You can name your minor child as the beneficiary of your retirement account or as the contingent beneficiary who would receive it if the primary beneficiary of the account, such as your spouse dies before you. However, if your child is a minor when you die and they inherit your retirement account, a court may have to appoint a conservator to handle any money distributed to the child from the account. This will take significant time and money, and the conservator the court chooses may not be the person you would have chosen. You can avoid this by proactively naming a conservator for your minor child in your will.
Under the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act, most beneficiaries must receive an entire retirement account within ten years of the account owner’s death. However, minor children of an account owner fall into a special category of beneficiaries (called eligible designated beneficiaries or EDBs). Their mandatory ten-year payout period does not begin until they turn twenty-one, meaning the beneficiary must receive an entire inherited retirement account at age thirty-one. In the meantime, however, they are required to take required minimum distributions (RMDs), which will likely be held in a protected account overseen by their conservator, until they reach the age of majority in the state they live in (usually between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one). RMDs for these EDBs are based upon the child’s expected lifetime, and they must take them until the end of the calendar year that they turn thirty-one, at which time the retirement account must be fully distributed. It is important to note that the child will have to pay income taxes on any amounts distributed to them. This is usually favorable because the RMDs up until the year they turn thirty-one can be made in smaller amounts because of the long life expectancy of a minor and because they will likely be in a low tax bracket. However, the account must be emptied by the end of the calendar year in which the child turns thirty-one. Depending upon the size of the account, this could mean that the child will receive a large amount of taxable income at a relatively young age. In addition to the potential tax liability, one of the disadvantages of naming a minor child as the beneficiary of your account is that when they reach the age of majority (which could be as young as eighteen in your state), they will gain complete control of the funds and could choose to pull everything out of the retirement account right away, regardless of whether they are mature enough to handle that responsibility.
There is another option. Check out our next blog entry entitled “Should You Name a Trust as a Beneficiary of the Retirement Account and Your Child as the Beneficiary of the Trust?”
