On July 1, the Treasury Department released the long-awaited final regulations for qualifying longevity annuity contracts (QLACs). These new annuities will offer advisors a unique tool to help clients avoid outliving their money.
The QLAC rules, however, are a complicated mash-up of IRA and annuity rules, and clients may need substantial help in understanding their key provisions. To help advisors break down the most important aspects of QLACs, below are 5 critical QLAC questions and their answers.
1) Question: What are QLACs?
Answer: QLACs, or qualifying longevity annuity contracts, are a new type of fixed longevity annuity that is held in a retirement account and has special tax attributes. Although the value of a QLAC is excluded from a client's RMD calculation, distributions from QLAC don't have to begin until a client reaches age 85, well beyond the age at which RMDs normally begin.
2) Question: Why did the Treasury Department create QLACs?
Answer: Prior to the establishment of QLACs, there were significant challenges to purchasing longevity annuities with IRA money. The rules required that unless an annuity held within an IRA had been annuitized, its fair market value needed to be included in the prior year's year-end balance when calculating a client's IRA RMD. This left clients with non-annuitized IRA annuities with an inconvenient choice to make after reaching the age at which RMDs begin. At that time, they needed to either:
1) Begin taking distributions from their non-annuitized IRA annuities, reducing their potential future benefit, or
2) Annuitize their annuities, which would obviously produce a lower income stream than if they were annuitized at a more advanced age, or
3) "Make-up" the non-annuitized annuity's RMD from other IRA assets, drawing down those assets at an accelerated rate.
None of these options was particularly attractive and now, thanks to QLACs, clients will no longer be forced to make such decisions.
3) Question: How much money can a client invest in a QLAC?
Answer: The final regulations limit the amount of money a client can invest in a QLAC in two ways: a percentage limit; and an overall limit. First, a client may not invest more than 25 percent of retirement account funds in a QLAC.
For IRAs, the 25 percent limit is based on the total fair market of all non-Roth IRAs, including SEP and SIMPLE IRAs, as of December 31st of the year prior to the year the QLAC is purchased. The fair market value of a QLAC held in an IRA will also be included in that total, even though it won't be for RMD purposes.
The 25 percent limit is applied in a slightly different manner to 401(k)s and similar plans. For starters, the 25 percent limit is applied separately to each plan balance. In addition, instead of applying the 25 percent limit to the prior year-end balance of the plan, the 25 percent limit is applied to the balance on the last valuation date.
