Natalie Choate’s Seminar Topics
Dear seminar sponsor,
Please choose a seminar topic from this list. Once you have chosen a topic, we’ll send you a “Sponsor Information Sheet” with everything you need to prepare your seminar announcements and apply for CPE credits. I hope to see you soon at a seminar!
Natalie Choate
Retirement Benefit Topics for Estate Planning and Money Management Professionals
* An asterisk indicates that the 1-hour indicated length can be expanded to 1.5 hours for more in-depth coverage and greater opportunity for audience questions and answers.
- IRA Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Formerly "IRAs with Hair". 1 hour
Have you ever had a client who...didn't take her RMD? Contributed too much to his IRA? Missed a rollover deadline? Or made one of a dozen other IRA mistakes?
It's amazing how many ways an IRA can slide off the rails. With this seminar, you can IDENTIFY the mistake, and (usually) FIX the problem and AVOID the punishment.- The Problems: Sooner or later you will have a client who bungled a rollover, minimum distribution, contribution, or other IRA step.
- The Punishments: Know whether your client faces a 6%, 10%, or 50% penalty, a deemed distribution, or complete disqualification of his IRA.
- The Remedies: Learn when and how to use a corrective distribution, request for penalty waiver, absorption, recharacterization, hardship waiver of the 60-day rollover deadline (including the NEW IRS self-certification procedure), or a rollover to solve your client’s problem.
- Roth Immersion Workshop
Everything you need to know about Roth retirement plans, to help your clients decide on, implement, or undo a Roth conversion. 1 hour
Roth IRAs, offering tax-free distributions and no required distributions during the participant’s life, are now available to high-income clients. To help you advise your clients regarding this significant planning opportunity, Natalie Choate explains the rules and shares expert tips about:
- How to create a Roth IRA
- Designated Roth accounts (“Roth 401(k)s”)
- How the minimum distribution rules apply to Roth IRAs
- How to get a “free” (or cheap) Roth conversion
- Beneficiary Roth conversions
- Estate planning with Roth IRAs
- Which clients should (and should not) “go Roth”
- How to undo a Roth conversion
- Roth time bombs to avoid
- 72 and older : How to compute, pay, minimize or avoid RMDs.
At age 72 (formerly 70-1/2), everybody’s favorite tax shelter turns into a tax nightmare. Learn how you can help your older clients manage those unwelcome required minimum distributions (RMDs), including:
* A systematic approach to computing RMDs and deciding WHEN to take them, HOW to take them, and WHERE to take them from.
* How qualified charitable distributions and qualified longevity annuities can help the RMD-oppressed client.
* Little-known ways to save, such as using RMDs to pay estimated taxes and Roth conversion of after-tax money
* How to reduce (or eliminate?) RMDs
*Transition troubles: Impacts of the shift from 70 1/2 to 72: what changed and for whom?
* When things go wrong: How to avoid the penalty for a missed RMD.
- Case Studies in Estate Planning for Retirement Benefits: Real Life Situations after SECURE
Practical Ideas for Real Life Situations. 1 hour*
How to integrate retirement benefits into the typical estate plan now that SECURE has taken away the life expectancy payout for most beneficiaries. Case studies illustrate the planning options for the client whose major asset is an IRA or other retirement plan, and who wants to:
* Benefit the surviving spouse (including "second marriage" situation)
* Leave benefits to adult children, minor children, multiple children
* Leave benefits to a disabled beneficiary
* Plan for a traditional vs. a Roth IRA
* Hear about “outside the box” solutions for replacing the stretch IRA
* Keep perpetual control while getting maximum deferral and low tax rates
* Hint: That last client may be disappointed
This presentation answers these questions, explaining the pros, cons and pitfalls of various approaches, including the conservative, the practical and the "cutting edge."
- Charitable Giving with Retirement Benefits
Advantages and pitfalls of using retirement benefits to fulfill the client's charitable goals, both as part of the estate plan and during life, including:
- Double tax saving by leaving IRA to charity
- Seven ways to leave retirement benefits to charity
- Which charitable entities are suitable as IRA beneficiaries (or not)
- What to do if a trust has both charity and human beneficiaries
- Trust income tax traps for the charitable deduction
- Charitable remainder trust still works to solve estate plan problems while benefitting charity
- Can a charitable remainder trust replace the stretch IRA?
- Qualified charitable distributions—lifetime gifts from the IRA (including new SECURE limit)
- Death and Taxes: The Inherited Retirement Plan
As more retirement plan owners die leaving significant plan benefits to heirs, and the SECURE Act has upended many traditional estate plans the question of how to advise the decedent's survivors, executor, beneficiaries, and trustees grows in importance. This seminar explains:
- How to correctly title and transfer inherited IRAs and 401(k)s
- Should the executor complete decedent's rollover and RMDs?
- What to do if the estate plan was not updated for SECURE
- Improving the beneficiary designation with separate accounts and partial distributions
- Cleanup strategies when the decedent named the wrong (or no) beneficiary
- How to advise the surviving spouse
- Disclaimers, double deaths, and don't forget the IRD deduction!
- Planning for Retirement Benefits: SECURE! and other Recent Developments
What’s new in planning for retirement benefits in the last year or so? SECURE, SECURE, SECURE! Enacted in December 2019, SECURE has upended estate planning techniques for our clients’ IRAs and other retirement plans. We cover:
- What to tell new clients about their options for retirement benefits
- Reviewing existing estate plans—don’t change the document, change the plan!
- How does the 10-year rule work for individuals? Trusts?
- The four different sets of minimum distribution rules for the five categories of “eligible designated beneficiaries” who still get the life expectancy payout
- Alternatives—charitable trusts, Roth conversions, annuities?
- SECURE effect on pre-2020 deaths
- RMD age increased to 72 from 70½
- Plus, new IRS life expectancy tables!
- Making Retirement Benefits Payable to Trusts
Intended for Lawyers and CPAs: Pros, Cons, and Pitfalls of Naming a Trust as Beneficiary, Including the IRS “RMD Trust Rules.” One hour; can be expanded to two hours for in-depth workshop
What estate planners must know when a trust is beneficiary of retirement benefits:
- The IRS's “minimum distribution trust rules” under which a “see-through trust” can qualify as a “designated beneficiary”
- Why see-through trust status still matters under SECURE
- Drafting mode vs. cleanup mode: How to play it safe when planning but get creative when you have to
- When to use multiple trusts for different assets or beneficiaries
- Trust income tax rules: What happens when “DNI” meets “IRD”
- Trust accounting for retirement benefits: Why it matters even more post-SECURE
- When and how to transfer an IRA out of a trust or estate
Other Topics
- For Non-professional Audience
Your clients, donors and prospects will enjoy and learn from this seminar.
Your IRA/Roth IRA Field Manual
45 minutes to 1 hourUncle Sam holds a mortgage on your Keogh plan, 401(k) plan, IRA or 403(b) plan: his “mortgage” is all the unpaid taxes you owe him on your plan contributions and earnings over the year. This seminar explains the rules that dictate when you must take money out of your retirement plan (and pay Uncle Sam his share). Plus, learn how your choice of beneficiary (spouse, estate, trust, children, charity or “other”) can double (or halve) the value of your retirement plan, and how to decide whether a “Roth” IRA may be right for you.