Article published by Kiplinger.com

Written by Jackie Stewart

“It took more than four decades for Congress to raise the age for required minimum distributions in 2019 from 70½ to 72. But just three years later, it has been raised again. The SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, which was signed by President Biden on December 29, aims to make it easier for Americans to save for retirement by, among other things, raising the RMD age to 73 on January 1, 2023, and then to 75 on January 1, 2033.”

“Having three more years of tax-deferred growth in your retirement savings accounts, however, is a mixed bag. “Everyone likes when you delay RMDs,” says Ed Slott, president of Ed Slott and Co., which provides IRA training to financial advisers. “But waiving RMDs or putting them off doesn’t help most people.”

“In fact, taking RMDs later could hurt. The amount of these required withdrawals from traditional IRAs and 401(k)s is based on both the account balance at the end of each year and the account owner’s life expectancy as determined by the IRS’s Uniform Lifetime Table. By delaying RMDs, retirees may be forced to make bigger withdrawals from an account that is likely to have a larger balance because it had more time to grow. That can have tax implications.

“Of course, raising the RMD age is appropriate given today’s longer life expectancies. In the mid-1970s, when the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, first authorized IRAs, U.S. life expectancy at birth was 72.6 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 2021, that age, according to the CDC, has increased to 76.4 years.”

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