Retirements Assets: IRAs, 401[k]s, and Best Practices to Manage your Estate (2026 Edition)

A client’s IRA—the largest asset in the estate—lands in a trust drafted to stretch payouts over a beneficiary’s lifetime, and the language now forces the entire account out within ten years, often at compressed trust tax rates that erase the deferral the plan was built to protect. The SECURE Act ended the stretch for most beneficiaries, and the IRS’s final regulations—confirming annual RMDs inside the ten-year window for many heirs—are now in effect, with SECURE 2.0 layering on further changes. Planners still working from conduit-trust templates and pre-2020 beneficiary forms are handing clients accelerated tax bills without knowing it. This session covers the tax treatment of retirement accounts, current RMD rules for inherited IRAs, how dispositive trust language controls distribution timing, when naming a trust still makes sense, and how charitable giving during life and at death can absorb the tax. You’ll leave able to draft trust language that survives the see-through rules and structure designations that control timing and tax.