Her Husband Died at 74, Already Taking RMDs. She’s 68, She’ll Roll His IRA Into Her Own, and the IRS Won’t Ask Her for a Dollar From It Until 2031
When a husband dies mid-RMD, most widows assume his withdrawal schedule becomes their burden. One IRS election rewrites those rules entirely, and the window to use it closes faster than most people realize.
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If you inherit a traditional IRA from your spouse, you can roll it into your own IRA and reset the required minimum distribution (RMD) clock to your age. This works even if your spouse was already taking RMDs. A 68-year-old widow whose husband died at 74 while taking annual withdrawals can delay IRS withdrawals until 2031, when she turns 73.
How One Election Turns Off His Withdrawal Schedule
A surviving spouse can leave the account as an inherited (beneficiary) IRA or treat it as her own. If she keeps the beneficiary IRA after his required beginning date, she must take distributions over the longer of the remaining single life expectancy of the decedent or the life expectancy of the spouse beneficiary. If she treats the account as her own, it runs on her RMD schedule. Under SECURE 2.0, RMDs start at age 73. For a 68-year-old, rolled-over money needs no required withdrawals until 2031, and the full balance grows tax-deferred.
Where the IRS Writes This Down
Internal Revenue Code §402(c)(9) lets a surviving spouse roll over a distribution from a late spouse’s account. Treasury Regulation §1.408-8 covers the election to treat an inherited IRA as your own. IRS Publication 590-B lists the choices for a spouse: “Treat it as your own IRA by designating yourself as the account owner”, treat it as your own “by rolling it over into your IRA” (or into certain employer plans), or stay a beneficiary. The RMD rules themselves sit in Code sections 401(a)(9), 408(a)(6) and 408(b)(3).
Who Gets This Option and Who Gets Shut Out
Only a surviving spouse can use this option. If you inherit from anyone else, you can’t treat the inherited IRA as your own, and you can’t contribute, roll money in, or roll money out.
To treat the account fully as your own, you must be the sole beneficiary with an unlimited right to withdraw from it. If you share the IRA with children or a trust, you can still take a distribution and roll it into your own IRA within the 60-day time limit, as long as the distribution isn’t a required distribution.
Younger survivors should think before moving the money. Withdrawals from a beneficiary IRA are reported as death distributions, so the 10% early distribution penalty does not apply. Once the money is yours, that protection is gone until age 59½.
How to Move the Account Into Your Name
- Check his final-year withdrawal. See whether your husband took his RMD for the year he died. If not, that amount must come out before anything else moves.
- Request a direct transfer. Ask the custodian for a spousal rollover or treat-as-own election as a trustee-to-trustee transfer. If his money is in a 401(k), a mailed check means 20% is withheld, and you must replace it within 60 days.
- Name your beneficiaries. The account is now yours, so your beneficiary form controls who inherits it.
- Mark your restart year. Your first RMD covers the year you turn 73. You can delay it to April 1 of the following year, but then you take two RMDs that same year.
His Last Withdrawal Still Comes Due
The adjustment covers future years only. The year-of-death RMD is still due. If he died before taking it, you must take it as beneficiary, and it can’t be rolled over. Final SECURE Act regulations gave beneficiaries more time. To qualify for the automatic penalty waiver, you have until the later of the tax filing deadline for the taxable year of the beneficiary that begins with or within the calendar year in which the IRA owner died and the end of the following calendar year. If you miss this extended deadline, you owe a 25% excise tax (or 10% if you correct it within the correction window) on the amount you should have taken.
Timing also matters because required distributions can never be rolled over, so if you leave the money in a beneficiary IRA into the next calendar year, that year’s beneficiary RMD must come out before the rest moves. Each year you wait adds another taxable withdrawal.
Before signing transfer documents, ask the custodian to confirm in writing which RMDs it counts as satisfied and what it will report on Form 1099-R. Rolling his balance into her own IRA also gives five quiet years to work on the bigger problem, which is the tax bill waiting when her own RMDs begin (we laid out how to handle that one year early in a free guide to the first-year tax bomb).
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David Beren has been a Flywheel Publishing contributor since 2022. Writing for 24/7 Wall St. since 2023, David loves to write about topics of all shapes and sizes. As a technology expert, David focuses heavily on consumer electronics brands, automobiles, and general technology. He has previously written for LifeWire, formerly About.com. As a part-time freelance writer, David’s “day job” has been working on and leading social media for multiple Fortune 100 brands. David loves the flexibility of this field and its ability to reach customers exactly where they like to spend their time. Additionally, David previously published his own blog, TmoNews.com, which reached 3 million readers in its first year. In addition to freelance and social media work, David loves to spend time with his family and children and relive the glory days of video game consoles by playing any retro game console he can get his hands on.
