William Byrnes' Tax, Wealth, and Risk Intelligence

President Obama’s tax compromise—the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 (Tax Relief Act)—includes a provision that permits qualified charitable distributions to be made directly from an individual retirement account.

Generally, to make a charitable contribution from an IRA, the account owner has to take a distribution from the account, pay any tax due on the contribution, and then make the charitable contribution.  An account owner can also name a charity as a beneficiary of the retirement account. Direct qualified charitable distributions take out the middle step, keeping the distribution out of the taxpayer’s taxable income … Read this complete analysis of the impact at AdvisorFX (sign up for a free trial subscription with full access to all of the planning libraries and client presentations if you are not already a subscriber).

For previous coverage of individual retirement accounts in Advisor’s Journal, see Maximize IRA Stretch with Individual Inherited IRA Accounts (CC 10-69) and The Automatic IRA Act of 2010: Boon for Advisors? (CC 10-56).

For in-depth analysis of individual retirement accounts, see Advisor’s Main Library: IRAs and SEPs.

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