Darla Mercado for InvestmentNews.com writes: Life insurance-based retirement strategies will look even more
appealing if President Barack Obama's pitch to cap IRAs at $3 million
becomes a reality. Curbing growth of individual retirement
accounts is expected to be in Mr. Obama's budget proposal, which will be
released tomorrow. According to Bloomberg, the plan proposes that funds
inside of a tax-preferred retirement account could not generate more
than $205,000 in annual retirement income, pegging the maximum value of
the IRA at about $3 million. There isn't any word yet on how this
provision would apply to Roth IRAs — which could become more popular if
they are left untouched — or how amounts over the $3 million limit
would be treated.
However, experts view the move as deterring the use of inherited, or
stretch, IRAs, which allow beneficiaries to extend the required minimum
distribution over the course of that individual's life expectancy. As a
result, the corpus of the IRA is preserved even longer and has more time
to grow tax-deferred.
“I think eliminating stretch IRAs is what
they're getting at, and they want to go back to saying that all the
money has to be paid out within a few years after death,” said Ed Slott,
an IRA distribution expert.
It's too early to tell where the
proposal will go, but advisers and tax-planning experts believe that
life insurance and other strategies may become more popular should the
$3 million limit come to pass.
Clients with large IRA balances
could consider making a withdrawal, paying any applicable taxes and
using those proceeds to buy a life insurance policy.
Retirement
plan assets are “bad assets” in terms of estate-planning vehicles.
Beneficiaries could start making withdrawals and end up stuck with
income taxes. Meanwhile, life insurance pays out to beneficiaries free
of income tax — and if it's structured in an irrevocable trust, it could
pass through free of estate taxes.
“You are converting a bad
asset to a good one,” said Jeremiah W. Doyle IV, an estate-planning
strategist for BNY Mellon Wealth Management.
As far as coming up
with supplemental retirement income vehicles for ultrahigh-net-worth
individuals, cash value life insurance could also be a reasonable
savings alternative because it grows tax-deferred, noted Matt Klein,
managing partner at Matauro LLC, which specializes in life insurance
planning.
Universal life insurance, variable or indexed, could be
positioned so that premium dollars are largely going toward cash
accumulation. In this context, Mr. Klein noted, the death benefit isn't
the sole purpose of the policy. Rather, it's the tax-deferred growth
capability of the policy and the fact that clients can take tax-free
withdrawals from the cash value to help fund costs in retirement.
Still,
there is some risk in using these policies. For instance, during the
market downturn in 2008, variable insurance policies took a beating
because their underlying investments tanked. People who had optimistic
illustrations that depicted strong market performance were blindsided
when they ended up with policies with dwindling cash values that had to
be propped up with even more premiums.
Any strategy that positions
life insurance as a retirement savings and income vehicle needs to be
closely monitored on a regular basis, Mr. Klein warned.
Further,
this is more of a tax diversification play for retirement income, and it
should be considered only part of the client's overall strategy.
“The
trick is to make sure everything is healthy on an annual basis,” Mr.
Klein said. “It's like if you bought a gremlin: It's the coolest thing
in the world — if you take care of it.”
Should the $3 million
limit become a reality, there are also some strategies for plan sponsors
to help boost supplemental savings.
Nonqualified plans could be a
way to increase savings for highly compensated workers, too. Such
concepts include supplemental compensation plans, which allow the
employer to finance the worker's supplemental savings, and the
death-benefit-only plan, in which the employer pays a benefit to the
worker's beneficiary if the employee dies.
These plans are
already used in situations where employees earn so much money that they
could save beyond the $17,500 annual limit in their 401(k) and the
$5,500 limit for IRAs.
Employers typically use corporate-owned
life insurance on the lives of these key employees to help fund the cost
of providing these nonqualified benefits.
Still, nonqualified
plans aren't available to all employers. Smaller businesses, such as S
corporations and limited liability companies, might find this
prohibitively costly to set up.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
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