Can I rollover an “individual retirement annuity” to an IRA?
"You are not allowed to take a retirement account and move it into the beneficiary's name, an inherited IRA is titled as ""Deceased Name for the benefit of Beneficiary name"". Breaking the correct titling makes the entire account non-retirement and tax is due on the funds that were not yet taxed. If I am mistaken and titling remained correct, RMDs are not avoidable, they are taken based on your Wife's life expectancy from a table in Pub 590, and the divisor is reduced by one each year.  Page 86 is ""table 1"" and provides the divisor to use. For example, at age 50, your wife's divisor is 34.2 (or 2.924%). Each year it decrements by 1, you do not go back to the table each year. It sounds like the seller's recommendation bordered on misconduct, and the firm behind him can be made to release you from this and refund the likely high fees he took from you. Without more details, it's tough to say. I wish you well. The only beneficiary that just takes possession into his/her own account is the surviving spouse. Others have to do what I first described." Annuities, like life insurance, are sold rather than bought.  Once upon a time, IRAs inherited from a non-spouse  required the beneficiary to  (a) take all the money out within 5 years, or  (b) choose to receive the value of the IRA at the time of  the IRA owner's death in equal installments over the expected  lifetime of the beneficiary.  If the latter option was chosen, the IRA custodian issued the  fixed-term annuity in return for the IRA assets. If the IRA  was invested in (say) 15000 shares of IBM stock, that stock  would then belong to the IRA custodian who was obligated to  pay $x per year to the beneficiary for the next 23 years (say). There was no investment any more that could be transferred  to another broker, or be sold and the proceeds invested in Facebook stock (say).  Nor was the custodian under any  obligation to do anything except pay $x per year to the  beneficiary for the 23 years. Financial planners loved to get at this money under the old IRA rules by suggesting that if all the IRA money were taken out and invested in stocks or mutual funds through  their company, the company would pay a guaranteed $y  per year, would pay more than $y in each year that the  investments did well, would continue payment until the  beneficiary died (or till the death of the beneficiary  or beneficiary's spouse - whoever died later), and would return the entire sum invested (less payouts already made, of course) in case of premature death. $y typically would be a little larger than $x too, because it factored in some earnings of the investment over the years. So what was not to like? Of course, the commissions earned by the planner and the lousy mutual funds and the huge surrender charges were  always glossed over.
No, IRA contributions can only be made in the form of cash (rollovers and conversions are different). You'd have to sell the investments in your taxable account, incurring capital gains or losses, then transfer the proceeds to your IRA in cash. Note that the amount you can transfer is subject to the limits on how much one can contribute to the IRA each year. You could look into Vanguard Target Retirement funds, which have a lower $1,000 minimum investment, or Vanguard ETFs. Answering for just the US part, yes, you should be able to do this and it's a good strategy. The only additional gotcha I can think of is that if you've made after-tax contributions to your traditional IRA, you need to prorate the conversion, you can't just convert all the pre-tax or all the after-tax. I'm not familiar with Oregon personal income tax so there may be additional gotchas there. That would be my suggestion (and what I've personally done), but I can't tell you what's right for you.   As an aside, you don't usually need to manually fund an IRA (traditional *or* Roth) to open it for a rollover - Just tell them you're doing a rollover, and they'll set you up and tell you where to have the 401k checks sent (and sometimes even arrange it all *for* you). "Your question asks ""how"" but ""if"" may be your issue. Most companies will not permit an external transfer while still employed, or under a certain age, 55 or so.  If yours is one of the rare companies that permits a transfer, you simply open an IRA with the broker of your choice. Schwab, Fidelity, eTrade, or a dozen others. That broker will give you the paperwork you need to fill out, and they initiate the transfer.  I assume you want an IRA in which you can invest in stocks or funds of your choosing. A traditional IRA. The term ""self-directed"" has another meaning, often associated with the account that permits real estate purchases inside the account. The brokers I listed do not handle that, those custodians have a different business model and are typically smaller firms with fewer offices, not country-wide." "I am a CPA. Yes you can do what you are contemplating. Be careful that they do not take any taxes out of the money when you go to do the ""rollover"". If they do you will have to dip into your own pocket to put that back into the IRA." "In the case of Fidelity, the answer is ""no."" Although when you leave your employer and roll over the account to an IRA, leaving it with Fidelity allowed me to keep money in those closed funds. My Roth IRA was not able/allowed to buy those funds." No. Borrowing is not allowed, but if you take a withdrawal, you have 60 days to deposit into another IRA account. This effectively creates a 60 day loan. Not what you're really looking for.  If you take this withdrawal and re-deposit to new account within 60 days, no problem. If not, you owe tax on the untaxed amount as well as a 10% penalty. This comes from IRS' Publication 590, I have the document memorized by substance, not page number. If your SIMPLE IRA is over two years old then you can roll your money to another qualified account such as a rollover IRA. The usual rollover rules apply. You have 60 days to deposit the funds in another qualified account and you are only allowed one such rollover in a 12 month window. If you are still within two years of opening your SIMPLE IRA, you can roll your funds to a SIMPLE IRA with another vendor, but you would then have to wait until that account is two years old before rolling it elsewhere. If you roll the money another type of IRA before your SIMPLE IRA account is two-years old, and under 59 1/2 years old, you will be subject to a 25% penalty (which is much higher than for other types of accounts). Many of the early distribution exceptions apply such as disability, etc. Edit: The first document linked above covers rules for running a SIMPLE IRA. All the specific regulations linked in the second document apply to all IRAs of all types. There is no specific prohibition from rolling only a portion of the money to another qualified account. There are prohibitions against rolling money more than one time in a 12 month period. The usual obstacle to rolling money from a retirement account--like a 401(k)--is that the 401(k) plan is written to prohibit withdrawals while the employee is still employed at the company. 