The purpose of the 401k Rollover Request is to advise the administrator of a 401k plan that an account balance should be "rolled over" into an IRA or another retirement plan. Typically, this would occur when an employee leaves an employer because of either retirement or job termination. Generally the plan administrator will provide several options, one of which will be the transfer of the current account as a "direct rollover" to an IRA or another retirement plan (a "Recipient Plan"). The direct rollover option has the following advantages. - If your current account balance is paid directly to you, the distribution will be taxable to you, and you will likely have to pay income taxes. Further, if you receive the distribution prior to age 59 and 1/2 years, you will also have to pay an additional 10 percent tax, unless you qualify for a hardship exception. Thus, the direct rollover allows you to continue the deferral of income taxes on your account.
- It is possible to handle a rollover by taking a distribution of your account directly to yourself, and then "rolling over" all or a portion of it to an IRA or another retirement plan within 60 days after you receive the distribution. You defer income taxes on any amount that you roll over and pay income taxes on any amount that you retain. The risk of this approach is that you might fail to timely transfer the funds into an IRA or another retirement plan within the 60 days, with the result that you pay income taxes on the entire distribution. The direct rollover avoids this result by having the funds go directly from your current plan to the new account. If you want a "partial" distribution and are willing to pay the taxes, you can take a partial distribution from the new account.
The 401k Rollover Request form addresses only the safe option of requesting a direct rollover. Your plan administrator may advise you that you must make your request using the plan administrator's preprinted form. If you are locked into that approach and want to make a direct rollover request, carefully fill out your administrator's form, and in addition, complete this program's request form and give it to your administrator as a supplemental document. |