Inherited IRAs

If you inherit an IRA from a spouse, you can treat that IRA as your own and all the regular rules concerning IRAs apply. If you are a non spouse beneficiary, then you are under a whole new set of rules. You can't make contributions to an inherited IRA, you can't roll over any of the inherited IRA to your own IRA, and one good thing; you don't have to pay the 10% early withdrawal penalty on distributions. There are required minimum distributions for inherited IRAs for non spouse beneficiaries. If the original owner of the IRA died before their required beginning date of distributions (generally age 701/2), then the distributions have to be taken out over the beneficiary's life expectancy. If the original owner died after the required beginning date, then distributions have to be taken out over the longer of the remaining life expectancy of the deceased per the tables in IRS publication 590 or the beneficiary's life expectancy.