IRA 'Junk' Bunk
There’s a “new” retirement crisis to fret about — and it involves so-called “junk” IRAs. You may have seen the recent Wall Street Journal’s headline that proclaimed “ Forgotten 401(k) Accounts Are Costing Americans Billions in Lost Investment Gains .” This particular assertion turns out to be another spurred by (yet another) proclamation from an IRA provider (PensionBee), though this one at least doesn’t manufacture quite as ludicrous a compounding of the size and number of those accounts as others [i] have done. More precisely, the issue they raise is that smaller retirement plan balances can, and often are, legally expunged from the plan of their prior employer into an IRA. Now, retirement plan professionals know how this works — those who sever (or who are severed from) employment with less than a $1,000 balance will likely have that distributed to them in cash, those with balances above $7,000 [ii] will generally have the option to leave that bal...