Retirement Plans

Small businesses face increasing demands for retirement benefits for rank-and-file employees as well as newly enhanced opportunities for their principals. Now more than ever, Dennis Piper & Associates, P.C. can help you understand the new opportunities available, and to provide the ongoing tax planning services you need most.

Support Available:

• Review of practical plan options and matching this to your business needs
• The new "inside" Roth - is it really 10 times better than the old "outside" one?
• Playing catch up with retirement plans - a new game
• Increasing benefits for participants and deductions for businesses
• SIMPLE and 401(k) plans that provide added benefits
• Eliminating the money purchase plan in favor of a more flexible profit-sharing plan
• Compliance: what the IRS and DOL need to know
• How top-heaviness has gone on a diet
• The benefit of an employer-sponsored IRA
• New ways for highly compensated employees to contribute more to their plans

• IRAs -- Structure, contributions, distributions, and the NEW limitations under the 2001 Tax Act
• Simplified employee pension plan rules and procedures
• SIMPLE plans -- The wave of the future?
• The Roth IRA -- Advantages and disadvantages
• How to take advantage of the final minimum distribution regulations
• Opportunities and pitfalls in naming beneficiaries of an IRA
• Avoiding the 10-percent early-distribution tax and maximizing results through advanced tax-planning techniques
• Splitting an IRA into multiple IRAs for significant tax benefits
• Prevailing Wage Plans for Davis Bacon contracts. Important tax savings for the employer and the employee, including income & FICA taxes and workers compensation.
• Estate planning for IRAs, including the use of QTIP and bypass trusts as beneficiaries

• Asset allocation, portfolio management, and investment selection concepts including portfolio rebalancing, before and after retirement, tax-saving investment transactions, and the optimal asset mix between retirement plans and taxable savings
• Historical guidelines and benchmarks for nominal and real after-tax returns (accounting for both the income and capital gains components of returns)
• Worksheets and formulas for determining how much money one needs in order to assure a financially secure retirement and the after-tax accumulations achievable for various asset categories
• Distribution and asset liquidation planning including the pros and cons of various annuity options, guidelines and strategies using the minimum required distribution rules for qualified plans and
• IRAs, beneficiary elections, and the use of trusts
• Sustainable portfolio withdrawal rates during retirement for differing stock/bond/cash asset allocations, inflation rates, and tax rates both from tax deferred accounts and taxable accounts
• Analysis of the regular IRA to Roth IRA conversion election
• When a variable annuity is a better after-tax investment than a mutual fund; when it is better to contribute after-tax dollars to a Roth IRA rather than before-tax dollars to a regular deductible
• IRA; and when it is better to elect a single life annuity from a pension and buy insurance to protect the spouse rather than to take the qualified plan survivor benefit (the Pension Max issue)