Parlay Your IRA into a Family Fortune: 3 EASY STEPS for creating a lifetime supply of tax-deferred, even tax-free, wealth for you and your family (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Bill and his two siblings had inherited a $270,000 IRA from their mother, a widow when she died in 2002..." (more)
Key Phrases: oldest trust beneficiary, trust tax rates, conduit trust, Year Age, Financial Group, Uncle Sam (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Ed Slott’s easy-to-understand tax strategies mean money in your bank account, not the IRS’s.”
—Jan M. Rosen, coauthor of Wall Street Secrets for Tax-Efficient Investing and financial columnist for The New York Times --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Description

Ed Slott is without a doubt "one of the country’s leading IRA experts" (Reader’s Digest). Appearing at a time when virtually everyone is concerned about retirement savings, this authoritative thoroughly accessible book presents an easy-to-follow plan for making money—a lot of money— with your IRA. Slott shows readers how to choose the right financial advisor, manage vital information and deadlines, and create a retirement fortune that will not only benefit the individual, but continue to enrich beneficiaries for generations. This powerful, straightforward tool is the book for Americans interested in creating a fiscal windfall for the future.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (December 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143036416
• ISBN-13: 978-0143036418
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #284,867 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Requried Reading for Anyone with an IRA., July 23, 2006

By	Alexander McKelvey "Alexander" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This book focuses on ensuring that your IRA is properly set up, so that it can be passed on to beneficiaries intact, effectively establishing a "stretch IRA". The stretch IRA describes an IRA held by a beneficiary, and which will pay out over their lifetime.

This book is very well organized, and the author is clearly very enthusiastic about his subject. He does quite well making his case, that you should ensure your IRA passes intact to a beneficiary, in that it can offer them HUGE tax advantages for their entire life time.

He is also quite good about explaining the steps you need to achieve this. Much of the book is reference material that will not apply to everyone at any given time, but that is not a real criticism. The book is cheap enough, and the sections that apply to all are worth the entire purchase price.

If you have an IRA, and you have any desire to pass your assets along to a beneficiary, this book is an excellent starting point.

36 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good IRA Reference, but Stretch IRA Wildly Overhyped, July 9, 2008

By	Donald E. Fulton (Stoneham, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is both a very good and very bad book. Slott is a CPA and his bio indicates that he specializes in IRA law and estate planning. The retirement column in the Wall St. Journal uses him as an IRA expert. If you've seen Slott on PBS, you know he is also a pitchman and showman. This book is a mixture of expert IRA info and advice and wild overselling.

On the plus side:
This book is full of IRA information and good IRA advice presented in a very readable manner. I made dozens of notes in the front cover while reading this book. An excellent IRA reference. And I think the book does a service by pointing out that the IRA code has (sort of) a loophole that allows the 'effective' taxes paid on the IRA to be greatly reduced if the IRA is passed on to younger family members who should (Slott recommends) only take out the minimum annually over their lifetimes. Slott calls this the 'stretch' IRA.

On the negative side:
Your IRA can grow into a FAMILY FORTUNE, he screams, with pages of tables showing a 100 thousand IRA growing to millions (in one case to nearly 300 million if left to grow into well into the 21 century!). Nonsense, what about the time value of money? Slott never heard of it (or pretends he never heard of it). The reality, of course, is that if your income tax rate is, say, 33% then when you withdraw IRA funds you lose 1/3rd of it to taxes. The best that even a perfect tax strategy can do is recover this 1/3rd. Nice, but hardly a fortune.

Slott provides a useful check list of features an IRA contract should have. You would think that maybe he would read the IRA contracts of top IRA providers (like Fidelity, Vanguard) and tell us how they stack up? Nope, that's our job, not his.

Convert to a Roth IRA and your money will grow TAX FREE he screams. Slott's very positive on Roth IRA's, too positive. I worked through a Roth conversion example and find that the extra shielding that a Roth IRA allows can boost your after-tax returns a little. (Calculation details are in 'Roth Primer' section of the 'Charity' essay on my home page.) I calculate in a 6% market environment that Roth IRA will yield 6% vs an after tax yield for a traditional IRA of approx 5.4%, or an extra 0.6%/yr investment gain. However, there can be a serious downside to doing a Roth conversion that Slott doesn't mention. A large Roth conversion will likely be taxed at a much higher incremental income tax rate than normal minimum withdrawals, and since Roth has only a tiny yield advantage over a traditional IRA it could easily take a decade or more just to get even.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Concise info on stretch IRA's, January 3, 2007

By	M. Cheney (Kansas --beside the Santa Fe Trail) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Parlay Your IRA into a Family Fortune: 3 EASY STEPS for creating a lifetime supply of tax-deferred, even tax-free, wealth for you and your family (Paperback)

Ed Slott is considered THE expert on stretch IRA's. Book is aimed at investors who will probably die before depleting their IRA funds. It explains how to structure a stretch IRA to pass this money on to future generations with minimal taxation.

Book is better organized than Slott's previous books. It is very readable. I keep it for a reference and have purchased additional copies for gifts.