dmertz
Level 15

Retirement tax questions

The one-rollover-per-12-months rule is intended to prevent one from repeatedly abusing distributions and rollovers from an IRA as a short-term source of funds.

 

@fgoodiwn57 , in saying that no part of your Roth IRA distributions would be taxable, Bsch4477 has assumed that the owner has completed the 5-year qualification period.  It's not clear from your statement whether you've had Roth IRAs the entire 10 years or not.

 

For you to still be within the 60-day rollover window, your distributions would have to have been made in 2023.  If these distributions were made in 2022, it's too late to roll these over.  For the rest of this, I'll assume that you are still within the 60-day rollover window and you can still perform a rollover.

 

You said "we" had a combination of traditional and Roth IRAs.  The rollover limitation applies per person, so each of you could roll over one of your own IRAs.

 

For those traditional IRAs that would otherwise be violation or the limitation if rolled over, these can be converted to Roth since Roth conversions are disregarded with respect to the rollover  limitation .  You would still have the tax liability, but future growth would be tax free.  Rollovers to an employer plan like a 401(k) are also disregarded with respect to the limitation, so perhaps your wife's employer provides such a plan that will accept a rollover from her traditional (but not Roth) IRA(s).

 

Based on which of you owns a particular IRA, the type of IRA from which the distribution was made and the amounts, you could come up with a plan to minimize the long-term impact of having made these distributions.