401(k)'s can be rolled over into IRAs. You can roll all of your former company 401(k)'s into a single IRA, managed by whatever company you like. Many employers will not let you transfer money out of your 401(k) while you're still a current employee, though, so you may be stuck with the 401(k) used by your current company until you leave. You'll have to check with your 401(k) administrator to be sure. You won't incur any taxes as long as you execute the rollovers properly. The best way to do it is to coordinate the transfer directly between your old 401(k) and your new IRA, so the check is never sent directly to you. You may withdraw penalty-free from a 401(k) if you separate from service at 55 or later. This may make the rolling to any IRA not a good idea. You can withdraw penalty free if you are disabled. You can withdraw penalty free if you take the withdrawal using a process called Section 72t which basically means a steady withdrawal for either 5 years or until age 59-1/2 whichever is second.  Aside from these exceptions, the concept is to be allowed to take withdrawals after 59-1/2, but you must start to take withdrawals starting at 70-1/2. These are called RMDs (required minimum distributions) and represent a small fraction of the account, 1/27.4 at 70, 1/18.7 at 80, 1/11.4 at 90.  Each year, you take a minimum of this fraction of the account value and pay the tax. If you had a million dollars, your first withdrawal would be $36,496, you'd be in the 15% marginal rate with this income.  In general, it's always a good idea to be aware of your marginal tax rate. For example, a married filing joint couple would be in the 15% bracket up to a taxable $74,900 in 2015. At withdrawal time, and as the year moves along, if they are on track to have a taxable $64,900 (for example), it would be wise to take the extra $10,000, either as a withdrawal to put aside for the next year, or as a Roth conversion. This way, as the RMDs increase, they have a reduced chance to push the couple to the next tax bracket. I'm a series 24 securities principle and have explained and trained people on questions like these more times than I can count. Although, my first recommendation is to speak to a qualified tax professional for the appropriate answer for each individual scenario.  Disclosure aside, the source of truth for these questions is always the IRS publications. In this case it's IRS pub 590b: When Must You Withdraw Assets? (Required Minimum Distributions).  IRA stands for Individual Retirement Arrangement. Basically it's an arrangement between you a the government to encourage retirement savings. Tax payers(up to a define taxable income amount) agree to receive a deduction during your working years lowering your taxable income in the present. Your taxable income should drop in retirement because you're not working anymore and any withdraws would most likely be taxed at a lower rate. To be clear the require minimum distribution is based on a life expectancy factor and the ending balance of your pre-tax retirement accounts from the prior year(for ex. 2016 ending balance for a 2017 rmd). The rmd works out to be somewhere around 3-4% of your total balance.  Most retirement account providers(if not all) have established several conveniences to automate the withdraw process. I've believe that moving funds directly to bank deposits or moving the funds to another taxable investment account are most common.  Retirement account providers are required by law to give you notifications about RMDs. Some big firms allow you to setup an auto-distribution a year before you turn 70.5 to start when they need to. Because of the 50% penalty you're given so many notifications about an RMD that it's hard to forget about it. You weren't eligible for a 401K in 2010, but you were eligible for an individual IRA.  If you had known by April 18th that you had this extra money, you could have deposited (not rolled over) the money, up to the maximum ($5,000 or so, I think), into an IRA account  You could do that because you didn't participate (legally) in an employer retirement program. But you didn't learn until early May, so you missed that deadline.  I doubt that the IRS has any provisions for waiving that April 18th deadline, but I could be wrong: see the IRS publications. In any case, to answer the question directly - no, you can't roll over the money you're getting back, because it was mistakenly in the 401K plan.  It will now become part of your 2011 income, and so you'll owe taxes on it when you file your tax return for the tax year 2011, in early 2012. A rollover IRA is a traditional IRA.  Your rollover contributions are not taxed and rollover or counted against your annual limit, which is income dependent. A Roth IRA is one where your contributions will be taxed going into the IRA.  Note that there are adjusted gross income maximums for contribution to a Roth IRA (see here), and as far as I can tell those income maximums also determine whether or not you can rollover to a Roth IRA. You can do this with no problem. What you want is a direct transfer style of rollover. This is simply where the money is transferred from your 401(k) custodian directly to your new IRA custodian. This will ensure there are no taxes or penalties on the balance.  The key is that the money is moving directly to the new account without you having direct access to the balance. This keeps the money out of your hands in the eyes of the IRS. The process should look something like this: A few notes: Right you **don't** ever want to use that account for your traditional 401k rollovers.  Realistically, you could *probably* still have it reclassified as a traditional IRA and roll your traditional 401ks into it, which was basically your original idea except none of the funds would be Roth; but if you see yourself ever potentially contributing to a Roth IRA going forward (which makes all the more sense if you have only traditional 401k funds in your retirement portfolio so far), there's nothing *wrong* with having both types of IRA at the same time.  But no, don't cross the streams!  :)