
the RMD requirement with respect to the “annuity portion” is satisfied by the payments to Roz
under the annuity contract. For the year 2005 only, the $25,000 of annuity payments Roz receives
from the contract for August–December (five months times $5,000) count towards her $80,972
RMD for 2005; she will have to withdraw the rest of the 2005 RMD ($55,972) from the nonannuity
portion of the account by December 31, 2005. Starting in 2006, the payments under the annuity
contract will not count towards the RMD requirement for the nonannuity portion of the account
(see Clyde Example, below).