You can't put your Individual Retirement Account (IRA) in a trust while you're living. However, you can name a trust as the beneficiary of your IRA and dictate how the assets will be managed after your death. This applies to all types of IRAs, including traditional IRAs, Roth, SEP, SIMPLE, and American Gold IRAs. An IRA trustee, also called a custodian, is the institution that manages your American Gold IRA. By law, every qualified retirement plan must have a custodian or trustee.
A trustee can be a bank, credit union, financial institution, or trust company, such as IRA Financial Trust. IRS regulations require a qualified trustee or custodian to own IRA assets on behalf of the IRA owner. A self-directed IRA depositary, also called a passive custodian, allows IRA holders to make non-traditional investments (i.e., real estate), but generally does not offer investment advice or act as a fiduciary. Even if it can somehow be established that a trust granting an IRA is not a person disqualified from an IRA according to the Swanson principles, the Tax Court ruled that it never authorized the owner of an IRA to be a trustee (which is a fiduciary position) of an entity owned by an IRA.
To minimize the required distributions, the trustee and estate manager must submit the required documentation to the IRA custodian by October. The trustee, of course, can withdraw more than the required distribution from the IRA any time he wants. The advantage of an IRA trust is that the distributions are controlled by the trustee and not by the beneficiary. The IRA trustee is the depositary of the bank or IRA who is responsible for the administration of the IRA and, in most cases, the custodian of IRA assets.
That's why, in most cases, it's best for the trustee to take the minimum required IRA distribution each year and distribute it to the beneficiary. A Fiduciary IRA may provide additional protection for wealth, but it costs more and has less flexibility.
