Reference Library

Retirement Planning

Rollover IRA

Suppose you are changing jobs or retiring, and you have actively participated in your employer's retirement plan. Your employer may require that you receive a distribution from your plan when you leave.

You now have several key decisions to make about the amount of your retirement savings that were in the plan:

• You can keep it.
• You can invest it fully in a rollover IRA.
• Or you can invest it partially in a rollover IRA.

Prior to rolling over assets from an employer-sponsored retirement plan into an IRA, it's important that you understand your options and do a full comparison on the differences in the guarantees and protections offered by each respective type of account as well as the differences in liquidity/loans, types of investments, fees and expenses, services, withdrawal penalties, protection from creditors and legal judgments, required minimum distributions, possession of employer stock and reduction/elimination of guaranteed benefits from the pension plan.